Monster Doesn’t Know When to Quit

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Be warned: the following contains spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, all eight episodes of which became available on Netflix on October 3rd.

Similar to other seasons of Monster, The Ed Gein Story suggests a central idea: we don’t have the complete picture of Ed Gein’s life, and perhaps understanding it fully would lead to sympathy rather than judgment, and a better understanding of America – its roughness and obsession with buying things. Creators Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy aren’t suggesting they’re part of the problem, of course; they see themselves as simply highlighting how other filmmakers, police, and the media have exploited the Gein story for their own purposes. However, their criticism feels somewhat hypocritical given the show includes graphic scenes of Charlie Hunnam’s Gein engaging in sexual acts with a corpse or dancing in the snow wearing clothing made of human skin. Brennan and Murphy could have concluded the season after the fourth episode, which contains the most perceptive commentary on America’s narrow-minded view of political violence. Monster comes very close to presenting a compelling argument about how we use entertainment to deflect from our shared responsibility for failures caused by indifference and self-absorption. Unfortunately, just like Gein himself, Monster doesn’t know when to stop.

Monster begins in the early 1940s, focusing on the life of Ed Gein in rural Wisconsin. He’s stuck on a struggling farm with his emotionally abusive and deeply religious mother, Augusta (played by Laurie Metcalf). Their days fall into a disturbing pattern: she berates him about sex, catches him engaging in private acts while wearing her clothes and self-harming, and then continues to scold him with Bible verses, repeating the cycle. Ed is a repressed and isolated man, a timid boy trapped in a large frame, and Hunnam portrays him with a high-pitched voice and wide-eyed expression, reminiscent of Lennie from Of Mice and Men and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. When his girlfriend, Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son), shows him photos taken in Nazi concentration camps and a sexually suggestive comic featuring Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), the German war criminal known as “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” Gein becomes fixated. After his mother’s death in 1945, he begins exhuming graves, inspired by Koch’s practice of crafting items from human skin for her home. Eventually, remains from over 200 bodies accumulate in his house, including belts made from nipples and bowls from skulls. He then starts killing people in his town and using their bodies in his disturbing creations. (It’s important to emphasize how upsetting this show is to watch. The props department deserves recognition, but the content is truly shocking.)

After quickly explaining the reasons behind Gein’s increasingly disturbing actions, Monster shifts between different time periods: 1959, when Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) first considered making Psycho; 1968, when Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) used his childhood fear of Gein to develop The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and the late 1980s, when Gein served as inspiration for the crossdressing character in The Silence of the Lambs. Monster shows the huge impact Gein had on 20th-century horror, illustrating how widely his story spread, how famous he became for deeds he didn’t fully grasp, and ultimately, how detached he became from both the crimes and his reputation. However, the film also aims to make a larger point – it’s less about Gein as a person and more about why Americans are more accepting of certain types of violence and brutality than others. Why are we willing to pay to see Leatherface use his chainsaw, but switch channels when watching news coverage of the Vietnam War? Why do we turn images of Jewish suffering into shocking souvenirs, dismiss war crimes like My Lai, and celebrate New York City crime-scene photographer Weegee as a kind of celebrity?

Monster doesn’t offer any easy answers, honestly. It mostly just feels…disgusted with America, and points out what it sees as our inherent cowardice. It’s really annoying that the show frames this fascination with violence as something that *started* after World War II, because it completely ignores the fact that the U.S. was founded on genocide and slavery. But, I have to admit, Brennan and Murphy do create some compelling tension by showing how little we care about America’s own destructive actions abroad, while being totally obsessed with the brutality of someone like Gein. And the show definitely makes *you* feel complicit – there’s a moment when Hunnam looks right at the camera and says, “You’re the one who can’t look away.” By the fourth episode, “Green,” Monster really lays all this out, and it does it well. The episode ends with Hooper having this incredible rant about how he was just “fucking bored” with Psycho. When someone tells him he can’t make his movie, he basically asks, “Why not? They’re showing whole villages being destroyed on TV. They’re burning babies… I’m not giving this country what it *wants*; I’m giving it what it *deserves*. They created all this ugliness, violence, cruelty, and lies. We’re humans, but we’ve stopped being human.” It’s a pretty nihilistic and over-the-top speech, but he makes some really good points! Gein is presented as this monster, but Hooper argues he’s a monster *for* an America that was already lost, maybe even never had a moral compass to begin with.

Let’s consider what Monster would have been like if it had concluded earlier. We’ve already witnessed how Gein was treated poorly and like a child by his mother, manipulated and led astray by Adeline, and how the disturbing images from the concentration camps triggered his schizophrenia, ultimately leading him to become a violent killer of women who provoked him. We grasp how the media coverage of Gein sparked imitators and reshaped the true crime genre. We recognize Brennan and Murphy’s disapproval. However, Monster continues beyond that point, repeating the same points and overwhelming the viewer with increasingly disturbing imagery, to the point where any subtlety the show initially possessed is lost.

The ending of the series introduces several complex themes – the harshness of religious morality, the disturbing nature of the American public, and the shortcomings of our legal and healthcare systems – but ultimately leaves these ideas unresolved, much like the remains of Gein’s victims. Unlike in “The Godfather,” where Gein finds redemption, here he remains trapped in a poorly funded asylum, subjected to abuse from other patients. His only correspondence comes from fellow serial killers, particularly those featured in the Netflix show Mindhunter (which Monster, oddly, criticizes with a tiresome, self-aware parody). Gein possesses crucial information about Ted Bundy from serial killer Richard Speck (“Birdman”), who was still actively killing young women, but the FBI dismisses his leads – until a police officer finally listens and uses the information to apprehend Bundy. While presented as a fantasy, one of the biggest weaknesses of Monster is its failure to clearly distinguish between Gein’s thoughts and what it portrays as factual events.

Honestly, the most unnecessary scene in the whole movie is this weird, fantastical sequence. Speck, who bizarrely claims Ed Gein as his idol – even the real-life killers who copied Gein didn’t *know* him, the film points out – starts reading a letter he supposedly wrote to Gein. And it’s… disturbing. He asks Gein if he’d want to, well, masturbate while touching Speck’s breasts, which he’s had enhanced with estrogen. The movie then cuts to Look at all these freaks and opportunists, as if to say, unlike the ‘good boy’ Gein. As Gein dies, he imagines himself walking down a Soul Train-style line of people from the asylum and his life, everyone dancing to Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” It’s his final fantasy. He then sees Augusta, and she warmly greets him at the top of a staircase. Honestly, it felt like a Glee performance mixed with the Leo and Kate reunion at the end of Titanic. It’s… a lot. Augusta tells him he’s made her proud, and even though “only a mother could love you,” she clearly does.

The last scene in Monster shows the pair enjoying lemonade on their porch. Is this a glimpse of a rare, peaceful family moment we hadn’t seen before? Perhaps it imagines what the Geins’ lives could have been like if Ed had gotten help sooner? Or is it a vision of Ed and Augusta in the afterlife? It’s hard to say! Either way, it’s a surprisingly refined way to conclude a show that previously showed us, not one, not two, but three graphic shots of preserved human remains. Monster strongly suggests that Gein changed in his later years, and Hunnam’s acting reflects this, portraying a man who is more composed and calm, with a lower voice and steady posture after receiving treatment for his schizophrenia. (Although the show doesn’t quite succeed in letting us fully understand Gein’s thoughts, Hunnam does his best to make him relatable.) But Monster is excessive in showing both Gein’s disturbing behavior and his supposed rehabilitation, embracing the over-the-top portrayals and stylistic choices it previously criticized films like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and Mindhunter for using. In the latter half of the season, neither the constant depiction of gruesome acts nor the overly sentimental moments add anything new that Monster hadn’t already established four episodes earlier. We already know how the story of Ed Gein ends-with his story being exploited for profit and his lasting notoriety. What Monster doesn’t seem to realize is that it contributes to this very problem.

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2025-10-04 18:57