Jeremy Renner's 2002 Dahmer film handled victims better than Netflix's Monster

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True crime is a wildly popular genre in both film and television, and projects centered around serial killers are near the top. The figures at the top of that list are the most infamous: the Zodiac (This Is the Zodiac Speaking, Zodiac) and Ted Bundy (Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes; Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile), for example. But there's an inherent problem with these projects that isn't easily overcome, and that's the killers themselves. The killer often becomes romanticized, with their victims an afterthought, "tasks" that need to be checked off while telling the killer's story. And there is arguably no greater example than Ryan Murphy's Monster anthology series, the first of which, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, told the tale of Jeffrey Dahmer, aka "the Milwaukee Cannibal." Yet it's a 2002 movie about the killer that did overcome that problem, and is far more worth one's time than Murphy's account: Dahmer.