After the release of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story on Netflix, it wasn't long before the true crime series rose to the top of the streamer's most-watched titles as millions of viewers tuned in. Starring Evan Peters as the cannibalistic murderer, the series is just the latest project to take inspiration from Dahmer's real-life crimes. Clearly, given many of the viewer reactions on social media, the show is so horrific that a great many of those viewers were not even able to finish the first episode. "Consider myself a horror film enthusiast. I don't mind gory scenes. But The Dahmer series is different," one tweet reads. "Turned it off 20 minutes in. It was quite horrifying. I felt very uneasy, idk if it's because I'm a black man. It literally made my skin crawl."
Another tweet reads, "ngl i was watching the dahmer movie on Netflix and that man energy’s is so dark/ heavy just from simply watching it. I wish they’d stop channeling him overrall. He has the type of vibe that makes the hairs on your neck stand up. I turned that shit off and saged my room."
"i put on the dahmer tv show for like 5 mins and then turned it off bc i had just a bad visceral reaction to it and nothing had even happened yet," writes another Twitter user. "the framing and marketing of the show just makes me rly uncomfortable so it’s gonna be a skip for me."
Echoing many others, another tweeter said, "As a true crime fan who has been moving farther and farther away from the genre, I turned the Dahmer series off. Felt horribly disgusting to be recounting his crimes in detail. There is no mystery or razzle-dazzle to a rapist and cannibal — no matter who plays him."
Evan Peters Says The Idea Was Not to Glorify Jeffrey Dahmer
In an interview for Netflix speaking about the series, Evan Peters has said how horrifying it was for him to get into character to play the infamous murderer. He also said how co-creator Ryan Murphy's rule for the series was that it could not glorify Dahmer whatsoever.
Honestly, I was very scared about all of the things that he did, and diving into that and trying to commit to that was absolutely going to be one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life, because I wanted it to be very authentic, but in order to do that, I was going to have to go to really dark places and stay there for an extended period of time," Peters said. "To get lost in that, it was a challenge to try to have this person who seemingly was so normal, but underneath all of it, had this entire world that he was keeping secret from everybody."
He added, "So, we had one rule going into this from Ryan that it would never be told from Dahmer's point of view. As an audience, you're not really sympathizing with him, you're not really getting into his plight, you're sort of watching it from the outside."
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is streaming on Netflix, but be warned, as the series may be quick to make you uncomfortable. You can see some more of the social media reactions to Dahmer below.