Did you know that the same real-life serial killer inspired the likes of Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs?
Ryan Murphy’s latest Netflix series, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, is keen to remind you that Gein’s gruesome reputation has loomed large over the American horror canon for decades. Yet in giving into their own worst voyeuristic impulses and failing to make its central character into anything resembling a human being, the latest installment of the Monster anthology series that dropped last week once again lapses into the very sort of titillation it claims to critique.
For all the lurid, big-screen horrors that Gein influenced, his fictional counterpart’s early years are a study in the most ordinary of miseries.
When Ed (played here by Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam) isn’t doing humdrum manual labor on his family’s rural Wisconsin farm, he’s getting berated by his cruelly domineering mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf), who’s so similar to Norman Bates’ “Mother” impersonations that writer Ian Brennan might as well be writing Psycho fanfiction.
Cinematographer Michael Bauman casts Monster’s Wisconsin scenes in sallow grays, the Gein family farmhouse’s shadowy gloom only interrupted by gas lamps illuminating Ed’s grisly hobbies.
In real life, Gein was so isolated and emotionally enmeshed with his mother that her death reportedly triggered his psychosis-driven grave-robbing. After digging up corpses failed to assuage his grief over Augusta, he eventually took to murdering middle-aged women. Gein ultimately pled guilty to killing two victims—51-year-old Mary Hogan and 58-year-old Bernice Worden—and robbing over 40 graves. It’s the accounts of Gein fashioning corpses’ skin into everything from lampshades to masks and leggings that truly stand out as nightmare fuel to this day.
Psychiatrist N.G. Berrill, who was featured in the 2023 docuseries Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, has said that Gein was likely inspired by pulp magazines about horrific Nazi crimes committed against Jewish prisoners during World War II—particularly Ilse Koch (played by Vicky Krieps), a Nazi commander’s wife who allegedly made lampshades and photo albums from their skin.
This version of Ed is given all the depth of a freak show exhibit that might have rolled through his small town. Hunnam portrays the character with a lurching awkwardness and a tinny, Kermit-esque voice—which the actor says was inspired by a recording of the real-life Gein—which nonetheless never manages to sound authentic.
When he’s not a meek-mannered and pitiable manchild, Monster’s Ed is busy performing every single crime that Gein has been accused of over the years. Some speculate that his older brother Henry, who officially died of heart failure, was Gein’s first victim, so Ed murders him with a log!
Gein denied cannibalism and necrophilia allegations, but this Ed gets romantically entangled with Worden (played by Lesley Manville) and then has sex with her corpse! (That this series is technically a Phantom Thread reunion between Krieps and Manville is arguably one of its worse offenses). There are even scenes recreating pulp images of a scantily clad Ilse torturing concentration camp prisoners atop a horse, which come across as titillating and not much else.
At a certain point, Monster’s grotesqueness becomes almost laughably predictable—imagine the most questionably salacious thing that could happen next in any given scene and it will inevitably come true, the camera leering in close-up to capture every perverse detail.
Gein’s propensity to wear women’s skin and collect their damaged genitalia has prompted decades of speculation around his gender identity. Late in the series, a psychiatrist declares that Ed, like Silence of the Lamb’s skin suit-wearing killer Buffalo Bill, is not transgender himself. Nevertheless, during a moment when trans people are being demonized and attacked on a federal level, Monster’s near-fetishistic depictions of Ed dressing as his victims and preening in lingerie feel not just distasteful, but borderline dangerous.
In theory, a series about the ways in which the peddling of humanity’s worst actions across mass media has warped our cultural understandings of everything from morality to mental health and gender identity is an admirably ambitious undertaking.
Some of Monster’s most memorable (if maddening) moments come when the show cuts to fictionalized retellings of how filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock (played by Tom Hollander and a boatload of prosthetics) and Chain Saw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) drew upon elements of Gein’s story to bring their own transgressive visions of American societal decay to the screen. In one particularly troubling retelling of Hollywood history, Hitchcock remarks to Psycho star Anthony Perkins, a closeted gay man, that he chose him for the role because he also has “something that’s making you sick.”
we as a society need to have a serious conversation about ryan murphy and that monster show. s1 and s3 has done nothing but cause detrimental damage to the victims and their families. he has people feeling for ed gein. a freaking serial killer. pic.twitter.com/0ZBMJEHcsx
— zee (@ekyism) October 4, 2025
Monster: The Ed Gein Story was just an excuse for Ryan Murphy to recreate scenes from his favorite horror movies… pic.twitter.com/8c7JYrXFY3
— DROP A TEAR 💧 (@yooinkss) October 6, 2025
It’s difficult to separate Monster’s supposed interest in interrogating the legacy of true crime media when it’s responsible for proliferating some of the most exploitative, tabloid-y entries into the genre.
The first season of Monster, The Jeffrey Dahmer Story hypocritically lambasted the Milwaukee police and true crime fans alike for their indifference towards the serial killer’s non-white victims, only to treat said victims as little more than fodder for scenes of Dahmer’s graphic crimes (family members of the victims later accused Netflix of sensationalizing their trauma).
Likewise, Ed Gein serves as little more than a template for Murphy and co to throw all of their stray fascinations with exploitation horror and our cultural reactions to perverse mass media at the wall. They don’t have much at all to say about what all of these parallel threads mean, but they sure do draw Netflix viewers.
By the end of Monster, Ed—much like his real-life counterpart—hasn’t reflected much on his misdeeds, especially after helping the FBI profile other serial killers in a dispiriting homage to David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter. As he dies, he imagines himself being greeted by the likes of Ted Bundy as costumed nurses partake in a flash mob around him. Even after he’s been buried, Brennan finds time for one last indulgent montage of all the horror icons Gein has inspired dancing exuberantly around his grave.
At the very least, perhaps everyone who manages to sit through all eight hours of The Ed Gein Story will walk away with a marginally better understanding of American horror history. When it comes to excavating Gein, though, the less said about its calamitous near-deification of the “Butcher of Plainville” the better.
The post Netflix’s ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Is Serial Killer Horror at Its Worst appeared first on The Daily Beast.
