Trigger Warning: Mention of extreme violence.

“Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is a Netflix documentary on Jeffery Lionel Dahmer, who is known as a American serial killer that murdered seventeen males. Dahmer was also a sex offender and the crimes he committed were to young boys and male adults. The documentary went into detail on how Dahmer committed these crimes, but did Netflix go too far into detail?

The Netflix documentary on Dahmer shows many graphic scenes including nudity, sexual violence, canabalism, murder, gore, profanity, sex, violence, suicide, alcohol, smoking, and drugs. In most episodes of this series, Dahmer was cannibalistic with the drugged bodies, then usually preform sexual activities with the corpses, later dismembering them. Netflix allowing these extremely disturbing scenes are problematic and caused issues in the media.

“I chose not to watch the series because of how sickening it is.” States Rain Thorne, freshman at Silver Creek High School, “I think it’s really disrespectful that Netflix is making money off a tragic, traumatic story.
Those victims got murdered and their family now have to go through grief all over again ever since the documentary got released.”

In the documentary, Tony Hughes was the 12th victim of Jeffery Dahmer. Hughes was a middle aged, deaf, African American man who got tricked into going home with Dahmer like many of Dahmer’s other victims. Dahmer murdered Hughes and the bones were later found by police in Dahmers apartment. The mother of Hughes, Shirley Hughes has spoken out to the public on how disappointed she is with Netflix for publishing the series with those misleading scenes about her son.

“I don’t see how they can use our names and our stuff out like that out there,” she states.

There is a scene where Dahmer claims that him and Tony Hughes knew each other before the murder but there is no actual evidence of this statement.

“It didn’t happen like that,” states the mother of Hughes.

She talks about how the documentary is inaccurate and romanticizes Dahmer and Hughes. Netflix does in fact make it seem like Hughes and Dahmer had a romantic, friendly relationship before the murder but the family of Hughes disagrees and believes it is disrespectful to use false information about the helpless victims.

I chose to watch half of the series and found it very disgusting and emotional. Dahmer not only manipulated his victims, but he tourtured them, killed them, was sexual with the corpses, but also dismembered and ate the bodies. It is truly horrific and is concerning that it is on Netflix. Yes, Netflix gave a parental warning to prevent children from watching the documentary but those won’t always work. The parental warning didn’t give enough details on what there is in the show and if I didn’t know who Dahmer was before watching the show, I definitely wouldn’t have guessed cannibalism was going to be a part of this series. There are children that could be watching the series and that could cause the child to have serious anxiety.

I do believe that it is good that Netflix shared what Dahmer did to his victims but they did not have to be so graphic with the scenes, I feel like there are other ways to tell stories. It is important that these poor families and victims will get recognized and remembered because what they had to go through is extremely hurtful and traumatic, though I do believe that Netflix might have gone too far with some of the scenes and did not have to fully show the explicitness.