I literally stared into the abyss of evil and saw things most people shouldn’t see.” So Joe Berlinger, the director behind Netflix’s new Jeffrey Dahmer documentary, tells me over Zoom one sunny autumn afternoon. He is bespectacled with a grey beard and an avuncular whiff of Mandy Patinkin about him.
Through those glasses, Berlinger has seen more than his fair share of things most people shouldn’t. Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, is out this Friday. It comes, very intentionally, two weeks after Ryan Murphy’s controversial dramatisation of events – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, starring Evan Peters – hit the streaming platform. The Dahmer Tapes rounds off a trilogy of serial killer documentaries Berlinger has released over the past three years. His first subject was the most famous – the “charming” murderer, Ted Bundy. Then came John Wayne Gacy, another nightmarish American killer who sometimes dressed as a clown when butchering his victims. And now Dahmer, a sick predator who drugged, killed and defiled 17 predominately gay men and boys of colour between 1978 and 1991. For each series, Berlinger has pored over tens, if not hundreds, of hours of interviews and crime scene footage of the most harrowing nature. The obvious question to me is: why?
