‘Dahmer on Dahmer’ Marks The Next Phase Of Our True Crime Obsession

Serial killers are having a moment. Popular culture has always mined the phenomenon of seemingly random acts of violence and the monsters who commit them, to tell grisly tales about the dark corners of the human psyche. But with Netflix’s buzzy new series Mindhunter ascending to the top of everyone’s watch list, and the interest surrounding the upcoming movie My Friend Dahmer, it feels like the true crime craze is evolving into a new phase. Case in point is Oxygen’s upcoming docu-series Dahmer on Dahmer: A Serial Killer Speaks.

The trailer for this project, which comes in two parts, calls Dahmer “America’s most notorious serial killer,” and while that claim is debatable, he’s certainly in the conversation. Dahmer’s grotesque criminal history—he raped, killed, and dismembered 17 males, some of whom he ate—has been studied, analyzed, and even dramatized (we see you, Jeremy Renner). But Dahmer on Dahmer seeks to explore the killer and his crimes through his own words, mainly through conversations recorded between him and journalist Nancy Glass. We also hear from those most closely tied to Dahmer in diametrical ways. His father and stepmother, Lionel and Shari Dahmer, both appear in the doc, as do Billy Capshaw and Preston Davis, both victims of Dahmer who lived to tell the tale (“I consider myself a survivor,” one of them says to prove that point.)

Dahmer on Dahmer premieres on Oxygen on Saturday, November 11.