My quick rating - 8.0/10. Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology has already taken us through Jeffrey Dahmer (Milwaukee’s claim to fame), the Menendez brothers (fun family), and is about to cover Lizzie Borden. Last year, season three decided to give us a TV show about the bloke who helped inspire half of Hollywood’s favourite psychopaths? Monster: The Ed Gein Story is the surprisingly compelling result.
Structurally and stylistically, there’s very little to fault. The pacing is excellent, with the story constantly jumping between the past, where Charlie Hunnam’s Gein commits his murders, robs graves, and happily assembles his collection of female body parts, and the present, where Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bloch and Anthony Perkins pore over the details while turning Bloch’s Gein-inspired novel into Psycho. It’s a clever way of showing how an obscure Wisconsin lunatic eventually became part of pop culture’s DNA.
The series also plays around with the line between fact and fantasy. Gein’s real life, dominated by his terrifyingly religious mother and his increasingly disturbing obsession with women who resembled her, is interwoven with lurid, fetishistic sequences involving Ilse Koch, the notorious “Butcher of Buchenwald”. The imagined Nazi party scenes, with terrified prisoners being shaved by children while adults chase others around the house with whips, are particularly grotesque and beautifully shot. Apparently Monster wasn’t content with one horrifying subject per episode.
And Gein is certainly an intriguing one. He barely qualifies as a serial killer, having been convicted of only two murders, but his grave-robbing and corpse mutilation were so spectacularly fucked-up that his influence has lasted for more than seventy years. If you’ve ever watched a movie featuring a flayed corpse, a woman wearing someone else’s skin, a room decorated with human remains or IKEA furniture made from skin, there’s a decent chance Ed Gein is somewhere in the family tree.
I’ve always found him fascinating (H.H. Holmes remains my personal favourite historical monster) to the extent that, when the World Wide Web was still a wee baby, I actually bought Gein’s fingerprints online. Yes, I know they’re technically a print. Still my creepy piece in the living room.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with Monster is also a fairly significant one. It doesn’t seem particularly interested in what any of this means. There’s no convincing moral dimension or commentary to counterbalance the lingering, almost loving attention given to Gein’s depravity. The filmmaking is excellent, but the show sometimes seems more fascinated by the monster than interested in examining him.
Still, as a piece of television, it’s gripping, inventive, and darkly hilarious in its sheer commitment to human awfulness. It just needed to step back from the corpse pile occasionally and ask why we’re staring at it.
