Who was Ed Gein? Was he really “the Ghoul of Plainfield,” a serial killer who fashioned furniture from corpses he dug up at the nearby cemetery? Or an empathetic schizophrenic, warped by a fanatical mother who crippled his ability to relate to women? Did Ed murder his brother Henry, or is that legend?
Did Adeline Watkins share an intimate 20-year relationship with him, or barely know the man? Beyond directors Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, and Jonathan Demme, did Gein influence Richard Speck, Ted Bundy, and other serial killers? Did he eventually evolve into a curmudgeonly Hannibal Lecter who helped track down Bundy? Did he kill two people or more? Was he a necrophiliac?
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
The world may never know, and it definitely won’t know who Ed Gein truly was if it only watches Ryan Murphy and Mount Prospect-born Ian Brennan’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Murphy’s third and Brennan’s second Monster entry open like a knockout. If only Fargo and Alien: Earth’s creator, Noah Hawley, had gotten his hands on this. Episode 1 (“Mother!”) is an icy, precisely staged origin story: Charlie Hunnam’s murmuring Ed tends cows, chickens, and secrets on the family farm while Laurie Metcalf, in a Carrie’s Piper Laurie-esque inspired performance of mother Augusta, scorches every room with Old Testament fury.
Director Max Winkler leans hard into wintry noir; the sound of a match flaring in a dark shed is scarier than most jump scares. If the season kept that focus – mother, son, and the lonely spiral between them – we might be talking about one of the year’s best limited series.
Instead, Monster quickly wanders away from its focus. What begins as a character study balloons into an everything-bagel of true-crime mythmaking: a heavily fictionalized romance with town outcast Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) and Bernice Worden (the excellent Lesley Manville), florid World War II digressions about Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), interludes with Hitchcock, and a finale that drifts into Mindhunter cosplay with Richard Speck, Ted Bundy and FBI profilers. The tonal center collapses. The chaotic switching of the timelines almost makes the series unwatchable. The result often plays like eight episodes built around a three-episode story.
My guess is the horrors created by Grein were not enough for Brennan and company. Instead, they padded and fabricated.
Hunnam is terrific – slight, fidgeting, almost apologetic, then suddenly ice-cold. Metcalf is ferocious, weaponizing scripture without a hint of camp. Son threads a tricky line between accomplice, muse, and (perhaps) fantasy. Manville is wonderfully quirky and seductive.
But here’s the central argument Monster won’t stop having with itself: can we or should we make monsters sympathetic? Brennan and Winkler clearly believe empathy is the point. The series diagnoses Ed, dramatizes his delusions, and repeatedly suggests that what he looked at – newsreels, pulp, horror – helped make him what he became. It asks us to consider the responsibility of the images we consume.
That’s a bracing idea. It’s also where the show lost me. Empathy is not absolution, and sometimes evil and depravity do exist without footnotes. When the scripts lean into Gein as cultural lodestar (the shows and films he “inspired,” the killers who “admired” him), the moral center blurs. The camera lingers so long on the spectacle that the critique curdles into complicity.
By the back half, the tone slides from austere tragedy to baroque collage. The season’s best hour (the police discovery of Bernice Worden and the townspeople’s horror) pulls us outside Ed’s head; too often, though, we’re marched back in for sequences that feel more theoretical than truthful. The last episode, a delirium of serial-killer cameos and pop-culture echoes, is clever on paper and weightless in practice.
As a piece of filmmaking, Monster: The Ed Gein Story is frequently first-rate, especially for Chicago-area viewers who’ll recognize the bones of Pullman, Momence, Saunemin, and Woodstock under the snow. As a story, it’s a gorgeous sprawl that mistakes maximalism for meaning. The season begins with a piercing human drama and ends with a thesis about how myths are made. In the space between, the man and his victims get lost.
The craft is undeniable: snow-caked fields, jaundiced lamplight, and production design that evokes Wisconsin farmhouse horror without turning Gein’s trophies into carnival rides. The art department’s farmhouse of horrors is specific without becoming a funhouse.
If Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was a claustrophobic character study – stuck in a Milwaukee apartment with a killer the system kept missing – and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story widened the canvas into a slick courtroom-and-media saga about privilege, abuse, and celebrity justice, Monster: The Ed Gein Story tries to do both at once. It opens like a focused Midwestern noir, then explodes into a baroque collage about how pop culture manufactures myths.
Season 1 had a clear spine (the apartment, the neighbors, the police files). Season 2 had one, too (the courtroom, the family, the TV cameras). Season 3 keeps changing spines – mother-son psychodrama, a not-quite romance, WWII fantasies, and a finale that detours into FBI-profiling cosplay – until the show’s own thesis (“Are monsters born or made, and who profits from the story?”) gets buried under the spectacle.
In short, Dahmer asked How did we let this happen? And Menendez asked, “What happens inside a gilded cage?” Ed Gein asks, “Who builds the legend – the killer, his mother, or us?” Then it answers with… everything, all at once.
REEL See or REEL Skip: A gorgeously mounted, queasy, often compelling misfire. Episode 1 is a near-classic; the rest is a stylish sprawl that mistakes maximalism for meaning. It’s a Reel Skip, unless you have nothing better to watch.
Colin Costello is the West Coast Editor of Reel 360 News. Contact him at colin@reel360.com or follow him on Twitter at @colinthewriter1
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