English speakers call this period of the year with cooler nights that precedes Halloween “spooky season”. The chilly season when leaves blush, pumpkin lattes spice up and horror movies slip into our couch potato evenings — ideally under an ethical wool blanket knitted by an eco-responsible company in Pointe- Saint Charles.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
It’s also the perfect time to re-trigger the original 153 episodes of Gilmore Girls and, possibly, die of caffeinated tachycardia with Luke and Lorelai in Stars Hollow, under the gazebo.
Chill Season also coincides with the (fans-awaited) release of the movie. Hocus Pocus 2, Abracadabra 2 in French version, online on Disney + since last week. The Sanderson witch sisters of Salem, played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy, bring out potions, cauldrons and light up with the black flame of a very special candle.
But let’s not mix up our fall captions, shall we? Let’s go back to the scary nights, night terrors and plastic bats of Jean Coutu. What better way to shake – safely – than a TV series about America’s worst killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, aka the Milwaukee cannibal?
Especially since it’s Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Ratched), the master of television horror, which produces the ten episodes of Dahmeravailable in French and English on Netflix.
To make it very short: it’s ordinary, long and nauseous. I made it to the fourth episode and that’s enough for me. No need to see so many reconstructions of heinous murders to understand the “making” of this deranged monster.
But if your heart tells you, know that Dahmer spare no detail gore. Lobotomy with a drill performed cold, murder with a dumbbell and evisceration with an electric kitchen knife, the episodes are dripping with blood and smell of putrefaction. It’s really disgusting, all these filthy places filmed in sepia tones.
Some scenes intended to make us “understand” the human behind the sex maniac border on the ridiculous. In the second episode, Jeffrey Dahmer steals a model from a clothing store, brings the model back to his bed and rubs himself on it while listening to the song Please Don’t Go by KC and the Sunshine Band.
Within an hour, Dahmer’s parents divorce and his depressed – and addicted to barbiturates – mother abandons Jeffrey when he is only 17 years old. And what part plays as Jeffrey’s emotional world crumbles in this flashback? Yes, Please Don’t Go, bingo. So that’s where the origin of the evil lies: in parental abandonment, it’s as simple as that.
Subsequently, the replies take up this founding speech of Dahmer: he can no longer stand being abandoned, all the time, by everyone, the poor. Cry me a river, as they say in Wisconsin.
Dahmer places much emphasis on the childhood of the psychopath, who drugged, killed, ate and butchered 17 young men between 1978 and 1991. Several endless sequences show young prepubescent Jeffrey training, encouraged by his father, to empty the inside of small animals, whose guts he triturates with a deviant sexual drive (yes, we see Jeffrey masturbating while thinking back to his macabre anatomy sessions).
The series evokes it several times, but could have insisted more on this crucial aspect of the story: the blindness and the biases of the local police. Homosexual, Jeffrey Dahmer recruited his victims in gay bars, mostly black men or from marginalized communities. In the early 1990s, when a gay, poor and racialized person disappeared, it was not a priority, far from it.
On several occasions, the police nearly nabbed the Milwaukee butcher, but cut the search short because they were afraid of catching AIDS in Dahmer’s rotten apartment or because they didn’t give a damn about the fate of homosexuals. . The episode which recounts the capture and murder of a 14-year-old immigrant teenager, who had nevertheless managed to escape from the clutches of his torturer, is infuriating.
Most popular title on Netflix, Dahmer begins with the end, the fateful evening that leads to the arrest of the sociopath. The script leaves no room for the imagination.
Everything is said, everything is shown, like this human head deposited in the vegetable drawer of the fridge, this penis in the freezer or this big barrel of acid which gnaws at three human torsos. The episodes then follow a rambling, repetitive timeline (forward, backward, forward, backward) that stuns.
Since it went live two weeks ago, Dahmer triggered several controversies. Families of the victims have again cried out about the commercial exploitation of their traumas, we can understand them.
And there’s the whole debate surrounding the glorification, humanization, and sexualization of serial killers, whose ratings are exploding with the surge of true-crime shows.
By dint of seeing him being intimidated, disgusted and dumped by his own family, we end up almost feeling empathy for Dahmer, that’s what is the most twisted and annoying.
It seems that Dahmer gains depth in the sixth episode. I don’t think I have the courage or the stomach to go that far.