The Controversy Over Jeffrey Dahmer Costume
In one of the Terrifier 2 scenes, the older sister and heroine of the film, Sienna, criticizes her little brother for considering dressing up as Art the Clown – “A real guy who murdered nine people last year”, as she describes. “Don’t do that,” she says, “Because that’s beyond
disrespectful. Do you have any idea how insensitive that is, not to mention, sick? You don’t see people dressing up as Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson”, she concludes.
Sadly, she’s wrong.
The discussion raised by the movie “Terrifier 2” could not be more accurate, because it made headlines at exactly the same time that the movie came out – a time when the demand, believe it or not, for Jeffrey Dahmer costumes increased. To understand why this is happening, you have to go back a few months. The month of October in the United States is, traditionally, the time when many dress up in the scariest costumes for Halloween on the 31st of the month.
When this happens to coincide with a record-breaking Netflix series, you can expect mass demand for costumes based on it: we’ve seen it for example with House of Paper costumes, Stranger Things, and The Squid Games. But what if this series refers to one of the most gruesome true stories in history, of a flesh-and-blood serial killer who tortured, beheaded, and murdered 17 men, including necrophilia or cannibalism in some cases? The answer is quite complex: trying to limit people looking for Jeffrey Dahmer costumes.
Increase In Searches For Jeffrey Dahmer Costumes
“Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”, aired in September on Netflix, became a huge hit right away. Ryan Murphy’s series, starring the excellent Ivan Peters who recently won the Golden Globe Award, is already considered one of the most successful Netflix series ever. In its first two weeks on the air, the ten-episode series about the “Milwaukee cannibal” accumulated about 496 million viewing hours. This fact makes it the second most-watched English-language Netflix series, after the fourth season of “Stranger Things” (which was split into two). that is the third Netflix series to pass a billion views in two months.
With all this happening in the middle of September and towards Halloween, you can expect “side effects”. The search data from those months, which are somewhat current even today, indicate a certain demand for a “new” product, which is Jeffrey Dahmer costumes. Jesus, some people are even looking for “Sexy Jeffrey Dahmer Costume”. Yeah, we know there are some cool & sexy horror costumes – Lately we wrote about such Freddy Krueger costumes – But this is too much in our opinion.
Although the search volumes are small numbers compared to the monstrous search volumes for terms related to Jeffrey Dahmer or the series, which reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of searches per month, it still turns out that there is an audience looking for costumes of a convicted serial killer following the series. Unsurprisingly, this is an increase of thousands of percent compared to the corresponding searches last year, which were most likely minimal to non-existent.
Why Is It WRONG To Buy Outfit Jeffrey Dahmer Costume?
This is where the problem begins, as Sienna also pointed out in that successful horror film. Because these costumes allegedly mimic or even adore, a convicted serial killer. Unlike other scary costumes – think for example of the costumes of Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, or even the Chucky doll – Jeffrey Dahmer is not the product of fiction but a reality that existed a few decades ago. A Reality that the families of the victims, and not only them, still experience every day.
On the big shopping sites, led by Amazon and eBay, you can find anything – Including formal or improvised costumes of Jeffrey Dahmer. Over the past few months, there have been reports of children, teenagers, and adults appearing in costumes inspired by Dahmer’s character (mostly, as it appears in the series): shirt and pants, wire-rimmed glasses, a wig, and a prisoner ID plate.
Naturally, these costumes provoked a great deal of outrage, and certainly not only among the families of the victims. Twitter and social networks exploded, and people wondered about the ethics or the level of sanity of these people. Some places announced sanctions: starting from a message from party producers that they would expel anyone who arrives in a Jeffrey Dahmer costume to posts that called for physical harm to them.
Should We See Other Jeffrey Dahmer Products?
The answer from the online stores came very quickly, at least for some of them. According to CNN, eBay has announced that Jeffrey Dahmer-inspired costumes are prohibited from sale due to a violation of the site’s policy, which prohibits products that encourage or glorify violence against humans or animals. It took Amazon a little longer to formulate an official response, but from our testing, the site quickly no longer had costumes identified with Jeffrey Dahmer.
What’s more, unfortunately, you can find very bad-tasting products all over the internet, which are still being sold – even though some of them receive negative reviews, and quite rightly so. We are talking here, for example, about glasses reminiscent of those of Peters or some shirts in particularly bad taste, with inscriptions such as “If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Eat ‘Em” or “I Eat Guys Like You for Breakfast”.
Even if the big websites manage to stop sales through them, we will likely continue to come across the occasional more or less improvised Jeffrey Dahmer costumes next Halloween. We will probably also encounter people who try to be clever in other ways, such as the owner of that pizzeria in the United States who decided somewhat to make a pizza inspired by the killer. One can only hope that ideas for products of this type will decrease as the months go by and the buzz, so that next Halloween we will already find more “moral” scary costumes.
