HOLLYWOOD—For those wanting to know, I didn’t watch the Netflix series highlighting the chaos of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. So, you would think I would skip the next serial killer getting the spotlight, Ed Gein, but I didn’t. I gave the mini-series a watch over a two-day period, and it’s a mixed bag.
“Monster: The Ed Gein Story” highlights the life of the notorious killer who inspired a ton of horror classics like “Psycho,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” The problem with this series is that it felt all over the place. You have a great first episode, a decent second episode, but come the third episode the series start to flail with its narrative direction.
It tries to do too much, and it loses its focal point along the way. Now, I have to give kudos to Charlie Hunnam, who plays the meek mannered Ed Gein who has a very intriguing dynamic with his mother, Augusta Gein portrayed by Laurie Metcalf. Metcalf and Hunnam are standouts when it comes to the acting talent. Hunnam really envelops this role as a character who seems so nice, shy and mild-mannered, but as the episodes progress, we see this guy turn this switch from approachable and just unnerving, calculating and scary as hell.
I mean we are first introduced to Ed who is caught masturbating while wearing his mother’s underwear. She scolds him harshly, as he is completely nude and she reads scripture from the Bible. Yes, the audience learns very early that Augusta is a very religious woman and her upbringing of her sons, Ed and his brother, Henry has impacted their social interactions and behaviors, especially for Ed. The narrative does play with this notion of whether Ed’s motivations for his behavior is a result of him being scolded for his lust to be sexually active or his mother constantly scolding him for doing it.
He does have a pal in Adelaine Watkins (Suzanna Son), who introduces Ed to a Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch portrayed by Vicky Krieps. That introduction seems to be a driving factor in a lot of Ed’s behavior as the series attempts to push it.
Now the introduction of this character and the Nazi’s onslaught on Jews had me scratching my head. I had heard of Ed Gein before seeing the series. I knew he was from Wisconsin and that he was notorious for robbing graves (digging up people) and utilizing the skin to craft and make things. The idea that juggles back and forth for most of the series is whether Ed is wanting to become a woman or he just has a fetish for female body parts that just excites him. How the Nazis and their torture of Jews impacted or didn’t impact Ed’s behavior raises more questions than answers.
The series does exaggerate some of the things Ed did. I’m pretty certain he never donned a chainsaw, but I could be wrong. I think that was the series way of trying to connect Ed as the inspiration to the Tobe Hooper 1974 classic, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” that gave audiences horror icon, Leatherface. This is where the series needed to tighten up its plot.
We have these enormous cuts or gaps where we are focusing on Alfred Hitchcock making his 1960 classic “Psycho,” and Hooper directing “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and there’s footage or scenes being shot of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic “The Silence of the Lambs” that chronicled Buffalo Bill.
In essence, the series is letting the audience know that Ed Gein was an icon because he birthed some of the greats in horror but also inspired a lot of other infamous serious killers like John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and a host of others. It is actually scary to know that, but on a linear basis, the series doesn’t do this justice because it feels like the continuity is off.
We are talking about Ed and his family one minute and then getting shots regarding Hitchcock directing his iconic shower scene in “Psycho,” and then we have scenes with Norman Bates and his inner struggle to keep his personal life a secret. It doesn’t mesh without annoying you as a viewer.
However, the series does too much with the constant scenes of masturbation with Ed, not to mention him devouring dead corpses in the most disturbing ways that makes you turn away from the screen. Some of it was a bit too much for me to watch. It was not intriguing it was stomach turning and that may have been the focal point of the writers and producers of the series. Ed Gein was indeed a disturbed individual and whether that was a direct result of his upbringing by his mother, a mental health issue because it is apparent he may have been suffering from schizophrenia or something else, his impact on American pop culture is beyond scary.
A lot of the serial killers that gained notoriety in America would have never had any of it, without Gein, and that ultimately spilled into the horror genre that has birthed many iconic villains, some memorable, others not so much. I guess this proves a point about my concern with American’s obsession with true crime. We always want to know WHY someone does what they do, and until this day all we can do is speculate when it comes to Ed Gein.
