Spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story ahead.
You can now stream all eight episodes of Monster: The Ed Gein Story on Netflix, and it’s not surprising that it’s got incredibly mixed reviews. After the equally divided success of Monster‘s previous seasons (focusing on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers), I’m hardly batting an eyelid at season 3’s 29% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes or the one-star review from The Guardian.
Do I think the new Netflix show is perfect? Far from it. Does it deserve the level of vitriol it’s receiving? Absolutely not. Should you still watch it? I’d recommend that you do. There’s no getting away from the bottom line that Gein’s life was so horrifically unbelievable, you can’t tear your eyes away from it.
Season 3 delves into how Gein’s heinous crimes were influenced by Nazi Germany, and how he in turn went on to influence famous horror movies including Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
With all of these plot points happening at once, the show’s accuracy has quickly come into question. But if you ask me, that’s not the most shocking moment or issue that we’re faced with.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story on Netflix is both incredibly boring and outrageously shocking
Yes, you read that correctly: somehow, Monster: The Ed Gein Story is simultaneously boring and exhilarating. For a show about one of the most vomit-inducing serial killers in American history, that’s quite a feat.
But what do I mean by this? Before we get to any flayed skin being haphazardly grafted onto furniture, there’s a lot of nothing. Episodes 1-3 particularly reflect the barren countryside of Wisconsin that Gein grew up in, with plenty of time passing in between Gein’s sordid relationship with his mother where absolutely nothing happens.
You could argue that this is, in fact, completely accurate to how Gein would have lived his life, but flash forward to Alfred Hitchcock and Tobe Hooper creating their aforementioned horror movie masterpieces, and things start to get confused. But we shouldn’t even care about accuracy at all, in all honesty – we’re never going to get it, and creator Ryan Murphy is clearly striving for something else.
The real shocking moment – see Lesley Manville’s introduction and storyline as Bernice Worden in episode 4 – is the perfect proof of this. There is no evidence to suggest that Gein and Worden ever had a relationship as it’s depicted in the show, with Gein having been identified as a suspect for Worden’s murder after he left a receipt for antifreeze in her store.
This means everything we see happen at the halfway point of Monster: The Ed Gein Story is completely fabricated for our entertainment. We already watch plenty of grisly things happen before Worden appears, but the obsessive, romantic and sexual motive for Gein’s crimes finally plays out in the open in episode 4. It’s the biggest turning point a viewer could hope for.
Has Murphy just spoon-fed us the subtext we already picked up on, or was making things bigger and bolder than they were in real life a way to offset Gein’s farmyard solitude? I think it makes for the most confusing mess we’ve seen streamed on Netflix this year, and as we know, a mess is something we can’t stay away from.
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