My Friend Dahmer
| Jeffrey Dahmer has a tough family life as a child. Gradually, he develops into the serial killer he would become during his teen years.
CAST
We see a young man, none other than Dahmer sitting alone on the school bus. He then notices a grown man on a jog, and is overly fascinated by the man that he gets up from his seat just to watch him. Here we can see again that Dahmer develops an obsession with a male jogger, as he keeps watching the man even after the bus drops him off. Afterwards, Dahmer is seen carrying a plastic bag, and when he stumbles upon a couple of neighborhood teens, he explains that he’s carrying a dead cat he found and is going to try and dissolve it in acid, which he has access to because his father is a chemist. Curious, the two teen boys follow Dahmer to his father’s shed, and watch as he dissolves the cat, while explaining that the process will take a month because the acid is weak.
He enjoys doing this simply because he ‘loves bones’ and is interested in what's inside the body. However, the two teen boys are skeptical and think that Dahmer is simply pouring water into the jar instead of acid, so he tries to show them another road kill, which he dissolved a while ago, and crudely breaks the jar to prove how serious he is. The two teen boys find themselves disgusted by the foul stench, and weirded out by Dahmer, so they call him a freak and leave. We then follow Dahmer as he goes through his daily life: Dahmer’s family life looks nothing out of the ordinary; he has a caring father who constantly bickers with his mother, and a loud younger brother.
During the dinner, it becomes clear that his father wishes for him to become more social. At school, his classmates think he’s weird and some even bully him, except for one similarly awkward boy, who he sits next to at lunch and asks him to go to see a concert together. But aside from that, he sits alone in biology class, and seems fascinated by a preserved animal inside a jar in the lab. When Dahmer gets home, we see that he creepily has stolen the preserved animal to keep to himself. But contrastingly, when he gets inside the house, he sees that his parents are arguing once more and don't care that their sons are listening, so he tenderly guides his little brother away to keep from having to listen. One day after the school band practice, Dahmer finds his only friend getting harassed by the school jocks, but simply stands idle and opts to walk away, even though the friend tries to talk to him and get him to come help.
That very day, his dad comes home early from work, and becomes infuriated when he realizes that Dahmer has made no progress in making friends, and instead prefers to toy with his preserved animals in the shed as he always does. And so, the dad storms into his shed, and begins throwing his preserved animals into the trash can, while scolding him to try and be more normal and stop all this. From now on, the father will shut the shed and take it down. After the intervention, Dahmer tries to stay on school grounds on the next day, and is suddenly approached by a drug dealer classmate, Figg, but it doesn’t take long before he loses interest, and decides to walk home instead. At some point, he waits by the side of the road, while staring at his bone collection in deep thought, until the jogger from the beginning of the movie passes by, and catches his interest yet again.
When he’s back home later that day, his father apologizes for being harsh, and explains that he doesn't want Dahmer to end up like him, who spends too much time in labs and doesn't have many friends. The father tries to make it up by presenting him with a pair of dumb bells, hoping that Dahmer might get into working out, and hopefully snatch a pretty girl someday. To satisfy his father, he begins working out, but still secretly spends his days out in the woods, trapping critters in hopes of collecting their bones. One day in class, a history teacher tries asking him a question, but Jeff who is too lazy to answer decides to speak to the teacher with a silly voice, which surprisingly gets the entire class to laugh.
He then sees this as an opportunity to make friends, so when he’s walking down the hallway later, he starts making weird noises and doing random gestures. He even pretends to have a seizure to get everyone to laugh, and it actually works, until the bell rings and everyone heads to class, leaving him alone. This eventually becomes a thing he’s known for, and one day a group of teenage boys who think he’s hilarious decide to ask him to sit at their table for lunch. They are Derf, Mike, and Neil. It is revealed that Jeffrey imitated the speech and gestures of his mother's interior decorator, who has some kind of disorder. Jeffrey inspires Derf to draw him in various situations, and it is here that Derf and his friends form the "Dahmer Fan Club '' The four of them surprisingly get along so well that they’d like to come up with epic pranks to liven up their senior year.
They start with getting Dahmer to make random noises in the library, and have the librarian blame someone else for it. Up next, they run down the hallway while pretending to have seizures together. However, in between Dahmer’s seemingly improving social life, one day he discovers that his mother who was a former drug addict is having a relapse. He tries to convince her to stop and go to the doctor, but to no avail. Despite it all, he goes on with his days, and one day a weird instance happens when he’s out fishing with a couple of his friends. After hooking a fish, his friends asks him to let the poor fish go. Dahmer, however, opts to violently gut the fish instead, claiming that he’s curious what its insides look like. His friends of course find this disturbing, but still don’t register this as a red flag.
One of his friends, Neil, is the photographer for the school’s yearbook, and so as their next prank, Dahmer comes up with the idea to put himself in every school club’s yearbook picture, which his friends happily agree to. The following day, they start to carry out their plan, and in the end, the boys manage to perfectly pull off this prank.
Afterwards, Dahmer comes home bringing his friend Derf, to excitedly announce to his dad that he’s joined a lot of clubs this year, but his dad is too occupied arguing with his mom to notice. The fight eventually makes Derf feel awkward, so he excuses himself and goes home. In secret, Dahmer makes it a habit to hide behind the trees just to wait for the jogger to pass, seemingly having a crush on the grown man. Until one day, it just so happens that the three of them are hanging out, right when the jogger arrives and is greeted by Mike. As it turns out, he is Mike’s family doctor whose name is Dr. Matthews. We can see that Young Dahmer appears flustered throughout this interaction, but his two friends don’t seem to notice. When Dahmer comes home, he finds his parents fighting again, this time over his mother impulse-buying a car. The frustrated dad takes a bottle of liquor to calm himself down, which Dahmer sneakily steals, and it is at this point that he begins drinking. On the next day, Dahmer and his friends are casually talking in school, when their drug dealer classmate Figg suddenly walks up to them, to show off the fact that his former Nazi father just gave him a pocket knife.
He then cuts himself with it and begins sucking his own blood, which weird out the three boys, but not Dahmer. As time goes on, Dahmer eventually becomes sort of an alcoholic, and comes to school reeking of alcohol, to the concern of Derf. He also still secretly goes around collecting road kills, and dissects them after. One day, he goes on an overnight school trip to Washington DC, during which he gets roomed with Charlie, the only black person in his class. Here Dahmer discreetly checks him out, and suddenly begins to ask him a very disturbing question, which is whether a black person’s internal organs are the same color as a white person’s. Charlie, who is weirded out but is probably used to racist questions, decides to ignore him. When the boys are walking down the streets of DC the next day, they joke about getting an interview with the vice president for their school newspaper, which Dahmer takes seriously.
Taking everyone by surprise, he reaches for the nearest payphone, and makes a call to the White House, and somehow, they manage to get an interview with the vice president himself. They enter the White House, and have a brief audience with the man, who gives them superficial questions about what they want to be when they grow up, to which Dahmer simply answers “Biology.”
When they get home, Derf expresses how impressed he is with Dahmer before they part ways, but Dahmer’s euphoria from the trip doesn’t last long, because as soon as he gets into the car, his dad breaks the news that he and Dahmer’s mother are on the verge of divorce, and that his dad has decided to live in a motel for the time being. Hearing this crushes Dahmer, and we can see him lie awake in his bed later that night. To add to his dilemma is his growing crush towards Dr. Matthews. Therefore, Dahmer fakes a cold so that he can get an appointment with him, and he can examine Dahmer naked. Dr. Matthews becomes uncomfortable during the hernia exam, when he notices that Jeffrey has an erection. This of course makes the situation awkward, and sends young Dahmer on a spiral. He is now becoming hyper-aware of his sexuality, and finds himself completely silent when his friends are talking about girls. Even his friends eventually pick up on how odd and distant he’s been, and Dahmer begins drinking at school as well.
It is finally the day where the yearbook photos get printed, every single one of which has Dahmer in it. But unfortunately, a teacher walks in on the three boys laughing at the pictures, and realize what they’re up to, so she starts crossing out Dahmer’s face on every single one of them, which completely ruins their plan. Meanwhile, Dahmer is drowning in both his parents’ impending divorce as well as his sexual awakening. He is also visibly disturbed when the family pays his father a visit at the motel, and his parents end up arguing in the parking lot over custody. So when he gets home right after, he locks himself in his room, and lays in his bed, cuddling Dr. Matthews’ dead body. But luckily, it is only his imagination. On the other side of the town, Dahmer’s friends are out at a party, where a couple of their classmates tease them for not hanging out with Dahmer lately, which is a shame because Dahmer makes them more interesting. Feeling challenged, Derf bets that he could get Dahmer to do a fake seizure attraction at the mall this weekend, an idea which Neil isn´t too happy about, because he feels like they’re treating Dahmer like a zoo attraction. Still, Derf goes on with his plan, and bribes Dahmer with some money to get him to say yes. And so that weekend, a very drunk-looking Dahmer sits in the backseat of Derf’s car as they drive up to the mall
Once they arrive, Dahmer goes on and performs his seizure act, while his school friends watch and laugh; one of them is even there to record the entire thing, as Dahmer proceeds to publicly humiliate himself for their entertainment. This goes on for a while, until Dahmer appears to have grown visibly tired of this, and rejoins his friends with a sullen look, as he’s come to realize that he’s just a spectacle to these teen boys. As if that’s not enough, when he comes home, he gets informed by his mother that his parents have finalized the divorce, and the dad is getting the house. On the next day, the increasingly unstable Dahmer arms himself with a baseball bat, and waits for Dr. Matthews to pass, but he never does. This prompts him to lose his patience, and starts beating the bat against a tree until it breaks. That same day, a couple of neighborhood kids discover a disemboweled animal remains, which becomes the talk of the school the next day, because people find it creepy how someone would do that.
Dahmer’s friends then start talking about prom, and Mike makes fun of Dahmer by saying there’s no way any girl would want to go to prom with him. This offends Dahmer, so he goes right ahead and asks a freshman named Bridget to prom. At first, she says no because she knows Dahmer always does weird things, but eventually warms up to the idea after Dahmer convinces her that going to the dance with a senior is cool. And so they end up awkwardly going together, to the surprise of Dahmer’s friends.
At some point during the night, Neil who was against making fun of Dahmer at the mall decides to walk up to him, and apologize for what happened, which Dahmer accepts. When it is time to dance with his date, we can see that he grows uncomfortable, because he was never attracted to women to begin with. And so, he excuses himself, and retreats to his car, preferring to be alone. On the next day when he comes home from school, he finds his mother stuffing her things inside the car and taking his brother with her to live with her relatives. This breaks Dahmer’s heart, because this means his mother and brother won’t be attending his graduation. He doesn't react at all when his mother talks to him, and after they leave, he breaks down, and cries inside the house.
On his graduation day, Dahmer doesn’t seem excited at all, and here the father congratulates him and hands him the keys to the family car, without knowing Dahmer’s mother has left him completely alone. A few days after, Derf finds Dahmer walking alone by the side of the road, and decides to give him a ride home. When they arrive, he notices how there’s blood on Dahmer’s fingers, but Dahmer tells him that it’s just paint. They then have an awkward conversation about their friendship, during which Derf basically refuses to apologize for treating Dahmer like a zoo attraction. Aggrieved, Dahmer sneakily invites Derf to come inside for a beer. Once they’re inside the empty house, Derf gets creeped out by how close Dahmer is standing, so he begins walking away, saying his mother is waiting for him. We watch in horror as Dahmer grabs a baseball bat, and is about to strike him with it. But fortunately for Derf, Dahmer lets him leave, and as Derf gets in the car, he notices the bat.
Once Dahmer is alone, he finds himself freaking out over the thoughts that came over him earlier. The next morning, Dahmer gets inside a Volkswagen Beetle given by his dad, and drives around. He stops by to pick up a good-looking hitchhiker named Steven Hicks from a concert, who will soon end up as his first murder victim.
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