Ed Gein Is a Star (Or Why “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” Is a Bad Taste Masterpiece)

A familiar two-toned intergalactic bleep warps as a stitched-up ass in flesh-colored leather pants, alluringly rocks side-to-side on screen. That recognizable do-doo emerges from its muddied distortion into the sonic perfection of “Goodbye Horses,” as Q Lazzarus’s stunning, androgynous voice hums over the beat. A face peers into the camera in slo-mo. Lit only by the spinning reflections of a disco ball, he’s still recognizable with his awful permed platinum wig as the flayed woman skin-suit sporting seamstress/serial killer Ted Levine, aka Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, the lotion lunatic who singularly made Q Lazzarus’s unrivaled anthem into a homicidal world-making classic. A second dancer appears: Ed Gein, the Grandfather of Gore, also in a matching nauseatingly sewn-together lady suit, only he’s one-upped Buffalo Bill by slapping a deader’s face on his own as a mask. Gein whirls solo through his isolated Wisconsin corpse-hoarding home, merging with Buffalo Bill’s notorious dressing room scene from Jonathan Demme’s film. Bill slathers on red lipstick, announces, “I’d fuck me,” fiddles with his nipple ring, tucks, and spins, alongside Gein, who bursts, twirling, from his house into the chilly winter abyss. As the song reaches its soaring climax, Gein drops into the snow with his arms outstretched.

Watching this scene in the much-maligned, Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story, I gasped. I raced to scroll back, repeatedly soaking in this out-of-space-and-time dancerly duet. Is this what José Muñoz meant by queer utopia?! Because I see what’s at that warm, illuminated horizon, and it’s Ed Gein making snow angels to the greatest song ever recorded. The only note I have for show creator Ian Brennan is that this dance lacked a third dancer: burlesque terrorist Miss Rose Wood, who has her own spin on a woman suit boogie with her late-night shocker act at The Box, which includes carving up a doomed audience member for her hide, all set to Hole’s “Teenage Whore.” Even without Rose Wood, though, what a legacy of terror and tunes!

This is my way of saying: I love Monster: The Ed Gein Story. I love it so much! The show is an astonishing achievement of gory, sexually aberrant and abhorrent bad taste, a trash TV masterpiece the likes of which I haven’t enjoyed since my beloved The Idol. (I maintain that time will validate my opinions on The Idol. Mark my words, in a few years, someone will be screening it in its entirety at Metrograph. I hope it’s me).  The show follows the life of the Butcher of Plainfield, played with disarmingly misty-eyed, naïve, aw shucks, cheese and crackers, Midwestern charm and sweetness by Charlie Hunnam, as he unknowingly inspires a trio of maniacal cinematic legends with mommy issues–Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill–and serial killing idol worship by just being himself! By himself, I mean, attempting to resurrect his screechy religious zealot Mama through digging up graves, making skin furniture, skipping around in people’s faces, collecting vulvas in a box, and killing people in a deranged, sexually frustrated, mentally ill blackout!

With a paltry 21% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (which I realize is typically the sweet spot for my favs), I’m aware I’m in the minority as a loud-and-proud Monster: The Ed Gein Story fanatic. At least among critics, given the gleeful tortilla-wearing TikTok takes on the “Goodbye Horses” dances. Critics, though, are less amused, framing anyone who enjoys Monster: The Ed Gein Story as total amoral scum who should be locked away in the same Wisconsin nuthouse as Gein and his television-watching buddy Louise, who shouts, “All you do is SUCK COCKS!” (Maybe Louise inspired Linda Blair!). The Guardian hated the show so much that they published two nipple belt-clutching bad reviews. Guardian critic Lucy Mangan called the show “unforgivable,” describing it as “voyeuristic pandering to the basest instincts of viewers.” And just what is so wrong about that?! New Yorker scold Hilton Als took to his un-profile-pictured Instagram account to similarly rail in nearly impenetrable, comma-less sentences, mostly, it seems, sent into a fury by a song choice in the seventh episode. One wonders why he could stomach six prior episodes of a show he calls “insanely bloated cynical overlong badly written misogynistic psychology by numbers (when the creators could bother) forced unimaginative while straining to be ‘imaginative’ that with the best will in the world you can only stagger through while it gnaws at your brain cells like the smell of moth balls double wrapped in some hideous poison you’ll never know the name of.” Well, gee, tell us what you really think, Hilton! He finishes with two questions that seem much too existential for the trash show he’s watching (this is a Ryan Murphy production for Christ’s sake): “Is this what we need or deserve as the world burns? Or is this the show that’s representative of our ‘new’ America?”

I have two questions of my own. Who could hate a show that provides such a sublime concept as Ed Gein as a babysitter?! And Hilton dares to call The Ed Gein Story unimaginative! I could watch another 8-episode series of Gein’s failed attempts to impress two blasé kids through a series of magic tricks using body bits! Try to resist laughing at their bored responses: “These tricks are terrible.” “I want to go home!” Just don’t ask Eddie to do his turning into a lady whose head pops off act! At least without a barf bag! It’s a bit much! And who could resist a series that has bestowed upon us a phrase as transcendent as “sinful cold cuts”?! This may not be the show “we” deserve, but it was the one I needed!

I won’t deny that Monster: The Ed Gein Story is a lot to take in. The first we see of Gein, he’s uncomfortably rubbing a cow’s udders while milking them, spying on his sorta girlfriend as she tries on her new pointy bullet bra (this is the 1950s!), and returns home to put on Mama Gein’s bra and panties for some light autoerotic asphyxiation before supper. This perverse fun is ruined by Mama, who knocks Ed off of his wack-off belt and chair set-up and makes him stand naked while she berates him, “Only a mother could love you.” As beguiling and perhaps offensively sympathetic as Hunnam’s strangely gentle performance is as a necrophiliac Forrest Gump with his baffling haircut that screams, “I’m a serial killer!” and a slow, soft voice pitched to a repression squeak, like a Midwestern Michael Jackson, Mama Augusta Gein, played by Laurie Metcalf, steals the show—and the prize for 2025’s hag of the year (Sorry, Aunt Gladys!). Mother, as Ed calls her, is a hardened, pinch-mouthed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg-collared, fire and brimstone terror who rails against sexuality with memorable lines like, “You must never touch a woman. I should castrate you!” Just try to stop yourself from repeating Mama’s camp catchphrases, such as, “Put a demon in that old womb. Brush the cobwebs off her saggy dugs.” Why I’ve been wandering around my apartment repeating, “Naughty bits! Filthy shameful member!” all week! No wonder Ed wanted to become her! I do too! Played without a glimmer of goodness, Mother really has it in for those JEZEBELS, those PANDORAS, slutting around town and tempting her sons. That’s right—Ed has a brother, although not for long. Mama, too, is dead by the first episode, stroking out after witnessing more jezebels and harlots, yet she’s not gone. In fact, Mama is almost better in absentia when her presence is simply represented by a disembodied, hallucinated voice haranguing, “Just dig up this whore lying next to me!’

As much as Mama has my heart in a pot on the stove, other performances are worth a mention. Mama is almost upstaged by Tom Hollander’s fat suit, which deserves its own place in the credits, in his role as Alfred Hitchcock. Because he just played Truman Capote in Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and the fat suit is so hysterically distracting, I interpret Hollander as Capote doing a Hitchcock impression as he groans about William Castle’s tacky shock tactics before hoisting his big ass out of a theater seat to get more popcorn. Wouldn’t Capote as Hitchcock also goad haunted-eyed, closeted Tony Perkins (Joey Pollari) into confronting his secreted sexuality by staring at a box of vulvas on the set of Psycho, while Gein tinkers around the kitchen in the background as a ghostly representation of the worst that can happen when denying erotic impulses? The subplot about Perkins’s sexuality, including the short scene with Hollywood hunk Tab Hunter, is what finally clarified Murphy’s choice of an Ed Gein show for me, as most of his series typically tackle gay themes. This doesn’t mean the show’s treatment of Perkins’s closeted struggle is tasteful! When he’s not attending conversion therapy with Mildred Newman (Mimi Kennedy) and confessing about puking after “fornicating,” he gets a blowie in a movie theater while watching himself as Norman Bates, a role he comes to resent. Talk about psycho!

Not that the women are any less sexually loopy. Take Lesley Manville’s diet pill-rattled, lonely-hearted, tragic take on Gein’s final victim, Bernice Worden, who just wanted to have a little fun. She trades her bra and panties for a good pumping and guzzles wine while dreaming of an idyllic beach vacation…with Ed Gein. Honey, no! Did you see his homicidal haircut?! The biggest lady lunatic is unquestionably Gein’s on-again, off-again (when she’s freaked out by rigor mama) girlfriend Adeline Watkins, played by Suzanna Son, previously known to me as the little loon who sings about crocodiles in The Idol. Adeline is the kind of girl who brings gruesome photos of mass graves at concentration camps to a soda shop date with Ed. In other words, his dream date! Adeline hopes to become a crime scene photographer like WeeGee and, in the most glaring depiction of needing to pad out an eight-episode series, spends an episode in New York trying to make it after insulting her friends, family, and fuck buddies as ignorant hayseeds (“I smoke! I fornicate! I’m too big for this town!”). The only one who escapes her big city ire is Ed, who is encouraged to also come to NYC with an enticing description of the Meatpacking District: “You love meat hooks and cutting things open!”

Of course, none of this actually happened. Or there is no evidence at least. While a person named Adeline Watkins did tell the Minneapolis Tribune she had a relationship with Ed, then weeks later denied it, the rest is completely made up, as is his tryst with Bernice (I assume Charlie Hunnam was just too attractive to pass as sexless). Other than the odd detour into NYC’s cold water flats, nasty landladies, egomaniacal artists, and an embarrassing return home, Adeline mostly exists as a vessel into which to pour all the blame for Gein’s cadaver art projects and deader banging, which didn’t happen either, by the way. Not that I’m complaining, cold corpse kisses shot through the show’s strikingly gorgeous cinematography is one of the most discomforting viewing moments I can recall (and it wasn’t even the most uncomfortable scene in this show!). You have to give them credit for being bold! Apparently, Brennan didn’t think Gein’s moth-filled, sweetly stinky nightmare house with lips hanging off of curtain strings or a jar full of noses was sensational enough. So he added more murders; dramatized deaths that could never be conclusively tied to Gein, like my favorite pop star, Addison Rae’s mostly silent, haunting portrayal of a rival babysitter with polio; a preference for silky bras and panties; and a late transformation of Ed Gein as a holy (at least with all the overwrought choral music) elder crime solver from the bin. Presumably, Brennan figured that, with all the many cinematic adaptations of Gein’s story, he was free to fully embrace speculative fiction, à la Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde. But so much of Monster: The Ed Gein Story is so far from reality that the show comes off more like obsessive Ed Gein fan fiction.

Does this sound irredeemably vulgar? Well, I haven’t even touched on the Nazi subplot or poor trans pioneer Christine Jorgensen getting roped into all this depravity (What did she do to deserve this?!). Both can be traced back to that little corruptor Adeline, who gives Gein pulp comics about the Bitch of Buchenwald, Nazi Ilse Koch (Vicky Kreps), best known for her Holocaust victim lampshades, as well as introduces Gein to newspaper articles featuring Jorgensen. The Nazi scenes, especially, are staggeringly ill-advised. Koch’s heinous craftwork inspires Gein’s crafting frenzy as he imagines wild, historically inaccurate Nazi parties with Koch riding a horse like a genocidal Bianca Jagger. If that wasn’t bad enough, Gein also hallucinates being chased or running with a bunch of striped concentration camp uniform-wearing escapees who jam their faces against his windows like a zombie movie, a scene so incredibly tasteless that I cannot even believe it made it on screen. Even for me, a lover of cinematic atrocities and horrible decision-making, this was overboard. As was Jorgensen’s presence, though her appearance is more quintessentially Ryan Murphy classless, ripping an unsuspecting historical figure from the past to make some kind of ham-fisted point. Jorgensen’s contribution, played with sophisticated poise by Alanna Darby, becomes slightly clearer after a hesitant nighttime chat over a ham radio. She’s a stable trans foil, so the audience doesn’t equate Gein’s lady suit boogies and all his cross-dressing killer progeny with normal trans people.

Ok, I realize as I’m writing this that it’s increasingly coming off as if I’m giving the show a terrible pan. And it’s true that Monster: The Ed Gein Story is bad, no good, terrible. But hear me out—it’s also impressively, astonishingly, thrillingly terrible, foisting upon the audience unforgettable on-screen abominations! I mean, what other series is going to show us Richard Speck’s tits? Or the heretofore unthinkable possibility of filling high heels with jizz? Or a Thanksgiving feast turned trauma after a law enforcement visit to the Gein household? Or the visceral yuck of Gein’s sink filled with dirty skull dishes and pork and beans cans?!

More than these gnarly details, the overarching, perhaps accidental, tinglingly unhinged message of the show is what really renders it a shocker schlock masterpiece. And that is: Ed Gein is a STAR! Witness all that he inspired, from other serial killers and cult leader nutjobs writing him love letters to, more importantly, all those classic horror filmmakers! By exploring three of the (many) films that built characters from Gein—Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs, all of which are influential in their own right, the series points to Gein as the forefather of most of the horror genre we know and love. Slashers! FBI procedurals! Spooky rickety old homes filled with terror! What would I even be watching without Gein?! Maybe all that grave digging and skin sewing was all worth it! Think I’m being a ghoul? Well, consider this branch on this fucked-up horror family tree: Without Gein’s body-strewn home, there is no Texas Chain Saw Massacre hillbilly house, which means Ti West wouldn’t have mimicked its rundown isolated architecture for the doomed backwoods porn shoot in X, which, then, means…gasp…NO PEARL!!!!! WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT PEARL?!!! THANK YOU, ED GEIN!!!

Granted, the show clearly had other intentions in mind when exploring this trio of Gein-derived films rather than encouraging an appreciation of slaughter just as long as it influences a favorite flick. The show attempts a muddled social commentary about our lurid fascination with gore, connecting it to witnessing the utter brutality of war, genocide, and other assorted carnage of the times. Both Hollander’s Hitchcock and Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) embark on long lectures about how their blood-soaked movies respond to a world already littered with corpses, from the Holocaust to the My Lai Massacre. As Hitchcock says, “The audience has found a new monster. That monster is us.” Even though explaining exactly why we may find cathartic enjoyment in horror, the show also seems to sneer at US, the audience of perverts, maniacs, and morbid peepers, who get off on this shit at the expense of the mentally ill man at the center of it. “You’re the one who can’t look away,” Gein, a bit on the nose, observes. This is exactly the same point made by Todd Phillips in his almost universally loathed Joker 2, which also has clear contempt for its target audience, those pent-up incels thrilled by Arthur Fleck’s deranged, too-serious, interpretive dancing rampage in his first Joker. Though I’m one of the only ones, along with preeminent filth elder John Waters and Quentin Tarantino, that actually LIKED Joker 2 (though I also had contempt for the first movie), Phillips’s critique wasn’t that convincing.

And neither is Brennan’s in Monster. That’s a good thing. Who wants to be lectured?! Certainly not me, and not by a show crammed with as much unrestrained batshittery and as many unrepentant bad ideas as possible within eight episodes. You can’t finger-wag at me for laughing at Adeline’s stunned reaction to a chair with a nip flourish when YOU’RE the one who showed it to me! Give me a cavalcade of crimes against good taste! Thankfully, the show not only delivers but isn’t even that convinced of its own critique either. By the final episode, Monster: The Ed Gein Story gives up on morals and submits to reveling in Gein’s berserk stardom. How else to interpret its bafflingly bonkers conclusion that is perhaps more shocking than all the hours of nipple belts and vulva strips that came before, with a hilariously soppy golden hour felon farewell and a heartfelt heavenly meeting worthy of Titanic?!