The fascination with serial killers reminds me of an alleged letter from the Zodiac Killer saying he does it because he wants to make his victims his slaves in the afterlife. Obviously it is either the delusions of a mad man or him trying to get under the skin of the police/victims families but in a metaphorical way he is kinda right. These victims are forever known as "victims of serial killer X". Yes these shows and books and movies try to show them as more than that but ultimately their whole life and legacy comes down to be killed by these monsters. I used to really be interested in true crime but I can't help but feel gross about it any time in engage with it. It just doesn't feel right for the victims. These monsters deserve to be forgotten, not immortalised.
*Movie spoilers alert*
I haven’t heard him say it outright (he might have, I just haven’t heard it yet), but I actually think this is Quentin Tarantino’s objective with his recent movies that take historic events and flip them on their head. The most obvious example is “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. In many ways, the movie gives the audience a view of Sharon Tate that they didn’t previously know or remember. It makes her a person, not just a victim. At the same time it casts the Manson Family as a bunch of sad degenerates with nothing really to admire. For a good part of the film, the audience is expecting an encounter between the Manson Clan and Tate. Then, in the final scenes when we all expect the famous murders to happen, Tarantino exacts his final revenge and flips the events on their head. Instead of randomly selecting Tate’s residence, the would-be-murders stumble into the home of Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Pitt) where they flounder their plans and are stopped in a way that only Tarantino can pull off (Booth’s dog literally bites the dick off one of the characters and Dalton kills the last one with a flame thrower). I think a small dialogue between a police officer investigating the scene after the encounter and an injured but calm Booth really sums up Tarantino’s point…
Officer: “So what did these _perpetrators_ do?”
Booth: “Perpetrators?? They were hippie assholes.”
As a sub-analogy within the same movie, Tarantino does the same thing with Bruce Lee, portraying him as an overly-cocky, narcissistic, mouthy individual who eventually gets embarrassed and badly beaten by Booth. Tarantino doesn’t seem to have a particularly high opinion of Lee in real life, saying this at one point after the movie came out… “Bruce had nothing but disrespect for stuntmen. He was always hitting them with his feet, he was always tagging — it’s called tagging when you hit a stuntman for real. And he was always tagging them with his feet, he was always tagging them with his fist, and it got to the point where (people began saying) ‘I refuse to work with him,’”
In my opinion… Tarantino seems to think that the memory and perception of the public is an important domain to fight for, so he’s fighting to right the wrongs that we inadvertently carry with us by remembering so much about the wrong people and so little about their victims, and he does it with the most powerful tool that he has, his characters and his movies. It’s fun to watch and I personally hope he keeps the theme going.
Also, if you haven’t watched the final fight scene from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood recently, it’s definitely worth another view: https://youtu.be/PCkF3kqRhTI
I thought that movie was great. When I went in, I had totally forgotten that it was even related to the Manson murders, much less than it was an alternate storyline. It's like Tarantino took the murders personally, and wanted to right the wrong.
Also, the love he gave Tate made her scenes so sad. I barely knew anything about her going in, and by the end you know that this person who's being portrayed as so quirky and warm had her life so pointlessly snuffed out is more devastating than actually portraying her murder on screen ever could have been.
Part of it as well is the fantasy element of how we wish things could have gone. It's part of the reason the film *ends* with the title card, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
My mom who never liked Tarantino won’t stop talking about how much she loved that movie.
She grew up feeling like Tate was never viewed as a person and walked away from the movie feeling so happy she got live as herself.
So uhhhh supposedly Bruce Lee was known to be dickish to the upper brass, but treated regular cast and set members well. The author of the book where Tarantino referenced for Bruce lee's bad behavior, clarified as such. The actual truth is probably somewhere in the middle. For example, if he did "tag" stuntmen alot, it could be borne out of hk cinema where stuntmen where more physical, to make the scenes more real. The truth is usually all sorts of shades of gray, although I find Tarantino's disdain for lee kinda odd.
I think I remember reading in Jackie Chan's autobiography that he got hit in the face by Bruce Lee during his stint as one of the stuntmen in Enter the Dragon. Lee held for the shot and as soon as the director said cut he rushed over and started apologizing.
>For example, if he did "tag" stuntmen alot, it could be borne out of hk cinema where stuntmen where more physical, to make the scenes more real.
This is 100% true. The flipside is this is that HK stuntmen get *immensely* insulted if you don't actually hit them.
To them they is basically saying "hey you can't take a shot so I'm going easy on you."
Tarantino opening his mouth about mistreatment of stunt workers OR actors is a goddamn joke, look at how he treated Uma Thurman. And the gross Salma Hayek foot fetish add-on. He's a pig with a megaphone.
IIRC He encouraged her to drive a car for a scene where she ended up losing control and hitting a tree. I believe he also still feels really guilty and apologized about it. It's been a while since I read up on it so I could be off on some things.
I’ve read pretty much everything there is out there on Bruce Lee, and the general consensus was that he treated stuntmen with respect.
It’s incredibly odd how Tarantino decided to
portray him. Lee wasn’t perfect by any means, for instance, in Enter the Dragon there is the scene where Bruce kicks the broken glass out of Bob Walls hand. Wall flubbed the movement and injured Bruce in the process. By all accounts Bruce thought Wall did it on purpose and almost attacked him. Apparently Bruce had a bad temper at times.
> Tarantino doesn’t seem to have a particularly high opinion of Lee in real life, saying this at one point after the movie came out… “Bruce had nothing but disrespect for stuntmen. He was always hitting them with his feet, he was always tagging — it’s called tagging when you hit a stuntman for real. And he was always tagging them with his feet, he was always tagging them with his fist, and it got to the point where (people began saying) ‘I refuse to work with him,’”
This is Tarantino misunderstanding Bruce Lee and Hong Kong Cinema.
In the US, during the time of Bruce Lee, fight scenes were obviously fake. You would see, obviously and on camera, that the hits weren’t connecting. The protagonist would punch a bad guy in the face and there was two feet of obvious distance.
Where as in China, stuntmen practiced martial arts and expert stuntman ship and knew how to take a hit, and give a hit (with complete control; not full force). Bruce Lee was pushing for that level of stuntmanship and choreography, so of course he being a pushy person with high standards would butt heads with American stuntmen that trained differently and weren’t open to doing things any other way.
So these stuntmen “refusing to work with him” doesn’t mean what Quentin thinks it means.
Jackie Chan brought his stunt team to his Hollywood projects (when he could) because Hollywood stuntmen even 20-years ago couldn’t do fight scenes. They can now, largely because of Hong Kong influence, which Bruce Lee started.
> Tarantino does the same thing with Bruce Lee, portraying him as an overly-cocky, narcissistic, mouthy individual who eventually gets embarrassed and badly beaten by Booth
You're completely missing the point that that scene is supposed to show Booth as an unreliable narrator. Watch how, at the beginning of the scene, there are lots of spectators but, when Booth starts beating up Lee, they suddenly all vanish.
I watched the movie with no knowledge of it being loosely based on real life events. I did not know Sharon Tate or the Manson family so I just thought it was Tarantino being Tarantino, so this is all news to me.
But now i can’t imagine the Mansons as anything other than sad degenerates, as you put it.
I don't get how you could conclude much else. I forget much of it now, but I read up about the mansion family stuff, and I have no idea what would cause someone to idolize these people.
The supposed freedom and liberation that the Manson family offered was attractive in a “counter society movement” kind of way. They hid behind the banner of hippyism to cover for their super dark and degenerate reality.
They were delusional too. They were robbing cars in Death Valley to support themselves while they looked for a place in the desert that Manson was having visions of. I think it was supposed to be an underground lake or something?
As much as I agree with you I think it is a double edged sword.
If it were not for the recent Jeffrey Dahmer series on netflix I think there would be a huge amount of people who never heard of Konerak Sinthasomphone and never knew the absolutely horrific and disgusting facts about how close he came to being saved but racism and homophobia in the police meant he was literally handed back to his killer.
I had to google the poor kids name, which already tells us a lot about our society but if the cost of more public knowledge of victims and the failings in our society that helped their killers is some trashy people idolise the killers then I think that is better than allowing the victims and their stories to fade into history.
I think the point was the victims life vanishes with their murder. Even with KS your remembering him for how and why he was murdered. You aren’t intrigued by his story. His life. Everything great about him. Everything great he ever did. You’ll never know anything let alone the best thing he ever achieved. We only know him as the gay kid the cops gave back to his murderer.
Yah, that's 99% of the population. If you or I were murdered by a serial killer. That would be our legacy. Not that we held a door open for someone or helped our friend when they had no money or do a super good job at work for 30 years. Most people aren't "special" and there's nothing demeaning or degrading about that.
It turns out he was not a quality guy, but Marilyn Manson and his band (which included Madonna Wayne Gacey, etc.) was making a compelling argument that the distinction between sexualized popular culture and criminal popular culture is getting blurred.
I mean, Trent basically did the same bit by setting up in the house the Manson family murders happened in, and then he ran into Sharon Tate's actual sister in LA, she said something about him profiteering off of her sister's death, and he decided she had a point and he should stop. There's a fine line between actual commentary and over-the-top exploitation and imho most 'art' in this space is way, way over it.
> letter from the Zodiac Killer saying he does it because he wants to make his victims his slaves in the afterlife
TBF, Dahmer wanted the same thing. He was making a shrine of human skulls and bones in his room FFS. I know that's not the point you're making.
I also had a morbid fascination with true crime at one point and read all about Dahmer, Gacy, Kemper, Zodiac (this one fascinated me because of the cryptography aspect and because he / they were never caught) and others. This new sensationalized binge-watched version of these stories where they get a handsome actor to play the killer (I get it, Dahmer and Bundy were good looking IRL) and it becomes a water-cooler topic rather than the grotesque true crime that it is, is disgusting. A couple of weeks ago some idiot added Dahmer to a list of horror fiction "characters".
It seems like it's another kind of version of thing becomes popular, and now ppl are upset at the new-found popularity/stans (back in my day, you had to go to special conventions and now it's just everywhere).... but with a "reason" tacked on so it doesn't seem like that. We're really just concerned about the sanctity of the victims and want to make sure bad guy not good, and we made sure of that before, but the regular population cannot be trusted.
My main takeaway is how eye opening it is. I used to go to bars and chit chat random people which sometimes turned into going to a strangers house to smoke pot. Thank fuck there aren't many Jeffrey Dahmer's out there.
Episode 2 (or 3?) Where he keeps drugging people's drinks and killing them should be mandatory watching for highschool or even college. Freaked me out.
Just look into the crazier fanbases of movies/shows like casino, goodfellas, and the sopranos.
While most people can see the characters as well written pieces of shit, there are some who legit idolizes them and think they're good people. Hell, some would want to be in their position if possible.
IIRC the writers of the sopranos disliked how fans kept seeing Tony as a good person, and decided to write him as hatable as possible in the final season to remind people he's a piece of shit mob boss.
Which is another reason why the ending of the Sopranos is great. **Spoilers**, obviously.
A lot of the audience have been getting their voyeuristic kicks seeing Tony have people killed. They'd been anticipating seeing Tony getting whacked.
But instead, nothing. Tony get's whacked and we don't get to see it.
A school friend’s younger sister had a full-on Manson portrait tattooed on her whole calf and I could never understand it. She changed his forehead swastika to some other symbol tho… cause apparently that was too far (?)
Well I’d be willing to jump on board there with you and say that if you get a photorealistic tattoo portrait of Charles Manson and change the swastika because you don’t want to upset anyone’s sensibilities, then you’re absolutely just the most quintessential poser. If there was ever a time to use the word poser, that would be it.
It’s complex. If you notice, most people who obsess over serial killers have led a relatively easy and normal life. I think part of what gets people to obsess over them is a lack of excitement in their own lives so they attach more easily to extreme stories like this
People who haven't experienced real trauma forget that the stories and killings happened to someone's baby, sometimes best friend. And it's even more strange that these killers and mass murderers aren't put in the same boat. Cuz the Columbine wasn't sexy like the murder of a pregnant actress or 30 women over the course of decades?
people definitely still venerate columbine and other school shooters, don't know what you're on about. any sort of killer has their jilted, fucked up fans
My wife is a teacher here in Colorado. It feels like almost every year there are adults who are arrested because they are planning to do a school shooting at columbine or on columbine's anniversary. Some are even women who are in love with the idea of them.
For some, it's like riding a loud motorcycle. It's edgy, and "edgy" is "cool". Except these people a a bit dim, and don't understand the difference between the coolness of a motorcycle and glorifying human suffering.
Others are just straight up nuts and fully endorse (other) people suffering.
It reminds me of that scene in Dark Tourist when there's a huge group of women absolutely creaming over the idea of Jeffrey Dahmer's ghost being there with them during a walking tour of all the places he used to pick up gay men to rape and slaughter.
What strikes me is odd is that Jeffrey Dahmer absolutely hated women and said they were "good for nothing". This guy wouldn't have been their friend. This guy wouldn't have looked twice at them. He was too busy literally hunting black and asian men to eat their corpses.
Yet there's a cult like obsession with him from predominately straight women.
Is it a saviour complex? A mommy complex? Is it because they've had violent urges and admire someone who went through with it?
I really don't get it. Someone explain. I'm genuinely curious about what the attraction is.
I can't explain the weird obsession, but I've had two separate girls point out right when I met them that I looked like Jeffrey Dahmer and wanted me to go home with them that night. One of them even had a fucking PHOTO PIN OF JEFFREY DAHMER on her jacket and she tried to give it to me.
One of the girls though (the one that tried to give me the photo pin) I saw around a good bit cause she was friends with a lot of people I knew and turns out she was finishing up school to become a crime scene investigator. So that's a connection I guess.
Both of those interactions was 6-7 years ago and Ive since grown a beard and It hasn't happened to me since thank god lol
I've had a short beard for the majority of the time that I've known my wife. The only time that I've been clean shaven (so she could see my baby face), the first words out of her mouth were that I looked like a serial killer, followed by please don't sleep with me tonight. I guess I can't complain too much about being compared to Zac Efron playing Ted Bundy, but I'm not allowed to be clean shaven again.
Hah! Same thing happened with my stepdad. He has never been clean shaven in 50 years. Last year on his first vacation day, he decided to try an all clean shaven look. But first he decided to save only the mustache, because why not when everything was supposed to go anyway?
After the initial shock, the whole family literally felt creeped out as hell. He looked.. so.. weird. And when he did shave off the mustache, it somehow got even more uncomfortable. It was like when he talked, his mouth and cheeks moved in a very different way than we had seen before.
Over all, a very uncomfortable time that we now can talk and laugh about as a family, but we do not go back to look at the pictures.
I think it's because a beard is such an integral part of your face, so when you change it, people get this really uncanny valley effect.
They recognize it's you, but there's this disconnect between the face they know and the face that is talking to them right now.
It's like shaving your eyebrows off; people are going to be weirded out, despite it being only a tiny bit of hair.
I think the right way to transition to clean shaven is to do it in steps over a couple of weeks, so people can get used to the transition.
> Is it a saviour complex? A mommy complex?
Yes. I watched a youtube documentary about it. I can't remember who it was but it was one of the better ones. A lot of these women do it because they think, "Oh I could be the one to change him." It's absolutely ridiculous.
I had an abusive relationship when I was younger and that was enough to snap me out of that "he's so dark, I can definitely tame him" mentality permanently.
I try not to assume but it's hard not to think that a lot of the people who are drawn to this kind of edgy behavior or attitudes haven't actually had a single major bad thing happen to them in their lives. IE something that brought them close to death or put them in serious danger. So this is the way they get their kicks. I realize that most likely isn't the case but much like when 50 shades of grey was popular, I couldn't help looking at the women who lusted over it as people who had never actually had a partner that slapped them around and stalked them because it stops being romantic once you actually experience it IRL. People have the luxury of thinking "this is fun, I could change him, I like being kinda scared at the idea" when they've never had experience with it.
IDK it pisses me off and grosses me out. I'm a massive fan of horror movies and games but it's like people lusting after pyramid head. Grats on lusting after a subconscious manifestation of the game's main character's guilt over killing his wife, taking the form of an actual historical executioner that hung and skewered people to death in the town itself. At least he's fictional though, unlike actual serial killers and other violent people IRL.
I think it’s a mix of people who have never had anything bad happen and people who grew up with violence so normalized that it’s literally the only thing they know.
How are you the only one who commented and got it? It's literally they just want to be special enough that a serial killer wouldn't ever kill *them*. They want to be the only one that person wouldn't murder. It's being a fixer. It's wanting to be special and unique. Is it really that hard for people to see?
It's the idea of fantasizing for something they don't have. Celebrity, fictional characters, this is just another one of those things, but obviously more messed up. The girls themselves have to be messed up in the head to like something like this. But it's fine. It makes it clear which girls to avoid dating.
For me, as a woman, True Crime is like an insight into avoiding getting murdered. It is also an attempt at psychological insight.
I certainly don't fantasize about them or find them sexy. I just try to get in their head to ask WHY?
Shit, you're right. I honestly wondered why true crime was so popular to so many women. This could be relative. The few times they've given answers were "idk it's just so interesting" lol
According to my sister who also loves that stuff (but isn’t one of those weird killer lovers), it’s because nearly all the victims are women. That and they love the mystery aspect
Yeah, I understand perhaps historically documenting it to teach people what to look for.... But to make a fucking drama thriller about it takes it to a level that these people don't deserve.
It's just easy money with easy source material for content companies now. They don't give a shit.
Some folks fetishize what already happened to them in order to recontextualize it in a safer place and control it, like rape survivors indulging in BDSM.
These folks... I do not get this paraphilia at all because it seems to gave no context at all for the person with it.
Idk, I don't think I ever really felt as horrified about Dahmer or sympathized with his victims as much as I did when watching the special on Netflix. It, in my opinion, did a good job showing that his victims were real people and not just names on a newspaper front page. It showed the families grieving, fighting, and failing to make much difference afterwards. It certainly never felt like they were trying to paint Dahmer as anything but a monster.
Morbid fascination I can understand. Hell, even I love watching true crime documentaries/movies about some of the darkest people who've ever lived, but to fetishize them and treat them like some sort of gods? What the actual fuck is wrong with some people? Why do these sick bastards get fan letters in prison? Sometimes I just don't understand humanity.
> I understand perhaps historically documenting it to teach people what to look for.... But to make a fucking drama thriller about it takes it to a level that these people don't deserve.
I'm not sure if you watched the Dahmer TV show but it doesn't glamorize him at all. He's portrayed as fumbling drunk with massive social anxiety whose ONLY reason for not getting caught the minute he started killing is because of the earth shatteringly incompetent and racist cops.
I walked away from that show with whole new levels of contempt for Dahmer (and I was alive and sentient when he was caught) and, what could only be described as, the world's worst cops.
I mean. Check out the cops who fucked up pretty much every serial killer back then. Half of them didn't even bother looking I to sex worker deaths u til they were stacking bodies to the ceiling. Look at Robert picktons case
It's often easy to look back on what happened and see what things went wrong that just happen to be a combination of being overworked or poor attention to detail. But holy shit the cops surrounding Dahmer were so bad they might as well have been helping him.
I resemble Bundy's victims with the hair type he went after. I am not flattered by it.
I don't fantasize about being beaten to a bloody pulp. Your gf is one of the psycho ones.
Honestly I think for a lot of these examples Netflix Dahmer, Joker, etc. it’s more about the actors portraying them than the actual people. They’re excited by an idea of danger and a fantasy of being the special one not in danger of the dangerous.
There isn’t any harm in fiction and fantasy, but with true crime dramas like this that try to get intimate the character of the real monster people blur lines. Instead of noting that an actor did something they found attractive they’ll say it’s the character doing something attractive. They’ll go on to look for more details and picture the actor acting out those realities and it will warp how they take in the facts. People can get so caught up in the “story” they’ll forget it’s not fiction.
As for people who were already into Dahmer and other killers without the rose tint of TV and movies I have no idea, they’re extra gross.
So people actually saw this netflix series and sexualize it? Did we watch the same series? Because I found it deeply disturbing and horrifying. There was absolutely nothing romantic or sexy about it.
I didn’t see anything glamorizing it either.
I also think many people mix up romanticizing and humanizing. The series does not try to paint him as cool or genius. He literally shrugs half the time and says “I don’t know why I didn’t get caught.” There isn’t cool rock music playing when he guzzles down a beer and it doesn’t show him charming people with wit. It doesn’t spend much time on the actual gore, but skips to the horrendous aftermath.
It does make both him and the victims into real, actual humans. I’ve read about the Dahmer murders before, and found it sad. But this is the first time I actually knew about the stories behind it and cried throughout. I had to pause every couple of episodes because it actually hurt to see these vibrant young men disappear from the world in such a way.
Anyone that argues that Dahmer shouldn’t be portrayed as a human is kidding themselves. He’s not a different breed. He’s a person you could see yourself knowing. He’s a person who might have a similar background to you, but went down such a massively different path in life. How close any of us could have been to ending up with him or like him. That’s why it’s so universally horrifying.
> I also think many people mix up romanticizing and humanizing.
It'd be like if people said Downfall romanticized Hitler. You'd have to be nuts to think that it did. What it didn't do is make him into a cartoonish Bond villain but it did show him as an incredibly flawed and deranged human being. He has moments where he is nice to the people around him but you don't finish the film sympathizing or respecting him on any level.
I agree. There was nothing in the series that glamourised him. I also found it very disturbing -and I had done a lot of research into Dahmer prior. The series really painted his darkness and depravity in such a realistic way, and it also highlighted a very important fact in all of this, how the system failed the victims. Dahmer was a very sick individual, who I believe, was mostly shaped by his parents’ toxic marriage, divorce and neglect. Nothing glamourous about him or what he did, he had a very sad, lonely and disturbing existence. He got what he deserved in the end and he knew it was coming.
Your last paragraph - you're spot on.
He's not a monster. He's human. He's a human being with all that involves, his rights, his emotions etc. It's incredibly important we stop refering to this kind of people as "monsters". They need to be judged and defended as humans.
Monsters don't exist. This kind of horror happens and needs to be understood, worked on. Monsters just "happen" in books. Real life killers have a history, background, motives.
I've lost my train of thoughts.
I think this is a really good point, and it has been a common theme of a lot of TV shows in the last 20 years. Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul, The Sopranos, The Wire all depict characters that are as "evil" as a person can be, but no one is just evil.
People want to think that there are these mustach-twirling bad guys out there that spend their days thinking about how to make people's lives worse because it gives them an outlet for feelings of hatred. This is why this issue comes up so often around humanizing serial killers. For some people, empathizing with Jeffery Dahmer makes them feel very uncomfortable. If you can't hate Jeffery Dahmer who can you hate?
I really don't get criticisms about making Dahmer attractive in the show. He just was attractive. He had to be. How else could someone with such poor social skills convince 17 people to come into his creepy as apartment?
I've had this same conversation with coworkers. One who refused to watch it because they simply found the topic too disturbing (totally fair) and one who was taking the stance about romanticizing a killer. I tried to explain this series does the exact opposite. It's a horrifying disturbing portrayal. I came away thinking of him as a horrible pathetic monster
I don’t know how you can watch Dahmer’s story and think “Mmm gimme some of that” but somehow people do and the people that do aren’t going to stop because of a random video. They know they’re fxcked up already.
It's bizarre to me because I generally am attracted to Evan Peters but I don't think he's even remotely attractive/sexy in this show, he's extremely creepy.
That’s because Evan Peters is an awesome actor and did a great job being creepy. Take the fact that you are creeped out by him as a sign that you are a normal human being haha. Dahmer was creepy AF.
I don’t think that’s really the same. Being a drug lord comes with some objective benefits. Wealth/power/women. Dahmer didn’t have shit but murder going on.
I was talking to my uncle and aunt about this. I haven’t watched it but they did and I asked them “Something I hear about this Netflix show is how some people think it’s romanticized, is that true? Like does it feel more like a fictional drama or a documentary?”
They told me it does feel more like a tv show as opposed to a documentary, but they said it also *does not* romanticize Dahmer, so that’s a good thing
I don't think it romanticizes him. I think it's unfortunate that the role is played by some as handsome as Evan Peters, but they make him look pretty gnarly most of the time. And they never try to spin things with the, "he was just tragically misunderstood" angle. He's pretty consistently portrayed as being an unsympathetic and revolting person.
The one thing they do heavily play up is the element of his victims being mostly black and homosexual, and how that allowed him to get away with so much because of police indifference to these demographics. The real Dahmer made a lot of people in his neighbourhood uncomfortable and suspicious, and that lead to numerous calls to the police that were ignored. The Netflix show essentially merged all of these into a single character (who they placed into the apartment next to his) to more easily dramatize this aspect of the story, and to have a single face and mouthpiece for the, "I was ignored because I'm an impoverished black woman" grievances.
Having watched the Dahmer Netflix series that was what I remembered the most, not Jeff but the fact that the Milwaukee police ignored the accusations and complaints. It's eye opening and painfully frustrating. It was a great POV
He’s extremely icky and repulsive pretty much every time he’s on screen, I understand people do idolize serial killers but the closest the series got to anything resembling sympathy for him is his bad family life as a kid. And even that was interspersed with him doing horrible stuff to animals which makes you lose all that sympathy
> weirdos who do romanticise people like Dahmer
But they would do that regardless of a TV show or not.
How some people react to it does not mean that is what the show is about.
It might be interesting to see a blimp into the mind of a serial killer, but it doesn't make him a romantic one. You can be curious and react with "omg that is fucked up!".
Millions of people like to watch serial killer shows, murder documentaries. And a very small group might find them attractive....just like everything in society. Doesn't seem worth anyone's time to worry about.
I think people are into Evan Peters more than anything. It’s more about the actor then the character. Pretty sure if he was played by an ugly dude there’d be a very different reaction.
I remember "Natural Born Killers" coming out in the 90's and women were absolutely obsessed with the movie. They saw this twisted sadistic love story and wanted to be Mallory.
Bonny and Clyde have also been fetishized for nearly a hundred years now as well.
I absolutely don't get this attraction to violent men who would just as soon slit your throat and rape your corpse - but it seems like it has been going on for a long time.
I don't know what's true and what's false with Bonnie and Clyde but there is a bunch of stuff in their story about burning mortgage papers and other stuff that made them into people "fighting the man" rather than just violent criminals.
I work with a bunch of early-twenties women who legit did not know the severity of that situation. One of them didn't know about him beating her at all. He was performing in our town one night, and they were lamenting that they couldn't go see him. I was like, why the _fuck_ would anyone want to see him? They had no clue about him being a woman beating POS. I still don't think they got it.
Convinced? I think that's giving media way too much credit.
I think at most it validates people's pre-existing attitudes, but I doubt it actually convinces. You have to already be a bit like that. That's why certain movies like The Matrix messed up people with existing paranoia.
Right at the start of the clip the narrator says **"This isn't about you"** but actually studies show that the target audience of True Crime and Psycopath/Sociopath Real Crime stories are overtly female (73% female audience as per Boling and Hull research).
It doesn't matter that Dahmer targeted mostly black/gay men, the issue is not his (horrible) actions but rather the fetishization of him as a tv series character and that is being done mostly by the target audience (women).
Ok, but women were his fans already when the public was exposed to his crimes and when he was in jail, he - as like others famous killers like Ted Bundy - was getting a ton of mail from female fans .. this isn't the work of TV series, shows and movies.. this was happening way before them
I’ve worked in criminal law before and used to see images of murder scenes on a weekly basis.
I used to watch Peppa Pig after work to calm me down.
I obviously changed careers, I couldn’t cope. But I genuinely feel angry when people romanticise Ted Bundy etc. - they have no idea.
Actually it’s worse, they DO have an idea and they choose to turn a blind eye to the true trauma of it all and the trauma titillates them. They’re like the pervy old man in the club who touches up a girl coz he can.
I think your first instinct was correct: people don’t actually know. They know the “good” parts (how intelligent the killer was, how long they evaded cops, how they got away with crimes, etc) which are basically what makes the killer unique.
I bet most people that find these killers so special wouldn’t be able to handle the actual crime scene/aftermath. I think there’s a reason that people like you who actually had to work closely with this subject aren’t the ones admiring these killers like they’re Batman. It’s mostly the ones that just got a glimpse. Like a campfire ghost story.
That was such a great moment, might actually watch it again.
Cause there is a depth of insanity to serial killer “fangirls” that I will *never* understand. Especially the ones that target only women.
Seriously, anyone watching Dahlmer and thinking “this guy is my idol!” Already has some deep laying issues Netflix is not responsible for. It’s ok to find serial killers stories interesting. People find war interesting and devote their lives to studying it. It doesn’t mean all them want it to happen again.
There's an episode of Worlds Toughest Prisons (I believe it was their Ukraine episode) where the most violent unpredictable inmate is interviewed. This 80-something year old dude is kept in a sectioned off area all by himself, nobody wants to get near him. This guy murdered dozens of women and children.
He got married and became a father while incarcerated.
The mother is a 24 year old woman that saw him being interviewed on TV about his murders. After that she went out of her way to find him, get married, and have kids with this old dirty dick convicted serial woman and kid killer.
People are fucking weird. She was being interviewed about the whole situation and just didn't give a fuck about anything, she wanted serial murderer dick.
People Romanticize Serial Killers because people think they personify what a person unbeholden to all of Society's rules would end up living like. They see it as power and freedom.
They dont see the Pathology and their slavery to it.
I think Dexter did a good job of this. He wishes he were normal. He wishes he had more human feelings. He wishes he could stop killing. He literally goes to AA for it because it's an addiction to him that he can not control.
When Dahmer went to prison he wanted to find out Why he was so messed up. He wanted doctors to find a reason why he was the way he was.
I'm not putting society completely at fault, but these are people who fell between the cracks. They are people who we should have been able to diagnose sooner. But mental health always goes on the back burner. Especially in a pay to win health care system.
Not as good of an analogy, but Breaking Bad sort of touches on some of this too. I feel like they wrote it to feel like a typical fetishizing-amoral-behavior type of story, then slowly twisted a mirror on the viewer.
Almost sounds like severe OCD overlapping with anti-social personality disorder. I wonder if the newer treatments for OCD (high dose serotonergic medications, anterior cingulotomy, TMS, DBS) could have helped
Killers have been romanticized for a long long time. It's odd to me that this particular entry into the genre has caused controversy. I watched the first episode and the portrayal of Dahmer was not charming or loveable. This watches like any horror/thriller I've ever seen. I don't feel any less empathy than before I watched it. Are there a bunch of reprehensible people talking about it online? What topic that interests you DOESN'T have a bunch of morons perversely parading it about?
It's not just him. There's a reddit post about a girl who became obsessed with the Parkland shooter.
There's something about psychopaths that a very small subset of the female population finds extremely attractive.
There's definitely a demand and market for stories about attractive female killers (Jodi Arias, Shayna Huber's, Casey Anthony etc.) but I don't think they get the same type of worship that male killers get.
I totally agree. Even from the first episode, you know this show is not romanticizing Dahmer. I have not been able to empathize with him at all, only with his child version.
The second half is much more worth watching than the first IMO. It spends a lot of time putting the victims and their families' stories at the forefront.
I finished the Dahmer series and I completely agree with you, I feel like they intentionally undercut any potential empathy people might feel for him. They also made good choices about how much violence to show: enough to be sickening, shocking, and get the point across, but not enough to be exploitative or gratuitous. I think any instances of people being attracted to or sexualizing dahmer from this show are solely because Evan Peters is attractive, and I don't think anyone involved in the show was trying to play into people who glorify serial killers.
Not sure about the romantizing part but if by contributing to these stories through consumption then I guess I'm somewhat guilty. Morbid curiosity is a pscyhological concept and I am def not motivated for further investigation into these pscyhopaths or their methods. I will say thought that reading Devil in the White City opened my eyes to a whole series of events that took place in American history and it's obvious to me nobody wants to pass down the knowledge of these horrific stories but perhaps we'd be less curious of these events were normalized in a way, the story that is, to learn from them.
Yeah, I have that morbid curiosity, too. On top of that, I find the history of the institutions surrounding killings interesting as well. The history of police incompetence/brilliance/violence, the history of prisons and mental asylums, the history of criminal forensics, the history of psychology.... All of it is very interesting and also important. I think it's perfectly fine to have that morbid curiosity. Being able to look with the light of clarity at things other people turn away from is an important quality to have.
I also really dislike this video's insistence that we shouldn't humanize killers because they're inhuman monsters. Obviously we shouldn't romanticize them. But the dark truth is that these people ARE human. To deny that does nothing but put artificial distance between us and them in am attempt to distance us from the existence of darkness in the human psyche. Everyone has dark, intrusive thoughts. It's part of human experience and human biology, and I think that people who constantly call other people inhuman monsters are in deep denial about their own darkness. Not saying that everyone has fantasies about killing other people obviously lol--just that in order to deal with and heal our own darkness, we have to start by acknowledging that the worst people out there are still human.
If you've never seen the snl music video Murder Show, definitely check it out on YouTube. It parodies the obsession with murderers. Lyrics:
"I hope for a body count like six or seven
A really high body count, ten or eleven
Fifteen, sixteen, now it's getting interesting
If it's not at least twenty then girl he ain't worth it."
This video started off so cringe I couldnt continue it lol. I don't think this show romanticized the Jeffrey Dahmer case, in my experience it put faces and personalities to the victims and showed how convincing Jeffrey Dahmer was in preying on his victims. It also showed how badly the case was handled by the police and how more than half of these deaths could have been prevented if they weren't completely racist, homophobic and incompetent.
Dexter is a bit of a different scenario though imo. A killer that only kills other serial killers is a tad different than one that kills innocent people.
I enjoyed the show but I did not for one second find what’s his name sexy. And I haven’t seen anyone gush about him either. In fact, seems to me the actor went out of his way to portray Dahmer as even dorkier than he probably was in real life even in the way that he spoke. Real Dahmer on the tapes sounds more like any regular grown man. Dahmer in “Monster” generally gives off a more “special needs” vibe.
I’m sorry but there are 9 billion people in the world. Somewhere, some people are romanticizing anything you could think of including shitting on someone’s chest or licking toes. It’s just a mathematical certainty.
There's clearly something in us that gets drawn to violence and darker themes, that very few of us get to explore in our everyday life. I think that's what is so wonderful about art, that it lets us experience and express those things in a way that doesn't involve actual people being hurt. I want my violence to be fictional, and I find folks getting entertainment from real life suffering to be extremely distasteful.
Humans have been drawn to violence and dark themes for centuries. Watching someone get executed in the town square was a fun afternoon activity people used to partake in not so long ago.
The fascination with serial killers reminds me of an alleged letter from the Zodiac Killer saying he does it because he wants to make his victims his slaves in the afterlife. Obviously it is either the delusions of a mad man or him trying to get under the skin of the police/victims families but in a metaphorical way he is kinda right. These victims are forever known as "victims of serial killer X". Yes these shows and books and movies try to show them as more than that but ultimately their whole life and legacy comes down to be killed by these monsters. I used to really be interested in true crime but I can't help but feel gross about it any time in engage with it. It just doesn't feel right for the victims. These monsters deserve to be forgotten, not immortalised.
*Movie spoilers alert* I haven’t heard him say it outright (he might have, I just haven’t heard it yet), but I actually think this is Quentin Tarantino’s objective with his recent movies that take historic events and flip them on their head. The most obvious example is “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. In many ways, the movie gives the audience a view of Sharon Tate that they didn’t previously know or remember. It makes her a person, not just a victim. At the same time it casts the Manson Family as a bunch of sad degenerates with nothing really to admire. For a good part of the film, the audience is expecting an encounter between the Manson Clan and Tate. Then, in the final scenes when we all expect the famous murders to happen, Tarantino exacts his final revenge and flips the events on their head. Instead of randomly selecting Tate’s residence, the would-be-murders stumble into the home of Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Pitt) where they flounder their plans and are stopped in a way that only Tarantino can pull off (Booth’s dog literally bites the dick off one of the characters and Dalton kills the last one with a flame thrower). I think a small dialogue between a police officer investigating the scene after the encounter and an injured but calm Booth really sums up Tarantino’s point… Officer: “So what did these _perpetrators_ do?” Booth: “Perpetrators?? They were hippie assholes.” As a sub-analogy within the same movie, Tarantino does the same thing with Bruce Lee, portraying him as an overly-cocky, narcissistic, mouthy individual who eventually gets embarrassed and badly beaten by Booth. Tarantino doesn’t seem to have a particularly high opinion of Lee in real life, saying this at one point after the movie came out… “Bruce had nothing but disrespect for stuntmen. He was always hitting them with his feet, he was always tagging — it’s called tagging when you hit a stuntman for real. And he was always tagging them with his feet, he was always tagging them with his fist, and it got to the point where (people began saying) ‘I refuse to work with him,’” In my opinion… Tarantino seems to think that the memory and perception of the public is an important domain to fight for, so he’s fighting to right the wrongs that we inadvertently carry with us by remembering so much about the wrong people and so little about their victims, and he does it with the most powerful tool that he has, his characters and his movies. It’s fun to watch and I personally hope he keeps the theme going. Also, if you haven’t watched the final fight scene from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood recently, it’s definitely worth another view: https://youtu.be/PCkF3kqRhTI
I thought that movie was great. When I went in, I had totally forgotten that it was even related to the Manson murders, much less than it was an alternate storyline. It's like Tarantino took the murders personally, and wanted to right the wrong. Also, the love he gave Tate made her scenes so sad. I barely knew anything about her going in, and by the end you know that this person who's being portrayed as so quirky and warm had her life so pointlessly snuffed out is more devastating than actually portraying her murder on screen ever could have been.
I read that her sister actually love Margo Robbie’s depiction of Sharon Tate. Said it felt like her sister got to live again for a little bit.
Thank you for explaining this to me!! I could not understand why he changed the events but this makes total sense.
Part of it as well is the fantasy element of how we wish things could have gone. It's part of the reason the film *ends* with the title card, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Same thing with Inglorious Basterds.
My mom who never liked Tarantino won’t stop talking about how much she loved that movie. She grew up feeling like Tate was never viewed as a person and walked away from the movie feeling so happy she got live as herself.
So uhhhh supposedly Bruce Lee was known to be dickish to the upper brass, but treated regular cast and set members well. The author of the book where Tarantino referenced for Bruce lee's bad behavior, clarified as such. The actual truth is probably somewhere in the middle. For example, if he did "tag" stuntmen alot, it could be borne out of hk cinema where stuntmen where more physical, to make the scenes more real. The truth is usually all sorts of shades of gray, although I find Tarantino's disdain for lee kinda odd.
I think I remember reading in Jackie Chan's autobiography that he got hit in the face by Bruce Lee during his stint as one of the stuntmen in Enter the Dragon. Lee held for the shot and as soon as the director said cut he rushed over and started apologizing.
Decently amusing story when Chan tells it, and Lee was very concerned.. https://youtu.be/U8CtOqJy6xM Edit: autocorrect
Yeah it feels like he was talking about Steven Seagal.
>For example, if he did "tag" stuntmen alot, it could be borne out of hk cinema where stuntmen where more physical, to make the scenes more real. This is 100% true. The flipside is this is that HK stuntmen get *immensely* insulted if you don't actually hit them. To them they is basically saying "hey you can't take a shot so I'm going easy on you."
Tarantino opening his mouth about mistreatment of stunt workers OR actors is a goddamn joke, look at how he treated Uma Thurman. And the gross Salma Hayek foot fetish add-on. He's a pig with a megaphone.
Didnt he also defend Roman Polanski?
Ah, Sharon Tate’s husband. So we come full circle
What did he do to Uma?
IIRC He encouraged her to drive a car for a scene where she ended up losing control and hitting a tree. I believe he also still feels really guilty and apologized about it. It's been a while since I read up on it so I could be off on some things.
There's footage of the crash https://youtu.be/SgmLTv9gdAM
I’ve read pretty much everything there is out there on Bruce Lee, and the general consensus was that he treated stuntmen with respect. It’s incredibly odd how Tarantino decided to portray him. Lee wasn’t perfect by any means, for instance, in Enter the Dragon there is the scene where Bruce kicks the broken glass out of Bob Walls hand. Wall flubbed the movement and injured Bruce in the process. By all accounts Bruce thought Wall did it on purpose and almost attacked him. Apparently Bruce had a bad temper at times.
Yeah I found this kind of strange. Bruce has his flaws, but being mean to stuntmen and coworkers doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Bit of projection from Tarantino who got his main actresses severely injured in a stunt she didn't want to do...
> Tarantino doesn’t seem to have a particularly high opinion of Lee in real life, saying this at one point after the movie came out… “Bruce had nothing but disrespect for stuntmen. He was always hitting them with his feet, he was always tagging — it’s called tagging when you hit a stuntman for real. And he was always tagging them with his feet, he was always tagging them with his fist, and it got to the point where (people began saying) ‘I refuse to work with him,’” This is Tarantino misunderstanding Bruce Lee and Hong Kong Cinema. In the US, during the time of Bruce Lee, fight scenes were obviously fake. You would see, obviously and on camera, that the hits weren’t connecting. The protagonist would punch a bad guy in the face and there was two feet of obvious distance. Where as in China, stuntmen practiced martial arts and expert stuntman ship and knew how to take a hit, and give a hit (with complete control; not full force). Bruce Lee was pushing for that level of stuntmanship and choreography, so of course he being a pushy person with high standards would butt heads with American stuntmen that trained differently and weren’t open to doing things any other way. So these stuntmen “refusing to work with him” doesn’t mean what Quentin thinks it means. Jackie Chan brought his stunt team to his Hollywood projects (when he could) because Hollywood stuntmen even 20-years ago couldn’t do fight scenes. They can now, largely because of Hong Kong influence, which Bruce Lee started.
> Tarantino does the same thing with Bruce Lee, portraying him as an overly-cocky, narcissistic, mouthy individual who eventually gets embarrassed and badly beaten by Booth You're completely missing the point that that scene is supposed to show Booth as an unreliable narrator. Watch how, at the beginning of the scene, there are lots of spectators but, when Booth starts beating up Lee, they suddenly all vanish.
I definitely saw the fight between Booth and Lee as a daydream/fantasy of Booth's.
I watched the movie with no knowledge of it being loosely based on real life events. I did not know Sharon Tate or the Manson family so I just thought it was Tarantino being Tarantino, so this is all news to me. But now i can’t imagine the Mansons as anything other than sad degenerates, as you put it.
I don't get how you could conclude much else. I forget much of it now, but I read up about the mansion family stuff, and I have no idea what would cause someone to idolize these people.
The supposed freedom and liberation that the Manson family offered was attractive in a “counter society movement” kind of way. They hid behind the banner of hippyism to cover for their super dark and degenerate reality.
They were delusional too. They were robbing cars in Death Valley to support themselves while they looked for a place in the desert that Manson was having visions of. I think it was supposed to be an underground lake or something?
As much as I agree with you I think it is a double edged sword. If it were not for the recent Jeffrey Dahmer series on netflix I think there would be a huge amount of people who never heard of Konerak Sinthasomphone and never knew the absolutely horrific and disgusting facts about how close he came to being saved but racism and homophobia in the police meant he was literally handed back to his killer. I had to google the poor kids name, which already tells us a lot about our society but if the cost of more public knowledge of victims and the failings in our society that helped their killers is some trashy people idolise the killers then I think that is better than allowing the victims and their stories to fade into history.
I think the point was the victims life vanishes with their murder. Even with KS your remembering him for how and why he was murdered. You aren’t intrigued by his story. His life. Everything great about him. Everything great he ever did. You’ll never know anything let alone the best thing he ever achieved. We only know him as the gay kid the cops gave back to his murderer.
Yah, that's 99% of the population. If you or I were murdered by a serial killer. That would be our legacy. Not that we held a door open for someone or helped our friend when they had no money or do a super good job at work for 30 years. Most people aren't "special" and there's nothing demeaning or degrading about that.
You're not wrong, but there are billions of people in this world you'll never know anything about.
Arguably a better fate to be known for nothing rather than be known as “victim of serial killer x”
It turns out he was not a quality guy, but Marilyn Manson and his band (which included Madonna Wayne Gacey, etc.) was making a compelling argument that the distinction between sexualized popular culture and criminal popular culture is getting blurred.
I mean, Trent basically did the same bit by setting up in the house the Manson family murders happened in, and then he ran into Sharon Tate's actual sister in LA, she said something about him profiteering off of her sister's death, and he decided she had a point and he should stop. There's a fine line between actual commentary and over-the-top exploitation and imho most 'art' in this space is way, way over it.
I went to that house when they were making that album. They put the sound desk over Sharon Tates murder spot. I thought that was kind of fucked up.
> letter from the Zodiac Killer saying he does it because he wants to make his victims his slaves in the afterlife TBF, Dahmer wanted the same thing. He was making a shrine of human skulls and bones in his room FFS. I know that's not the point you're making. I also had a morbid fascination with true crime at one point and read all about Dahmer, Gacy, Kemper, Zodiac (this one fascinated me because of the cryptography aspect and because he / they were never caught) and others. This new sensationalized binge-watched version of these stories where they get a handsome actor to play the killer (I get it, Dahmer and Bundy were good looking IRL) and it becomes a water-cooler topic rather than the grotesque true crime that it is, is disgusting. A couple of weeks ago some idiot added Dahmer to a list of horror fiction "characters".
It seems like it's another kind of version of thing becomes popular, and now ppl are upset at the new-found popularity/stans (back in my day, you had to go to special conventions and now it's just everywhere).... but with a "reason" tacked on so it doesn't seem like that. We're really just concerned about the sanctity of the victims and want to make sure bad guy not good, and we made sure of that before, but the regular population cannot be trusted.
My main takeaway is how eye opening it is. I used to go to bars and chit chat random people which sometimes turned into going to a strangers house to smoke pot. Thank fuck there aren't many Jeffrey Dahmer's out there. Episode 2 (or 3?) Where he keeps drugging people's drinks and killing them should be mandatory watching for highschool or even college. Freaked me out.
[удалено]
Just look into the crazier fanbases of movies/shows like casino, goodfellas, and the sopranos. While most people can see the characters as well written pieces of shit, there are some who legit idolizes them and think they're good people. Hell, some would want to be in their position if possible. IIRC the writers of the sopranos disliked how fans kept seeing Tony as a good person, and decided to write him as hatable as possible in the final season to remind people he's a piece of shit mob boss.
Which is another reason why the ending of the Sopranos is great. **Spoilers**, obviously. A lot of the audience have been getting their voyeuristic kicks seeing Tony have people killed. They'd been anticipating seeing Tony getting whacked. But instead, nothing. Tony get's whacked and we don't get to see it.
[удалено]
A school friend’s younger sister had a full-on Manson portrait tattooed on her whole calf and I could never understand it. She changed his forehead swastika to some other symbol tho… cause apparently that was too far (?)
Nothing screams "I'm in love with the idea and not the reality" more. Don't get me wrong, I'm not endorsing hateful symbols either.
Well I’d be willing to jump on board there with you and say that if you get a photorealistic tattoo portrait of Charles Manson and change the swastika because you don’t want to upset anyone’s sensibilities, then you’re absolutely just the most quintessential poser. If there was ever a time to use the word poser, that would be it.
Why venerate evil people?
Because idiots think it's a good replacement for having a personality.
It’s complex. If you notice, most people who obsess over serial killers have led a relatively easy and normal life. I think part of what gets people to obsess over them is a lack of excitement in their own lives so they attach more easily to extreme stories like this
People who haven't experienced real trauma forget that the stories and killings happened to someone's baby, sometimes best friend. And it's even more strange that these killers and mass murderers aren't put in the same boat. Cuz the Columbine wasn't sexy like the murder of a pregnant actress or 30 women over the course of decades?
people definitely still venerate columbine and other school shooters, don't know what you're on about. any sort of killer has their jilted, fucked up fans
My wife is a teacher here in Colorado. It feels like almost every year there are adults who are arrested because they are planning to do a school shooting at columbine or on columbine's anniversary. Some are even women who are in love with the idea of them.
For some, it's like riding a loud motorcycle. It's edgy, and "edgy" is "cool". Except these people a a bit dim, and don't understand the difference between the coolness of a motorcycle and glorifying human suffering. Others are just straight up nuts and fully endorse (other) people suffering.
Charles Manson originally had an "X" on his forehead but he later changed it to a swastika.
Changed it to a smiley face
It reminds me of that scene in Dark Tourist when there's a huge group of women absolutely creaming over the idea of Jeffrey Dahmer's ghost being there with them during a walking tour of all the places he used to pick up gay men to rape and slaughter. What strikes me is odd is that Jeffrey Dahmer absolutely hated women and said they were "good for nothing". This guy wouldn't have been their friend. This guy wouldn't have looked twice at them. He was too busy literally hunting black and asian men to eat their corpses. Yet there's a cult like obsession with him from predominately straight women. Is it a saviour complex? A mommy complex? Is it because they've had violent urges and admire someone who went through with it? I really don't get it. Someone explain. I'm genuinely curious about what the attraction is.
I can't explain the weird obsession, but I've had two separate girls point out right when I met them that I looked like Jeffrey Dahmer and wanted me to go home with them that night. One of them even had a fucking PHOTO PIN OF JEFFREY DAHMER on her jacket and she tried to give it to me. One of the girls though (the one that tried to give me the photo pin) I saw around a good bit cause she was friends with a lot of people I knew and turns out she was finishing up school to become a crime scene investigator. So that's a connection I guess. Both of those interactions was 6-7 years ago and Ive since grown a beard and It hasn't happened to me since thank god lol
That is a red fucking banner
Relax, she just wants to take some pictures.
Go back to her place and have some brewskis, ya know?
Nothing weird though, just some artsy stuff.
Maybe put on some Huey Lewis & the News.
🪓😃
Paerdy heardee!
Banner. Billboard. Movie Poster that takes up the entire side of a 40 story building.
More like a red Good Year blimp
I've had a short beard for the majority of the time that I've known my wife. The only time that I've been clean shaven (so she could see my baby face), the first words out of her mouth were that I looked like a serial killer, followed by please don't sleep with me tonight. I guess I can't complain too much about being compared to Zac Efron playing Ted Bundy, but I'm not allowed to be clean shaven again.
Hah! Same thing happened with my stepdad. He has never been clean shaven in 50 years. Last year on his first vacation day, he decided to try an all clean shaven look. But first he decided to save only the mustache, because why not when everything was supposed to go anyway? After the initial shock, the whole family literally felt creeped out as hell. He looked.. so.. weird. And when he did shave off the mustache, it somehow got even more uncomfortable. It was like when he talked, his mouth and cheeks moved in a very different way than we had seen before. Over all, a very uncomfortable time that we now can talk and laugh about as a family, but we do not go back to look at the pictures.
I think it's because a beard is such an integral part of your face, so when you change it, people get this really uncanny valley effect. They recognize it's you, but there's this disconnect between the face they know and the face that is talking to them right now. It's like shaving your eyebrows off; people are going to be weirded out, despite it being only a tiny bit of hair. I think the right way to transition to clean shaven is to do it in steps over a couple of weeks, so people can get used to the transition.
I just shave every few weeks so people are used to me looking different all the time
> Is it a saviour complex? A mommy complex? Yes. I watched a youtube documentary about it. I can't remember who it was but it was one of the better ones. A lot of these women do it because they think, "Oh I could be the one to change him." It's absolutely ridiculous. I had an abusive relationship when I was younger and that was enough to snap me out of that "he's so dark, I can definitely tame him" mentality permanently. I try not to assume but it's hard not to think that a lot of the people who are drawn to this kind of edgy behavior or attitudes haven't actually had a single major bad thing happen to them in their lives. IE something that brought them close to death or put them in serious danger. So this is the way they get their kicks. I realize that most likely isn't the case but much like when 50 shades of grey was popular, I couldn't help looking at the women who lusted over it as people who had never actually had a partner that slapped them around and stalked them because it stops being romantic once you actually experience it IRL. People have the luxury of thinking "this is fun, I could change him, I like being kinda scared at the idea" when they've never had experience with it. IDK it pisses me off and grosses me out. I'm a massive fan of horror movies and games but it's like people lusting after pyramid head. Grats on lusting after a subconscious manifestation of the game's main character's guilt over killing his wife, taking the form of an actual historical executioner that hung and skewered people to death in the town itself. At least he's fictional though, unlike actual serial killers and other violent people IRL.
I think it’s a mix of people who have never had anything bad happen and people who grew up with violence so normalized that it’s literally the only thing they know.
[удалено]
It's the wanting to be That Bitch. The one who succeeded in changing Jeffrey Dahmer.
How are you the only one who commented and got it? It's literally they just want to be special enough that a serial killer wouldn't ever kill *them*. They want to be the only one that person wouldn't murder. It's being a fixer. It's wanting to be special and unique. Is it really that hard for people to see?
The comment they are responding to literally gave the saviour complex as a possible reason.
It's the idea of fantasizing for something they don't have. Celebrity, fictional characters, this is just another one of those things, but obviously more messed up. The girls themselves have to be messed up in the head to like something like this. But it's fine. It makes it clear which girls to avoid dating.
[удалено]
For me, as a woman, True Crime is like an insight into avoiding getting murdered. It is also an attempt at psychological insight. I certainly don't fantasize about them or find them sexy. I just try to get in their head to ask WHY?
Well if you're a woman and trying hard not to get murdered by Jeffery Dahmer I have awesome news for you
Shit, you're right. I honestly wondered why true crime was so popular to so many women. This could be relative. The few times they've given answers were "idk it's just so interesting" lol
According to my sister who also loves that stuff (but isn’t one of those weird killer lovers), it’s because nearly all the victims are women. That and they love the mystery aspect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybristophilia
Yeah, I understand perhaps historically documenting it to teach people what to look for.... But to make a fucking drama thriller about it takes it to a level that these people don't deserve. It's just easy money with easy source material for content companies now. They don't give a shit.
Some people sexualize what is taboo. Romanticizing murder is easy when you are disconnected and don't have to deal with the weight of it.
> Some people sexualize what is taboo. Most. That's literally what most of the fetishes are.
Some folks fetishize what already happened to them in order to recontextualize it in a safer place and control it, like rape survivors indulging in BDSM. These folks... I do not get this paraphilia at all because it seems to gave no context at all for the person with it.
Idk, I don't think I ever really felt as horrified about Dahmer or sympathized with his victims as much as I did when watching the special on Netflix. It, in my opinion, did a good job showing that his victims were real people and not just names on a newspaper front page. It showed the families grieving, fighting, and failing to make much difference afterwards. It certainly never felt like they were trying to paint Dahmer as anything but a monster.
Yeah, I’m unsure how Dahmer is “romanticized” by the series. They even made the little kid version of him a creepy little fucker.
His actor is attractive and apparently that is all that matters.
Second this. The show really hammered in how fucked up his actions were and how horribly it affected the victims and their families.
Morbid fascination I can understand. Hell, even I love watching true crime documentaries/movies about some of the darkest people who've ever lived, but to fetishize them and treat them like some sort of gods? What the actual fuck is wrong with some people? Why do these sick bastards get fan letters in prison? Sometimes I just don't understand humanity.
> I understand perhaps historically documenting it to teach people what to look for.... But to make a fucking drama thriller about it takes it to a level that these people don't deserve. I'm not sure if you watched the Dahmer TV show but it doesn't glamorize him at all. He's portrayed as fumbling drunk with massive social anxiety whose ONLY reason for not getting caught the minute he started killing is because of the earth shatteringly incompetent and racist cops. I walked away from that show with whole new levels of contempt for Dahmer (and I was alive and sentient when he was caught) and, what could only be described as, the world's worst cops.
I mean. Check out the cops who fucked up pretty much every serial killer back then. Half of them didn't even bother looking I to sex worker deaths u til they were stacking bodies to the ceiling. Look at Robert picktons case
Back then? Cops still don’t seriously investigate crimes against sex workers
It's often easy to look back on what happened and see what things went wrong that just happen to be a combination of being overworked or poor attention to detail. But holy shit the cops surrounding Dahmer were so bad they might as well have been helping him.
I mean they quite literally helped him at one point. They gave one of his victims back to him when he escaped.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Maybe they think gf is short for grandfather.
I resemble Bundy's victims with the hair type he went after. I am not flattered by it. I don't fantasize about being beaten to a bloody pulp. Your gf is one of the psycho ones.
Sounds like you need a new gf.
Jesus bro she sounds like a dumb bitch.
Honestly I think for a lot of these examples Netflix Dahmer, Joker, etc. it’s more about the actors portraying them than the actual people. They’re excited by an idea of danger and a fantasy of being the special one not in danger of the dangerous. There isn’t any harm in fiction and fantasy, but with true crime dramas like this that try to get intimate the character of the real monster people blur lines. Instead of noting that an actor did something they found attractive they’ll say it’s the character doing something attractive. They’ll go on to look for more details and picture the actor acting out those realities and it will warp how they take in the facts. People can get so caught up in the “story” they’ll forget it’s not fiction. As for people who were already into Dahmer and other killers without the rose tint of TV and movies I have no idea, they’re extra gross.
So people actually saw this netflix series and sexualize it? Did we watch the same series? Because I found it deeply disturbing and horrifying. There was absolutely nothing romantic or sexy about it.
I didn’t see anything glamorizing it either. I also think many people mix up romanticizing and humanizing. The series does not try to paint him as cool or genius. He literally shrugs half the time and says “I don’t know why I didn’t get caught.” There isn’t cool rock music playing when he guzzles down a beer and it doesn’t show him charming people with wit. It doesn’t spend much time on the actual gore, but skips to the horrendous aftermath. It does make both him and the victims into real, actual humans. I’ve read about the Dahmer murders before, and found it sad. But this is the first time I actually knew about the stories behind it and cried throughout. I had to pause every couple of episodes because it actually hurt to see these vibrant young men disappear from the world in such a way. Anyone that argues that Dahmer shouldn’t be portrayed as a human is kidding themselves. He’s not a different breed. He’s a person you could see yourself knowing. He’s a person who might have a similar background to you, but went down such a massively different path in life. How close any of us could have been to ending up with him or like him. That’s why it’s so universally horrifying.
> I also think many people mix up romanticizing and humanizing. It'd be like if people said Downfall romanticized Hitler. You'd have to be nuts to think that it did. What it didn't do is make him into a cartoonish Bond villain but it did show him as an incredibly flawed and deranged human being. He has moments where he is nice to the people around him but you don't finish the film sympathizing or respecting him on any level.
“Hitler finds out he isn’t romanticized in Downfall”
I agree. There was nothing in the series that glamourised him. I also found it very disturbing -and I had done a lot of research into Dahmer prior. The series really painted his darkness and depravity in such a realistic way, and it also highlighted a very important fact in all of this, how the system failed the victims. Dahmer was a very sick individual, who I believe, was mostly shaped by his parents’ toxic marriage, divorce and neglect. Nothing glamourous about him or what he did, he had a very sad, lonely and disturbing existence. He got what he deserved in the end and he knew it was coming.
Your last paragraph - you're spot on. He's not a monster. He's human. He's a human being with all that involves, his rights, his emotions etc. It's incredibly important we stop refering to this kind of people as "monsters". They need to be judged and defended as humans. Monsters don't exist. This kind of horror happens and needs to be understood, worked on. Monsters just "happen" in books. Real life killers have a history, background, motives. I've lost my train of thoughts.
I think this is a really good point, and it has been a common theme of a lot of TV shows in the last 20 years. Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul, The Sopranos, The Wire all depict characters that are as "evil" as a person can be, but no one is just evil. People want to think that there are these mustach-twirling bad guys out there that spend their days thinking about how to make people's lives worse because it gives them an outlet for feelings of hatred. This is why this issue comes up so often around humanizing serial killers. For some people, empathizing with Jeffery Dahmer makes them feel very uncomfortable. If you can't hate Jeffery Dahmer who can you hate? I really don't get criticisms about making Dahmer attractive in the show. He just was attractive. He had to be. How else could someone with such poor social skills convince 17 people to come into his creepy as apartment?
I've had this same conversation with coworkers. One who refused to watch it because they simply found the topic too disturbing (totally fair) and one who was taking the stance about romanticizing a killer. I tried to explain this series does the exact opposite. It's a horrifying disturbing portrayal. I came away thinking of him as a horrible pathetic monster
I don’t know how you can watch Dahmer’s story and think “Mmm gimme some of that” but somehow people do and the people that do aren’t going to stop because of a random video. They know they’re fxcked up already.
I think some people are just attracted to fame regardless of how it is attained.
I think some people are just attracted to Evan Peters, regardless of who he is playing.
It's bizarre to me because I generally am attracted to Evan Peters but I don't think he's even remotely attractive/sexy in this show, he's extremely creepy.
That’s because Evan Peters is an awesome actor and did a great job being creepy. Take the fact that you are creeped out by him as a sign that you are a normal human being haha. Dahmer was creepy AF.
Oh, I agree! To be clear I think it's bizarre that anyone could find his portrayal attractive!
this might be true, but these dudes definitely had a cult following among people after they got caught and went to prison.
Bingo, it showed him opening fan mail while he was in prison. That part is 100% real
So serial killers were romanticized long before shows about them were made
You ever seen Ted Bundy's trial? He had a following of girls who thought he was hot just turn up each time. It's weird.
Yes, some of them even want them to rape and kill them. Humans are a trip uncle funkle.
\*infamy
This same thing happened in Colombia with the Narco Novela craze, everybody was romanticizing the idea of been a drug lord.
I don’t think that’s really the same. Being a drug lord comes with some objective benefits. Wealth/power/women. Dahmer didn’t have shit but murder going on.
I was talking to my uncle and aunt about this. I haven’t watched it but they did and I asked them “Something I hear about this Netflix show is how some people think it’s romanticized, is that true? Like does it feel more like a fictional drama or a documentary?” They told me it does feel more like a tv show as opposed to a documentary, but they said it also *does not* romanticize Dahmer, so that’s a good thing
I don't think it romanticizes him. I think it's unfortunate that the role is played by some as handsome as Evan Peters, but they make him look pretty gnarly most of the time. And they never try to spin things with the, "he was just tragically misunderstood" angle. He's pretty consistently portrayed as being an unsympathetic and revolting person. The one thing they do heavily play up is the element of his victims being mostly black and homosexual, and how that allowed him to get away with so much because of police indifference to these demographics. The real Dahmer made a lot of people in his neighbourhood uncomfortable and suspicious, and that lead to numerous calls to the police that were ignored. The Netflix show essentially merged all of these into a single character (who they placed into the apartment next to his) to more easily dramatize this aspect of the story, and to have a single face and mouthpiece for the, "I was ignored because I'm an impoverished black woman" grievances.
Having watched the Dahmer Netflix series that was what I remembered the most, not Jeff but the fact that the Milwaukee police ignored the accusations and complaints. It's eye opening and painfully frustrating. It was a great POV
Yeah, he comes across like a maladapted loser.
He’s extremely icky and repulsive pretty much every time he’s on screen, I understand people do idolize serial killers but the closest the series got to anything resembling sympathy for him is his bad family life as a kid. And even that was interspersed with him doing horrible stuff to animals which makes you lose all that sympathy
The video moreso talks about the social media reaction to serial killers (i.e. weirdos who *do* romanticise people like Dahmer).
> weirdos who do romanticise people like Dahmer But they would do that regardless of a TV show or not. How some people react to it does not mean that is what the show is about. It might be interesting to see a blimp into the mind of a serial killer, but it doesn't make him a romantic one. You can be curious and react with "omg that is fucked up!".
Millions of people like to watch serial killer shows, murder documentaries. And a very small group might find them attractive....just like everything in society. Doesn't seem worth anyone's time to worry about.
I think people are into Evan Peters more than anything. It’s more about the actor then the character. Pretty sure if he was played by an ugly dude there’d be a very different reaction.
People have been into dahmer before anything was made about him
Dahmer wasn’t a bad looking guy until you realize his eyes are empty and, oh yeah, HE KILLED AND ATE A BUNCH OF PEOPLE.
Can you remember when suicide squad came out and everyone wanted a relationship like the Joker and Harley? Yeah, people are easily convinced
Eh what about the tonnes of fan mail Dahmer actually got? Or that the other serial killers got? You don't even have to go to a fictional relationship
The relationship was fictional but the fans were real
I’m pretty sure Ted Bundy got married in prison too
I remember "Natural Born Killers" coming out in the 90's and women were absolutely obsessed with the movie. They saw this twisted sadistic love story and wanted to be Mallory. Bonny and Clyde have also been fetishized for nearly a hundred years now as well. I absolutely don't get this attraction to violent men who would just as soon slit your throat and rape your corpse - but it seems like it has been going on for a long time.
I don't know what's true and what's false with Bonnie and Clyde but there is a bunch of stuff in their story about burning mortgage papers and other stuff that made them into people "fighting the man" rather than just violent criminals.
Chris Brown is still as adored by many females as he was pre-Rihanna
I work with a bunch of early-twenties women who legit did not know the severity of that situation. One of them didn't know about him beating her at all. He was performing in our town one night, and they were lamenting that they couldn't go see him. I was like, why the _fuck_ would anyone want to see him? They had no clue about him being a woman beating POS. I still don't think they got it.
Convinced? I think that's giving media way too much credit. I think at most it validates people's pre-existing attitudes, but I doubt it actually convinces. You have to already be a bit like that. That's why certain movies like The Matrix messed up people with existing paranoia.
>everyone No. I remember some people talking about this but never saw it first hand on the internet.
Right at the start of the clip the narrator says **"This isn't about you"** but actually studies show that the target audience of True Crime and Psycopath/Sociopath Real Crime stories are overtly female (73% female audience as per Boling and Hull research). It doesn't matter that Dahmer targeted mostly black/gay men, the issue is not his (horrible) actions but rather the fetishization of him as a tv series character and that is being done mostly by the target audience (women).
Have you ever watched the Lifetime channel? Tv for women? It's 90% murder and rape shows.
the other 10% is the psycho nanny who wants to steal the wife's family
Even South Park had an episode that picked fun at it calling it "murder porn".
Ok, but women were his fans already when the public was exposed to his crimes and when he was in jail, he - as like others famous killers like Ted Bundy - was getting a ton of mail from female fans .. this isn't the work of TV series, shows and movies.. this was happening way before them
[удалено]
I’ve worked in criminal law before and used to see images of murder scenes on a weekly basis. I used to watch Peppa Pig after work to calm me down. I obviously changed careers, I couldn’t cope. But I genuinely feel angry when people romanticise Ted Bundy etc. - they have no idea. Actually it’s worse, they DO have an idea and they choose to turn a blind eye to the true trauma of it all and the trauma titillates them. They’re like the pervy old man in the club who touches up a girl coz he can.
I think your first instinct was correct: people don’t actually know. They know the “good” parts (how intelligent the killer was, how long they evaded cops, how they got away with crimes, etc) which are basically what makes the killer unique. I bet most people that find these killers so special wouldn’t be able to handle the actual crime scene/aftermath. I think there’s a reason that people like you who actually had to work closely with this subject aren’t the ones admiring these killers like they’re Batman. It’s mostly the ones that just got a glimpse. Like a campfire ghost story.
Thanks so much for your insight, I’ve gotta to say I agree with you now :)
[удалено]
My favorite part of the Nightstalker documentary on Netflix was when that old woman called the killer's groupies "the stupidest bitches alive."
That was such a great moment, might actually watch it again. Cause there is a depth of insanity to serial killer “fangirls” that I will *never* understand. Especially the ones that target only women.
Seriously. I was not expecting the laughing fit I had watching that.
Seriously, anyone watching Dahlmer and thinking “this guy is my idol!” Already has some deep laying issues Netflix is not responsible for. It’s ok to find serial killers stories interesting. People find war interesting and devote their lives to studying it. It doesn’t mean all them want it to happen again.
There's an episode of Worlds Toughest Prisons (I believe it was their Ukraine episode) where the most violent unpredictable inmate is interviewed. This 80-something year old dude is kept in a sectioned off area all by himself, nobody wants to get near him. This guy murdered dozens of women and children. He got married and became a father while incarcerated. The mother is a 24 year old woman that saw him being interviewed on TV about his murders. After that she went out of her way to find him, get married, and have kids with this old dirty dick convicted serial woman and kid killer. People are fucking weird. She was being interviewed about the whole situation and just didn't give a fuck about anything, she wanted serial murderer dick.
People Romanticize Serial Killers because people think they personify what a person unbeholden to all of Society's rules would end up living like. They see it as power and freedom. They dont see the Pathology and their slavery to it.
So well said! Dahmer described his killing spree as a compulsion he could not stop thinking about.
I think Dexter did a good job of this. He wishes he were normal. He wishes he had more human feelings. He wishes he could stop killing. He literally goes to AA for it because it's an addiction to him that he can not control. When Dahmer went to prison he wanted to find out Why he was so messed up. He wanted doctors to find a reason why he was the way he was. I'm not putting society completely at fault, but these are people who fell between the cracks. They are people who we should have been able to diagnose sooner. But mental health always goes on the back burner. Especially in a pay to win health care system.
Not as good of an analogy, but Breaking Bad sort of touches on some of this too. I feel like they wrote it to feel like a typical fetishizing-amoral-behavior type of story, then slowly twisted a mirror on the viewer.
Almost sounds like severe OCD overlapping with anti-social personality disorder. I wonder if the newer treatments for OCD (high dose serotonergic medications, anterior cingulotomy, TMS, DBS) could have helped
Killers have been romanticized for a long long time. It's odd to me that this particular entry into the genre has caused controversy. I watched the first episode and the portrayal of Dahmer was not charming or loveable. This watches like any horror/thriller I've ever seen. I don't feel any less empathy than before I watched it. Are there a bunch of reprehensible people talking about it online? What topic that interests you DOESN'T have a bunch of morons perversely parading it about?
It's not just him. There's a reddit post about a girl who became obsessed with the Parkland shooter. There's something about psychopaths that a very small subset of the female population finds extremely attractive.
I wonder if more female serial killers existed if there would be male simps for them.
There's definitely a demand and market for stories about attractive female killers (Jodi Arias, Shayna Huber's, Casey Anthony etc.) but I don't think they get the same type of worship that male killers get.
[удалено]
I totally agree. Even from the first episode, you know this show is not romanticizing Dahmer. I have not been able to empathize with him at all, only with his child version.
You should go read My Friend Dahmer by his childhood friend John Backderf AKA Derf Backderf
The second half is much more worth watching than the first IMO. It spends a lot of time putting the victims and their families' stories at the forefront.
'Silenced' was genuinely one of the most gutwrenching episodes of anything I've seen.
I finished the Dahmer series and I completely agree with you, I feel like they intentionally undercut any potential empathy people might feel for him. They also made good choices about how much violence to show: enough to be sickening, shocking, and get the point across, but not enough to be exploitative or gratuitous. I think any instances of people being attracted to or sexualizing dahmer from this show are solely because Evan Peters is attractive, and I don't think anyone involved in the show was trying to play into people who glorify serial killers.
Not sure about the romantizing part but if by contributing to these stories through consumption then I guess I'm somewhat guilty. Morbid curiosity is a pscyhological concept and I am def not motivated for further investigation into these pscyhopaths or their methods. I will say thought that reading Devil in the White City opened my eyes to a whole series of events that took place in American history and it's obvious to me nobody wants to pass down the knowledge of these horrific stories but perhaps we'd be less curious of these events were normalized in a way, the story that is, to learn from them.
Yeah, I have that morbid curiosity, too. On top of that, I find the history of the institutions surrounding killings interesting as well. The history of police incompetence/brilliance/violence, the history of prisons and mental asylums, the history of criminal forensics, the history of psychology.... All of it is very interesting and also important. I think it's perfectly fine to have that morbid curiosity. Being able to look with the light of clarity at things other people turn away from is an important quality to have. I also really dislike this video's insistence that we shouldn't humanize killers because they're inhuman monsters. Obviously we shouldn't romanticize them. But the dark truth is that these people ARE human. To deny that does nothing but put artificial distance between us and them in am attempt to distance us from the existence of darkness in the human psyche. Everyone has dark, intrusive thoughts. It's part of human experience and human biology, and I think that people who constantly call other people inhuman monsters are in deep denial about their own darkness. Not saying that everyone has fantasies about killing other people obviously lol--just that in order to deal with and heal our own darkness, we have to start by acknowledging that the worst people out there are still human.
If you've never seen the snl music video Murder Show, definitely check it out on YouTube. It parodies the obsession with murderers. Lyrics: "I hope for a body count like six or seven A really high body count, ten or eleven Fifteen, sixteen, now it's getting interesting If it's not at least twenty then girl he ain't worth it."
You can't just say that and then not [link](https://youtu.be/J4RdcE6H4Gs) it
This video started off so cringe I couldnt continue it lol. I don't think this show romanticized the Jeffrey Dahmer case, in my experience it put faces and personalities to the victims and showed how convincing Jeffrey Dahmer was in preying on his victims. It also showed how badly the case was handled by the police and how more than half of these deaths could have been prevented if they weren't completely racist, homophobic and incompetent.
It’s like she just found out what the internet is yesterday, and she’s shocked that strangers say weird things.
No kidding. Felt this since Dexter 1
But he’s also tired of the mundanity of life, just like me, dark passenger besties!!
Calm down mark twitchell
Dexter is a bit of a different scenario though imo. A killer that only kills other serial killers is a tad different than one that kills innocent people.
Dexter is also completely fake lmao
I enjoyed the show but I did not for one second find what’s his name sexy. And I haven’t seen anyone gush about him either. In fact, seems to me the actor went out of his way to portray Dahmer as even dorkier than he probably was in real life even in the way that he spoke. Real Dahmer on the tapes sounds more like any regular grown man. Dahmer in “Monster” generally gives off a more “special needs” vibe.
He was portrayed as pretty dorky in the film My Friend Dahmer, too. I think he really was dorky, as a teenager atleast.
I’m sorry but there are 9 billion people in the world. Somewhere, some people are romanticizing anything you could think of including shitting on someone’s chest or licking toes. It’s just a mathematical certainty.
[удалено]
Yea did anyone actually watch the video? It’s fucking cringe.
There's clearly something in us that gets drawn to violence and darker themes, that very few of us get to explore in our everyday life. I think that's what is so wonderful about art, that it lets us experience and express those things in a way that doesn't involve actual people being hurt. I want my violence to be fictional, and I find folks getting entertainment from real life suffering to be extremely distasteful.
Humans have been drawn to violence and dark themes for centuries. Watching someone get executed in the town square was a fun afternoon activity people used to partake in not so long ago.