My Friend Dahmer (2017)

In 1974, Jeffrey Dahmer is a high school freshman living in Bath, Ohio, with his parents, Lionel and Joyce, and his younger brother, Dave. Jeffrey develops an obsession with a male jogger whom he sees every day from his school bus. For a hobby, Jeffrey collects dead animals that he dissolves to the bones using chemicals provided by his father, who is a chemist. This hobby is initiated by his obsessive interest in how animals are “fitted together”.

In 1978, Lionel trashes Jeffrey’s collection of bones and orders him to make friends at school. During school, Jeffrey imitates the speech and gestures of his mother’s interior decorator (who has cerebral palsy), clears his backpack, and makes loud noises, catching the attention of aspiring artist John “Derf” Backderf and his friends. Jeffrey inspires Derf to draw him in various situations; drawings that would later be incorporated into Derf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer. Derf and his friends form the “Dahmer Fan Club,” using Jeffrey for a variety of pranks such as sneaking him in every club yearbook photo, and conning their way to a meeting with then Vice President Walter Mondale during a school field trip to Washington, D.C.