I’ll do my best to keep this brief, but it’s time to talk about Ryan Murphy‘s new series, Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
First of all, I want to make it clear that I’m not a hybristophile or anything, just a big consumer of true crime in various formats. So naturally I already had quite a bit of information before even starting the first episode.
Ryan Murphy has a history of ruining his tv shows. He creates brilliant concepts that work amazingly, then completely loses the plot around the third season, so I was a little reluctant to watch it.
The “Serial Killer” label : fact-checking Ed Gein
Let’s be clear here, Ed Gein‘s life was sensational enough to fill an entire season on its own. We’re talking about a guy who lived in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin on a farm with a manipulative, hyper-religious, and violent mother, an alcoholic and emotionally neglectful father, and who was so brainwashed by his mother that he suppressed all his sexual urges while she even made him pray for his father’s death.
On top of that, he had a malformation of the eye and tongue that caused him to be bullied throughout his school years, in addition to the isolation of the farm, which was located 9 km from his village.
Basically, we had a stew of abuse on an emotionally fragile person.
So, at some point, of course it all went haywire.
Murphy could have highlighted all of this, or even focused on the fact that he had to live with all these struggles and make the show about his spiraling mindset.
But it would have been less sensational, and it would also have been closer to reality.
Ed Gein killed two people. He was not a serial killer. As a reminder, you need three victims to « earn » that title.
He was, however, suspected of other murders, but despite polygraph tests and witness statements, he was cleared of all of them.
He was a virgin. So we’ll skip over the necrophilia and the fact that he slept with women from the town.
Adeline had given a statement to a newspaper saying that they had been together, but she later retracted it.
So there’s no proof.
Adeline‘s encounter with her mother’s corpse? Made up, again.
Making her an accomplice to his necrophilia in the series, portraying her as a psychopath and potentially the cause of everything because of the World War II newspapers, is more than a bit of a stretch…
Murphy later clarified that it was up to viewers to guess whether Adeline truly existed or if she was just in his head… Suffice to say that the viewer’s perception is not quite the same.
Sensationalizing the victims : the case of Bernice Worden
There were a few other things that bugged me, such as openly spitting on the memory of the victims.
After Dahmer, we knew that Ryan Murphy didn’t give a s*it about respect, but still…
Bernice Worden, the hardware store manager who was found disemboweled like an animal in the barn, was portrayed as a promiscuous, almost desperate, woman who threw herself into Ed‘s arms. She even gave him her underwear to wear. When she was just… the manager of the village’s hardware store.
Why reduce her life to a sick fantasy? It was anything but necessary.
The Perkins betrayal : why Psycho didn’t belong here
The part about Psycho is what pisses me off the most.
First of all, it wasn’t necessary and it took us completely out of Ed Gein‘s life.
Second, and this is really the most blatant lack of ethics in my eyes, is the fact that Anthony Perkins was exposed like that. He struggled for years with being gay, he tried conversion therapy, etc. It weighed heavily on him.
Then he got together with a woman and had two children.
One of them is Osgood Perkins, who is a screenwriter and director in the horror genre. He is notably behind Longlegs and the adaptation of Stephen King‘s short story The Monkey.
Anthony Perkins died of AIDS, and Osgood often uses his films as an outlet for his childhood, which was sometimes linked to his father’s secrets.
Was the adaptation of Ed Gein‘s life really the place to expose all that?
Especially when you and his son are basically coworkers ? No. The answer is no.
Fact-checking isn’t for Hollywood
If we focus again on Ed, we can also see that he did some babysitting after his father’s death, but that had nothing to do with the dramatized version of the series. He was a trustworthy person who loved to read and tell stories to the children he looked after, from what I’ve reseached.
The chainsaw murders? That never happened. They just wanted to link him visually to the Texas chainsaw massacre.
The babysitter’s murder? There is also no evidence linking him to the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley.
Ed Gein had psychological problems, which led to him being committed to a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison when he was arrested. But, once again, there is no evidence that he caused any problems there.
According to reports, he was even a model patient.
So we’re talking about a man who killed two people, dug up several bodies while in a dissociative state, did arts and crafts with their corpses, and had a belt made of human nipples in his possession…
But that wasn’t enough for Mr. Murphy, apparently.
Gein inspired the character of Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and many other slasher characters are based on his actions. I don’t understand how you can change a real human life so much when everything was already more than enough to capture the audience’s attention.
The “Pretty Boy” problem
I could highlight Charlie Hunnam‘s performance, but due to the direction taken, he comes across as a simpleton when Ed Gein supposedly had a normal IQ.
And once again, even though I acknowledge the resemblance and the acting, I don’t understand this systematic need to cast attractive actors to play serial killers. We don’t need Zac Efron, Evan Peters, or Charlie Hunnam to play deviants. Hybristophilia existed long before Hollywood’s kink, guys. Richard Ramirez received lots of pictures of naked women in prison. We really don’t need to reach more fans for them as a society.
Oh, and on that subject, by the way, Gein never helped catch Bundy, that’s another one ofMurphy‘s inventions. Shocker.
It could have been done with dignity, but they chose shock value.
I’m terribly worried about the Aileen Wuornos one coming up.
I already know how she was viewed by the male audience, she doesn’t need the “Ryan Murphy” treatment.
Freddy Krueger deserved his sequels as an imaginary monster, real ones shouldn’t get this much spotlight.