Spoilers Ahead
This past weekend, I binged all of the Monster: The Ed Gein Story episodes on Netflix. It was a tough watch, but I powered through them to see how his nefarious deeds were depicted and whether the series could offer any new perspective on his life.
I have not been able to watch the first season that focused on Jeffrey Dahmer because I was sure it would give me nightmares afterward, which is hard to do based on my love of horror and dark fiction. So, on to my take on the show without spoiling too much.
I found episodes 1 through 6 to be very solid. We got the setup of Gein’s life while his mother was alive. He was an emotionally stunted and abused man who lived under the thumb of his ultra-religious mother who despised both women and men. In her mind, she was protecting him from the outside world by forbidding him from fraternizing with others and dating women. This, unfortunately, did not prepare him for life after her death.
So, it was no surprise that when she passed away, he could not handle being on his own without his mother’s guidance. Shortly following her funeral, he dug up a corpse from a graveyard and dressed it to resemble his mother. There were other women that he dug up and used their skin and other body parts to fashion gruesome furniture pieces like lampshades, chairs, and a skull as a bowl. Yikes!
The series explores a still unconfirmed romantic interest based on a real-life woman who claimed that she and the serial killer were close. In real life, she eventually pulled back her statements and claimed that she barely knew him, most likely to avoid being directly tied to Gein’s crimes.
And the show delves into Gein’s imagined connections to his idols. He may have been influenced to commit some acts after reading a comic book/graphic novel about Ilse Koch, a real Nazi woman from World War II, that was accused of inflicting pain and horror on Jews and of creating equally gruesome furniture pieces similar to Gein. The show also weaved a transgender celebrity, Christine Jorgensen, into the story to reflect some of Gein’s delusions, but there is no evidence to support his fascination with her in real life.
In the end, Gein only admitted to killing two women and digging up the bodies of several more. He’s long been rumored to have murdered his brother, a couple of hunters, and a young girl. None of these accusations led to criminal charges, but nonetheless, the series dramatizes these claims that were never proven.
Perhaps, the most interesting B story in the first half of the series was the time spent on the Alfred Hitchcock/Anthony Perkins collaboration on Psycho, which was purposely influenced by Gein’s case. The show spent quality time on the development of the film as well as insight into Perkins’ own thoughts around his sexuality and the infamous gay therapy he went through to stay in business in Hollywood. It was a part of film history that I was not familiar with and I appreciated the side quest from the show’s heavy theme.
Warning: Creative License
Episodes 7 and 8 are where I couldn’t quite follow where the story was going. The show alludes to other serial killers that were influenced by Gein, however, in my light research, I haven’t found that to be the case.
One particular serial killer on the show, Richard Speck, was featured as being a fan of Gein, but I found it to be a diversion, particularly the amount of minutes of screen time spent on a gratuitous prison sex scene. Whether this was one of Gein’s delusions of grandeur in real life, I’m not sure, but it was not necessarily needed to send home the message that he influenced many different aspects of society, including pop culture.
Then there was a mini crossover with Netflix’s other (now canceled) TV show about serial killers, Mindhunters, that featured another serial killer and the famed FBI agents who interviewed him. I found this thread to be more interesting to pull on if it were true, but it was not the case in reality that they met with Gein.
The last 20 minutes or so of episode 8 was filler. I actually would’ve preferred the final episode to focus on his trial where he was found to be legally insane, and to dive deeper into the psychology of Gein. Instead, we got some fictional delusions of Gein prior to his passing, which made me think it was meant to endear the audience to him. But if the purpose of the anthology is to answer the question if serial killers are born or nurtured, then it may have missed the mark.
My take is that Ed Gein’s life was a case study in the psychological profile of how a killer was made. How someone left to their own devices without the ability to manage their emotions and mental illness (in Gein’s case, schizophrenia) becomes more than just their personal problem, but society’s problem if they become violent. Not that not everyone who is schizophrenic is violent, but it’s important to look into how these sorts of violent criminals can be detected earlier in life.
I wrote this review because I wanted to watch the show and see if the screenwriter came to similar conclusions about Gein’s disposition as I did when I wrote a short story called “The Time Killer” in the horror anthology, Jane Nightshade’s Serial Encounters.
I was assigned by the editor to write about a fictional encounter with Ed Gein. I did not have a lot of background on him at the time, but I quickly understood how he influenced many other pop culture films and shocked the nation with his gruesome killings and pastimes. There was a sadness and loneliness there that I think came across in my own story similar to the show, and I too gave him a romantic interest to explore those themes in his life. I was pleased to see that the screenwriter found that to be an interesting way to reflect how the world saw him versus how he saw himself.
In any case, check out the series on Netflix if you can stomach it and check out my story in the aforementioned horror anthology and let me know what you think in the comments.
Gina N. Anderson 