Monster: The Ed Gein Story is guilty of the very sensationalism it critiques

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan paint a slickly meta portrait of the serial killer and pop-culture fascination.

By Manuel Betancourt | October 7, 2025 | 9:00am

Photo: Netflix

TV Reviews Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is guilty of the very sensationalism it critiques

Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story has no shortage of ambition. After all, as its poster stresses, its titular figure is responsible for three of the most influential films of all time: “Before Psycho,” its tagline reads, “before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, before The Silence Of The Lambs…there was Ed.” It makes sense that the anthology series that’s already offered viewers the tales of Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle and Eric Menendez would turn its sights to this most infamous of serial killers. He’s one who, as those films loosely inspired by him attest, has long captivated the curiosity of directors and audiences alike. And it’s a testament to the wild ambitions of this Netflix series that Monster: The Ed Gein Story doesn’t want to merely tell Gein’s story but to mount an argument about how his life has refracted and reflected American culture’s ever-changing ideas about horror—both in real life and onscreen.

Such a goal is an admirable one. There is plenty to be dissected about why Gein’s crimes (particularly his penchant for exhuming bodies and creating keepsakes from skin and bone) so fascinate and what, in turn, we could learn about the very arc of consuming horror. How do images of desecrated bodies (like the concentration-camp photos that first titillated Gein in his youth) or scenes of violent mutilation (such as those featured in Texas Chain Saw) contribute to a visual economy that simultaneously nurtures and glamorizes serial killers like himself? What’s the ethical imperative when aestheticizing this kind of violence, especially when it dovetails with issues of mental health and questions around gender and identification? How, in essence, does a show like Monster give itself license to offer a portrait of Gein that doesn’t merely mine the sensationalist thirst for details of his life but creates room for complicating our complicity in wishing to have a front row seat to his gut-wrenching exploits?

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A better version of Monster: The Ed Gein Story would not just ask these questions. It would actually tackle them with care and curiosity. Instead, those ambitious ideas remain thin premises onto which creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (who wrote every episode and directed two of them) tacks on Gein’s narrative haphazardly, making this season of Monster feel more intentionally fractured than its previous iterations. Sure, we may begin with a young Ed (Charlie Hunnam) stumbling through flailing attempts to appease his devout, domineering mother (played by Laurie Metcalf) and end with a graying Ed in a mental institution calmly reflecting back on a life bruised by crime and trauma. In between, though, Brennan remixes Gein’s life, shuttling back and forth as needed, threading episodes from his past with scenes from those horror films he inspired, fictionalized moments from a Holocaust-themed comic book, and even imagined conversations with the likes of Christine Jorgensen.

The through-line of the season is a simple one: Ed Gein is a foundational serial-killer figure. It wasn’t just that he inspired books and films. It was that he also inspired other murders. In presenting an origin story of sorts (while critiquing that very impulse), Monster insists that Ed was unique as well as a symptom for a world torn asunder, explaining why those images from the Holocaust are key to his development. If humanity could be responsible for such horrors—and would allow them to be re-presented (in photos, say), then what kind of monsters might it let loose in its wake?

Well, someone like Gein, who cannot distinguish reality from the cruel fantasies he unwittingly creates for himself. When his perpetually aggrieved mother dies, he digs up a body, dresses it just like her, and believes (in earnest) that she remains alive to emotionally flay him for not following her every wish. She doesn’t approve of his penchant for wearing lingerie and can’t fathom him ever laying with a woman. She admits at one point that she wishes she would’ve castrated him; that’s how much she didn’t want him to fornicate. Such thorny messages about gender and desire, about who young Ed wants and wants to be (and how confused he remains about how blurred that line remains throughout his life) is what eventually leads him to kill several women near and dear to him, become a leather tanner (with human skin), and lose contact with the very reality around him.

At times, Monster: The Ed Gein Story is quite engrossing even if it remains all too slick. (This is a Netflix/Murphy production, after all). That’s nowhere clearer than in the casting of Hunnam. The actor plays Gein like a holy fool of sorts. His voice is high-pitched and tentative throughout, as if he’s a child who doesn’t yet know how to fill out the rooms (let alone the body) he comes to possess. And while the real Gein was not served well by the lithe Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, this Monster Gein looks…well, like Hunnam, a picture-perfect star whose every ab and muscle has been chiseled to exhaustion. When Ed puts on a bra and a pair of panties and parades himself in front of the mirror, Hunnam looks like a modern-day pinup boy, a far cry from the confused little kid Hunnam’s eyes would have us believe he is.

Such dissonance is everywhere in a show that, because of its painstakingly put together production design and flashy cinematography, remains all too consumed with a sleek aesthetic that lures us in while keeping us at a distance from the gruesome crimes being committed onscreen. (To give you an idea, the series even stages an “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”-scored fantasy sequence in which Gein is welcomed into a kind of serial-killer version of heaven.)

“You can’t make someone look at something like this,” Anthony Perkins says (to himself, to Hitchcock, to an imagined version of Gein, but perhaps just directly at the audience, whom he faces in a tight close-up). He’s talking about the horrors that happened in Gein’s house that would soon be immortalized in Psycho. But he’s also voicing the very tension Monster desperately exploits. No image and no scene is off-limits in this: not the Holocaust horrors (here filtered through sensationalist comic books about the “Bitch Of Buchenwald”) and not Gein’s own (shots of desiccated vulvas, for instance may be offered in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it frame, but they’re there nonetheless). Brennan teases us with coy questions about complicity before, as always is the case in the show, playfully winking at us as if an acknowledgment of such problematic ideas is the same as measured responses to it. “You’re the one who can’t look away,” Gein smirks back at the camera, punctuating the tone and tenor of Monster, an ambitious gamble of a meta-conversation about screened real-life horrors that’s heavy on gore but very light on emotional or intellectual heft.