Netflix sets a release date for Ryan Murphy's 'Dahmer. Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.' Check out the new, unnerving trailer.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
"Dahmer. Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story," the new series on the Milwaukee serial killer by "American Horror Story" creator Ryan Murphy, will debut on Netflix Sept. 21.
The streaming service announced the release date Friday — five days before the series starts streaming — the same day it unveiled the first full trailer for the 10-episode series.
In the unnerving trailer, Dahmer, played by Evan Peters ("WandaVision") brings a guy home to his apartment at the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee's Avenues West neighborhood. "Ohhh, what is that smell?" The camera then cuts to a bloody power tool, and Dahmer locking the door.
"Monster" tells the familiar story of Dahmer, who admitted to killing 16 people, as well as necrophilia and cannibalism, over more than a decade before he was arrested in 1991 by Milwaukee police. But it tells the story from a fresh perspective — fresh, at least, for pop-culture iterations of the horror story, in that it centers on "the underserved victims and their communities impacted by the systemic racism and institutional failures of the police that allowed one of America’s most notorious serial killers to continue his murderous spree in plain sight," according to Netflix publicity.
Niecy Nash plays Glenda Cleveland, a neighbor of Dahmer's who tried to intervene after teenage boy Konerak Sinthasomphone was returned to Dahmer by police after he'd been seen fleeing Dahmer's apartment. (The police took Dahmer's word that the two were lovers; Dahmer later confessed to killing Sinthasomphone.)
In the trailer released Friday, Cleveland (Nash) confronts Dahmer about what's going on in his apartment (where, he confessed later, he killed, dismembered, destroyed and sometimes consumed his victims).
"What do you do in there?" she asks him. "The smells. Power tools going all hours of the night. I hear screaming coming from your apartment."
"I'm just trying to say I'm sorry," he replies. "So, you gonna open your gift?"
He opens the tinfoil-covered plate, revealing a sandwich. When she asks him what's in the sandwich, he tells her, "It's just meat."
Later in the trailer, she confronts a police officer, presumably on the night Dahmer was arrested, saying, "I called y'all for months. And it's too late! Y'all came too late!"
The impressive cast also includes Ryan Jenkins as Dahmer's father, Lionel; Penelope Ann Miller as his mother, Joyce; Michael Learned as his grandmother, Catherine; and Molly Ringwald as Shari Dahmer, the murderer's stepmother. Many of the real-life figures from the story, including several of Dahmer's victims and members of the Milwaukee Police Department whose conduct in the case came into question, are listed as characters in the show's credits.
Netflix teased the trailer's release in a post on Instagram Thursday.
Murphy's "Monster" will be Netflix's first Dahmer-focused project this year. The second, "Confessions of a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes," is a three-part documentary by director Joe Berlinger; it will be on the streaming service Oct. 7.
Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.
Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.
DOWNLOAD THE APP: Get the latest news, sports and more
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Netflix sets release date for Ryan Murphy's Dahmer series 'Monster'
