The Jeffrey Dahmer Files

A chilling documentary account of events leading up to and following the arrest of America’s most notorious serial killer.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


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  • Director-Producer Chris James Thompson
  • Screenwriter Chris James Thompson, Andrew Swant, Joe Riepenhoff
  • With Andrew Swant
  • USA 2012
  • 75 mins
  • UK distribution IFC Films

In the summer of 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee Dirafter human body parts were found in his apartment. Following a forensic investigation, which uncovered evidence of rape, necrophilia and cannibalism, he was charged with the murder and dismemberment of 17 men, and sentenced to 957 years in prison. He was dead by 1994, murdered by a fellow inmate. The morbid fascination surrounding one of America’s most notorious serial killers has been exploited in films frequently in the past, but Chris James Thompson’s chilling documentary account of events leading up to and following Dahmer’s arrest shuns sensationalism in a serious attempt to comprehend what the man did and why he did it. Interviews with Milwaukee Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen, Police Detective Patrick Kennedy, and neighbour Pamela Bass are interwoven with archive footage and recreated incidents from Dahmer’s everyday life to create a haunting film that’s both brilliantly realised and deeply affecting.
Michael Hayden

Director statement

I won the Milwaukee International Film Festival in 2007 with my first short documentary Kyoko Naturally, and they gave me some film-stock and a camera for my next film. At the time I was having trouble deciding what to shoot next, and was spending a lot of time painting with fellow Milwaukee director Frankie Latina (Modus Operandi). Frankie – who shoots really great exploitation films – suggested I shoot a Jeffrey Dahmer slasher film, which to me sounded like an awful idea. Because he was a mentor of mine at the time, I think he thought if he got me started shooting this film he could commandeer it and realise the Dahmer exploitation film he had always envisioned shooting in Milwaukee. In his mission he started bringing over books, magazines, movies, newspapers – anything related to Dahmer in hopes of persuading me. For the most part the stories offered the same familiar, sensational narratives on Dahmer’s motives and murders, but sometimes there were also these interesting fragments from other people that were involved in various ways – neighbours, police officers – usually about how normal Dahmer seemed. It felt like there was this odd inside viewpoint on the whole situation that was really intriguing, yet had never really been fully explored. The documentarian in me wanted to know what it was like to be involved with this up-close in 1991, as the whole world looked on, how it affected people involved with this seemingly normal person who turned out to be a serial killer. So I began shooting a very simple art film on the subject, which eventually turned into the opposite of what Frankie had originally hoped – a strangely complex documentary. To this day I still wonder if Frankie ever honestly believed he was going to succeed in convincing me to shoot a crazy exploitation film... [...] When I started this project I was obsessed with a film called Last Days, and intended to shoot a similar fictional narrative loosely based around Dahmer’s last few days before his arrest – with Andrew Swant playing Jeffrey Dahmer. While shooting the first scenes we ended up meeting a lot of people around Milwaukee that were actually involved with Dahmer in one way or another, and it seemed like the project needed to expand somehow to encompass this world we were exploring. At the time I was working with my friend and editor Barry Poltermann, who suggested I start shooting documentary-style interviews with some of the subjects involved with the case. I remember the idea really scaring me. That same week another friend – Milwaukee producer Andy Gorzalski – gave me a newspaper article about Dr Jeffrey Jentzen, who was the medical examiner on the case, and pushed me to contact him for an interview. From that point on the film continued to grow in ways unexpected into the documentary it is today. The whole project started to feel like we were conducting an experiment in filmmaking, or creating a recipe, with lots of friends and fellow filmmakers contributing new ideas and different directions throughout. As for the genre itself – my favourite films have always been ones that fall somewhere in between ‘narrative fiction’ and ‘documentary’ – films that provoke you to ask deeper questions about the characters than either genre could do on it’s own… In a way The Jeffrey Dahmer Files feels to me like some odd conglomerate of the all the styles I love from filmmakers like Errol Morris, Jim Jarmusch, Chris Smith, Gus Van Sant.
Chris James Thompson

Director biography

Working as an editor and producer at Bluemark Productions, he has credits on such titles as Suffering & Smiling (2006), The Pool (a 2007 Sundance awardee) and Collapse (2009). His own short-form work includes the documentary Kyoko Naturally, which won the IFP Chicago Film Festival in 2007. His feature directorial debut has already had some limited Festival exposure this year under the working title Jeff.

Filmography

2007 Kyoko Naturally [doc s]
2009 The Making of ‘The Pool’ [doc]
2011 Are You Busy? [s]
2012 The Jeffrey Dahmer Files [doc]