Spoilers ahead for “Monster: The Ed Gein Story”
In the final moments of “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” a nurse (played by Karly Rothenberg) turns to the killer who only has a few months to live and tells him he should set the record straight about his life.
“I think enough people have told my story, don’t you think?” Charlie Hunnam’s Ed Gein dreamily responds. “They seem to know it better than me.”
It’s a comment that captures the entire ethos of the latest installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix anthology series. Ed Gein was a man who inspired three of the most influential horror movies of all time — “Psycho,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Silence of the Lambs” — as well as serial killers like Richard Speck, Ed Kemper and Ted Bundy. Yet little is known about the man dubbed the Butcher of Plainfield.
“What I was interested in was the character study of this person that happened to spawn all of it and copycat killers, and then no one asked him what he thought,” Max Winkler, the series’ director and co-showrunner, told TheWrap.
When Murphy first pitched the idea of a season focusing on Gein, Winkler didn’t know who he was. But as he did more research into the man who killed two women and ransacked nine graves in his attempt to build a women suit, he became fascinated both with Gein himself and how this quiet Wisconsin man forever changed pop culture.
More than any of Murphy’s previous work, “The Ed Gein Story” explores how advances in technology have fueled our society’s bloodlust and the disastrous and unpredictable effects this has had. That throughline in the show starts with Gein himself, a man who becomes obsessed with the images of concentration camps that emerged after World War II. It’s commonly believed that Gein’s crime spree was the result of proof of these horrors entering the public space paired with comics that fetishized female Nazi members like Isle Koch, his abusive religious mother and Gein’s undiagnosed schizophrenia.
“What happens if you peel back the [Norman Rockwell] painting? What was really going on in the ’40s when people were getting imagery of Nazis and dead bodies that people mistake for wood because they were so stacked?” Winkler said. “We’re having these same conversations now.”
The impact of technology continues throughout nearly every iteration of Gein’s story. The series’ depiction of Alfred Hitchcock’s (Tom Hollander) “Psycho” doesn’t just explore how the film became wildly successful as it shocked the world. It depicts Hitchcock’s wife and editor Alma Reville (Olivia Williams) warning him that if he puts these horrors on screen, Hitchcock will be responsible for unleashing a genie that can never be put back into its bottle. It also depicts Hitchcock’s resentment and regret as he watches William Castle’s “The Night Walker,” a movie in the same vein as “Psycho” that trades the original’s thoughtful character reflection for ramped up gore.
It happens again with Tobe Hooper’s (Will Brill) “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” portraying the intentionally grotesque slasher as a mirror to the brutality of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War. Hopper’s disgust over seeing dead children on his TV is even mentioned in “The Ed Gein Story.”
“We’re probably now at our lowest form with these little, quick things of absolute f–king horror that you can find on the internet if you want to search for them. But it started when Hitchcock made ‘Psycho.’ I’m sure there were other versions of it, but that moment where people really walked out of a theater and threw up,” Winkler said. “We never came back from it.”
How these movies impacted pop culture forced Winkler and the team behind the series to reflect on what exactly they were making, why they were making it and what impact it may have on society at large. Winkler likened this internal grappling with his feelings around Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel”In Cold Blood,” a book that is widely considered to be the prototypical true crime novel.
“Are you actually having a falling in heart with them, or are you just doing it because it’s good journalism and it’s going to sell books? It’s the question we ask as filmmakers, as documentarians, as writers, as consumers,” he said.
There were some changes the series made from the facts to make Gein’s story more compelling. A major one has to do with Evelyn Hartley (Addison Rae). In real life, the police determined that Gein wasn’t responsible for her disappearance after he failed a lie detector test. Because lie detectors have been known to make mistakes and forensic technology wasn’t as sophisticated in the ’50s as it is now, the team decided to credit their Gein as Hartley’s murderer.
“According to our research, it was irrefutable,” Winkler said of the decision.
Another major alteration has to do with Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son). Shortly after Gein’s arrest, the real Watkins told the press she had a relationship with him and that Gein even proposed to her, though she turned him down. About two weeks after that first interview, Watkins then pulled back her comments, stating that the interview contained inaccuracies. But because Gein’s story focuses so much on a man grappling with his own inner demons, the “Monster” team expanded Watkins’ role as well as their relationship so that their Gein would have someone to interact with.
“I’d fallen in love with Suzanna Son’s acting from ‘Red Rocket’ and was so excited when we cast her,” Winkler said. “We had a hard time writing scenes for people with [Ed Gein], because he was alone so much of the time. So Adeline’s character became a sounding board for that.”
Ultimately, the show wants to tell Gein’s story accurately with as much tenderness as possible while still being respectful toward the victims.
“I have empathy for him, and I have sympathy for him. I don’t have sympathy for what he did,” Winkler explained. “Ed Gein was an extremely isolated, abused person in Plainfield, Wis., who was undiagnosed schizophrenic, had nobody to talk to, lived in this house completely alone. He seemed polite and kind enough that you’d pass him in the pharmacy and say, ‘Hey, Ed.’ The reason why he got away with it for so long is no one would ever think that sweet old Eddie Gein could ever be responsible for this stuff. But his inner life was vast because he was schizophrenic and he was exposed to the power of the image at a very ripe time in his life.”
And, as is always the case with “Monster,” this season asks who the real monster is.
“Is it [Nazi member] Ilse Koch? Is it Augusta Gein, his mother who abused him badly? Is it the American mental health institution at large? At its worst, we see that with Nixon in charge and in the ’70s in the finale. Is it us, the filmmakers who make these stories and take our vision of what Ed Gein did and why he did it and put it out to the world? Is it the filmmakers — the Hitchcocks, the Tobe Hoppers, the Jonathan Demmes, the Ryan Murphys, the Max Winklers? Or is it us, who keep consuming this?” Winkler said. “Why good art exists is it makes you, hopefully, challenge yourself and challenge art and culture at large and try to figure out what context, what container, you put this in, which I thought we were really successful with.”
