"Monster: The Ed Gein Story" is Disturbing for All the Wrong Reasons

Producer, Ryan Murphy has been making successful television shows for the past twenty five years. From Nip/Tuck, to Glee, to American Horror Story, his ability to turn pilots into chart-topping series is something truly impressive, regardless of how you personally feel about his work. For the past three years, Murphy's biggest project has been the Netflix anthology series: Monster, which dramatizes the life of a different infamous murderer every season. In 2020 it started off strong with Jeffrey Dahmer, then season two explored the case of the Menendez Brothers. This time around, audiences get a glimpse inside the life and mind of notorious serial killer and body snatcher, Ed Gein, otherwise known as the Butcher of Plainfield.

Ed Gein was a man from rural Wisconsin known for committing a series of grisly crimes between 1947 and 1957. This included 2 confirmed murders, 7 suspected ones, and a countless number of grave robberies. When police first entered Gein's farmhouse they discovered rooms full of furniture, clothing, and household items made from human remains. Needless to say the country was disgusted and shocked.

In terms of sheer body count, Ed Gein is far from the most prolific serial killer. What makes him so vividly remembered is his impact on popular culture. Gein is the main inspiration for some of cinema's most terrifying antagonists, the most famous of which being Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill to name a few. With all that being said, let's get into Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

Season 3 of Monster asks audiences to not only have a cursory knowledge of Gein himself, but of cinema history. And as a lifelong true crime junkie who happens to work in the film industry, this series felt tailor-made for me. But I never could've expected just how much I would have to say about it, after devouring the whole season in one sitting.

One of the big risks The Ed Gein Story takes is that it's not entirely focused on Gein. Scenes alternate between Ed's life and the productions of Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. While some critics have called this disorganized, I found myself admittedly kind of amazed by how they were able to structure this season. It feels like a mix of American Horror Story, and Ryan Murphy's limited series: Hollywood.

I can see Charlie Hunnam and Laurie Metcalf being in the running for some serious awards for their performances as Ed and his mother, Augusta respectively. Even after a celebrated run on Sons of Anarchy, Charlie Hunnam gives possibly the best performance of his career as Ed Gein. This show put Hunnam in a uniquely difficult position, not only did he play the lead, he played a lead based on a real, incredibly enigmatic figure in American history. In my opinion, his performance is nothing short of astounding, he truly does his best with the script he was given. But despite Hunnam playing a literal serial killer, nobody terrified me nearly as much as Laurie Metcalf's performance as his mother, Augusta. As you'll soon read, The Ed Gein Story has a laundry list of problems, but Hunnam and Metcalf still deserve their flowers.

If you regularly keep up with the world of film and TV, there's no doubt you've seen the reviews for Monster season 3. Despite only being out for a single weekend, the show's critic score has already plummeted to 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ryan Murphy is no stranger to bad reviews, but even for him this has been particularly scathing.

There is always going to be a moral component to making a series like Monster. From its inception, the show has been plagued with critiques about whether or not Ryan Murphy has the right to dramatize events that ruined real people's lives. A good portion of the show's criticism from both reviewers and audience members points to this exactly, but my druthers stem from the content of the show itself.

If this show was a fully fictional story, it would be great. But the problem is that The Ed Gein Story is written and presented as if it is a 100% true story, which it is not. A sizable part of the season's arc is dedicated to Gein's supposed romantic relationship with young woman, Adeline Watkins. All of which is either heavily exaggerated or entirely fabricated. Not to mention, the casting of a young, blonde, beautiful actress to play Watkins feels strangely manipulative when you find out that the real figure resembled Rosemary West more than anything. It's very reminiscent of Jonas Åkerlund's Mayhem biopic, Lords of Chaos that gave main character, Euronymous an entirely fictional love interest in order to humanize him. This is clearly intentional, manipulative, and Ryan Murphy deserves to be called out on it.

Now, this next critique is going to sound unorthodox, unprofessional, and even a little silly, but this is a genuine concern that greatly affects the watching experience of The Ed Gein Story: they made Ed Gein too hot. This is not me bashing Charlie Hunnam for being conventionally attractive, this is me saying that a lot more could've been done in both the wardrobe and writing departments. Throughout the show's eight episodes, Ed Gein is portrayed almost entirely as a sympathetic character; a soft-spoken, kind, attentive man who's only crime was being abused by his mother and being clearly mentally impaired. In laymen's terms, a "himbo." In the few days since the show was released, thousands of TikTok users have already made fan edits of Hunnam's Gein, with comment sections showing how positively audiences are viewing Netflix's version of a real serial killer. But Ed Gein was far more sinister than the simple village idiot Ryan Murphy portrays him as. The village idiot doesn't spend years murdering and dismembering the innocent. There is definitely a case to be made about Gein being a product of his environment, whose actions were just consequences of inaccessible mental health resources, but there's much more nuance here. While I appreciate that the show examines Ed from multiple angles, not enough emphasis is placed on the moral depravity of his crimes.

The writers makes it seem like Gein only did these ghastly things because he was too dumb to know right from wrong, but they don't shy away from showing these deeds in graphic detail...

Over the years, I have seen pretty much every film or television that has been dubbed "the most disturbing of all time," and let me tell you, The Ed Gein Story comes close. The show doesn't just have run of the mill murder scenes, there are some truly haunting instances of mutilation and necrophilia that have not left my mind since I saw them and I don't think they will any time soon. This makes The Ed Gein Story extremely hard to watch at times, which incidentally ends up being the show's greatest strength. We live in a world where extreme violence, both real and fictional are seen as everyday occurrences, barely worth a head turn. Crimes like Gein's should make you uncomfortable, sick even, and it's commendable that Ryan Murphy and company didn't shy away from the brutality of his crimes. I just wish more emphasis was placed on this and not his irrelevant love life.

When pitching an idea to an entertainment studio, three questions reign supreme: Why does this story need to be told? Why by me? And why now? I don't think there has ever been a worse time in American history to tell the Ed Gein story than now. Ed Gein is the main inspiration for Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates because of his compulsion to dress in women's clothes, sometimes going as far as to wear the dismembered skins of his female victims. It's no question that America is currently under an administration that wants to see transgender people wiped from the planet. Now, Gein was not considered a transgender woman, more of a "transvestite" or cross-dresser, but this administration does not know nor care about the difference. In this regard, The Ed Gein story has the capacity to do some real harm in this moment in time. Let's hope that for the sake of millions, people care about nuance, and realize that Gein was an isolated case that does not represent actual transgender people.

I'll admit, when I first tuned into Monster Season 3, I was enthralled by its non linear story and impeccable visual style. But as the show progressed, more flaws began to rear their ugly heads. When a show like this comes around, conversations always stem about the morality of dramatizing real life atrocities. But instead of "should we be telling these stories" I think a more constructive conversation would be: "how do we tell these stories as accurately as possible?" Let's hope that for Monster Season 4, Ryan Murphy and his team have that conversation.