‘Monster’ production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson on the ‘daunting’ task of recreating Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment [Exclusive Video Interview]
While there wasn’t a whole lot that Matthew Flood Ferguson remembered about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer before he boarded Netflix’s “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” as the production designer, he did have a vivid memory of his reaction to first learning about the murderer’s youngest murder victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone.
“The one thing I remember is… [that] actually, [Sinthasomphone] escaped, and then the police brought him back to Jeffrey Dahmer; Dahmer lied, said that they were lovers, and they left him there,” Ferguson recollects during a recent webchat with Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “And I remember hearing that and just being so horrified by it.”
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“Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is the first iteration of the “Monster” anthology series from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan and is about the titular serial killer and sex offender (played by Emmy winner Evan Peters). While the show dramatizes the life and heinous crimes of the infamous mass murderer — who killed 17 boys and young men between 1978 and 1991 — it also delves into the stories of some of his victims, including Sinthasomphone, as well as into the police incompetence and apathy that allowed the Wisconsin native to go on a multiyear killing spree.
Since Dahmer killed the majority of his victims between 1990 and 1991 in his apartment inside the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this 49-unit building became the 10-part series’ most important location — one that Ferguson, set decorator Melissa Licht and art director Helen Harwell were tasked with recreating. Although Ferguson describes this process as having been a “daunting” one, as it entailed looking through myriad crime scene photos and videos, it is with help of those, he highlights, that they were able to recreate Dahmer’s apartment down to the smallest of details and build the set in a way that would allow the crew to capture its atmosphere.
“The one thing is: it was a small apartment, and it was very claustrophobic; it was important that, actually, the entire show felt sort of claustrophobic and dark,” the Emmy-nominated production designer notes. “So, Helen and I worked pretty hard in creating walls that were on hinges, so that [the] crew could come and go. Jason McCormick, our DP, had some very specific shots he wanted to get — so, for instance, one in the bedroom. And we had a wall that was a shared wall with the bathroom, so we put that wall on a hinge so that the grips could open it up and the camera could [be positioned in a way] that we could actually shoot Jeff[rey] and Tony Hughes [one of his victims] the way Jason wanted to shoot it.”
One aspect in which Ferguson and his team decided to depart from the original look of Dahmer’s apartment was the wall color. “The walls in his apartment were actually a dingy off-white. And when I met with Ryan Murphy — [at] the beginning, one of the first things we talked about was the palette. On every show with Ryan, he always talks about the color palette, and he wanted a very dingy yellow,” Ferguson reveals. “So, going back to his apartment, we did change the wall color and we gave it more of a dingy, dirty yellow. And then Barry Jones, my lead scenic painter, and I — we went through and we aged the walls, and kind of put a patina, a sort of tobacco stain over everything to help visually sell the smell of his apartment.”
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When it came to designing the apartment of the killer’s next-door neighbor on the show, Glenda Cleveland (Niecy Nash-Betts), Ferguson wanted it to not just be “period-correct” but also sharply contrast Dahmer’s living space. “We wanted it to feel homey and lived in and inviting,” he explains. “That was important because it was such a stark contrast to the horrors that were going [on] right next door. And there was the connective tissue of the vent, where [Cleveland] can smell and hear what was going on. So, that was always kind of looming over her head.”
While the Cleveland character on the Netflix series serves as a composite character combining the experiences of two different people — the real-life Cleveland, who in fact resided in an adjacent building, and Pamela Bass, one of Dahmer’s actual neighbors — Ferguson divulges that he still worked off of pictures of the real Cleveland in her living space.
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