Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t scare me because he was loud or chaotic or theatrical.
He scares me because he was quiet. Because he apologized. Because he sounded like someone you’d feel bad for if you didn’t know what he kept in his apartment.

Dahmer is what happens when horror doesn’t announce itself. He didn’t stalk dark alleys with a knife in his teeth. He picked people up politely. Bought them drinks. Invited them over like it was no big deal. And for a while, it wasn’t. That’s the part that makes my skin crawl, how normal the beginning always was. Music playing. Small talk. A couch. A beer. The illusion of safety doing all the heavy lifting.

He killed seventeen young men and boys. Mostly gay. Mostly Black. Mostly invisible to the people who were supposed to protect them. He drugged them. Strangled them. Took them apart afterward, like he was trying to understand how a person works once the person part was gone. He kept body parts. Took photos. Tried to preserve them. Not out of rage, out of loneliness. Out of this warped, desperate need to never be abandoned again.

And that’s the lie people fall for with Dahmer: that he was just sad. That he was just broken. That he didn’t mean it.
Bullshit.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He planned. He adapted. He covered his tracks until he didn’t have to anymore. He drilled holes into skulls, trying to create living zombies, people who wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t say no, wouldn’t have opinions. Control without conversation. Companionship without consent. It’s horrifying not because it’s monstrous, but because it’s pathetic in the most dangerous way.

What really fucks with me is how many chances he was given to stop.

Police handed a bleeding, drugged teenage boy back to him.
Neighbors complained about the smell.
He had prior convictions.
People tried to intervene.

And every system shrugged.

Because the victims were the “wrong” kind of people. Because it was easier not to look too closely. Because evil is way more comfortable when it stays behind a closed door in a shitty apartment building.

Inside that apartment was a nightmare that didn’t need imagination. Freezers. Acid. Polaroids. A shrine made out of human remains and loneliness. Dahmer said he wanted to keep people with him forever, which sounds almost poetic until you realize “forever” meant ownership. Silence. Stillness. Death.

He didn’t torture for pleasure the way some killers did. That almost makes it worse. He wasn’t chasing screams; he was chasing absence. He wanted people who couldn’t leave him, couldn’t judge him, couldn’t exist independently of his need. Love stripped of choice isn’t love. It’s possession. And Dahmer took that idea to its most horrifying conclusion.

When he was caught, he confessed. Calmly. Thoroughly. Like someone relieved the secret was finally out. He didn’t fight it. Didn’t deny it. Didn’t pretend he was innocent. And that honesty tricks people into thinking he was somehow different. Better. More redeemable.

He wasn’t.

He just didn’t see a reason to lie anymore.

Dahmer was killed in prison by another inmate, beaten to death with a barbell. People argue about whether that was justice. I don’t know if it was justice. I just know it was an ending he didn’t get to control, and control was the only thing he ever really wanted.

What makes Dahmer terrifying isn’t the gore or the headlines or the documentaries that turn him into a Netflix aesthetic. It’s the way he blended into the background. The way people ignored the signs. The way society failed his victims long before he ever touched them.

Jeffrey Dahmer proves something I really don’t like admitting:
Sometimes the scariest monsters aren’t driven by hatred.
They’re driven by need.
And need, unchecked, can rot into something just as lethal.

He wasn’t a monster because he was different.
He was a monster because no one stopped him, and because he learned how easy it was not to be stopped.