After Monster: The Ed Gein Story debuted on Netflix on Friday, it soon earned the No. 2 spot on the streamer’s platform charts with 12.2 million views in its first week.
The true-crime series is the third season in the Monster anthology co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Like every season, it follows a serial killer (or two). But this time, the show centers around Ed Gein, a murderer known to kill women, wear their skin and faces and dig up graves. It stars Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) in the lead role.
And while the previous two seasons, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, earned a fair share of criticism for their alleged sensational portrayal of murder victims, Ed Gein is also stirring up some debate. It currently holds a 20 percent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but its audience score more than doubles that, at 54 percent.
Before the show dropped on the streamer, Hunnam told The Hollywood Reporter what he hopes people focus on if they critique the show. “If people are compelled to talk about it and think about it, hopefully they’ll actually be compelled to watch the show,” Hunnam said. “What I would hope and feel really confident in is that it was a very sincere exploration of the human condition and why this boy did what he did.” He also added: “I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could.”
As Hunnam mentions, the show portrays Ed’s mental health struggles as an undiagnosed schizophrenic. “Ed at its core is a story of mental illness. It was as important for us to show the horror of his inner life and his sort of prison that his brain was trapped in to show that horror as it was about this or that kill, per se,” Brennan told THR.
Read on to learn what audiences are saying about Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Cosmopolitan U.K. responded to the moment in the series, where Ed looks at the camera and says that they’re the ones who can’t look away, writing, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story feels like a critique of our desensitization.” The scene addressed Ed’s influence on media and how that scene was in response to people being obsessed with true crime. Hunnam told THR what he hopes that scene represents: “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and went and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he said. “Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?”
The New York Times also added to the true crime appeal, writing, “It makes sense that prestige television would eventually come for Gein. Viewers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories, true and false, centered on the more outrageous aspects of human nature — an appetite that Murphy, with his American Horror Story, American Crime Story and Monster franchises, has made a late career of whetting.”
The U.K.’s Times wrote: “Gein’s story blurs with the audiences’ appalled reactions to Psycho in a not uninteresting way as Hitch questions what he’s started: ‘The audience has changed and I’m the one who changed them. Like hogs who tasted blood.’ Or who tasted ghoulish true crime. Another reading of all this might be that Murphy is turning things on us to play with criticisms that his work can be exploitative. We are the ones who want this stuff; he’s showing us that it was ever thus and inviting us to lap it up again, slaves to our worst instincts. Or is it being that clever?”
A viewer on Rotten Tomatoes wrote that the show effectively mixed emotions. “Loved this, along with some great characters Charlie Hunnam’s was brilliant as Ed Gein, evoked a lot of emotions, dislike, hate, frustration and in the end pity, it was a real mix of fact and artistic license, the links to the influenced movies and other serial killers I understood it and liked how they did it, I thought it worked really well.”
The Guardian gave a harsher take: “The Monster series’ ultimate assertion: that we live in a sick, sad world and thus should be shown the sick, sad things that happen in it. Maybe there is some value in that. Though, one wishes that Murphy and Brennan and all else involved in this dubious project would be honest about what interests them. If they want to revel in the blood and muck of American life, so be it. Plenty of people will happily hop into the gunk with them. But it’s rather galling to cloak that indecent fascination in pseudo-academic analysis. It’s possible that the Ed Gein Story clumsily grasps for higher meaning simply because it has to fill eight hours of programming. And yet it’s hard not to see a more sinister, self-exonerating motivation behind it. Whatever the reason, the end product is crass where it tries to be elegant, exploitative where it plays at compassion.”
Time magazine spoke about Adeline and Ed’s relationship, writing, “Adeline pores over the most gruesome documents of human experience available; she gets off on her proximity to a man who is killing people and defiling dead bodies. Yet her relationship with Ed is entirely selfish. After his arrest, she dolls herself up to give interviews in which she claims they were merely acquaintances and tries to change the subject to talk up her own dubious charms and talents. Like a fan geeking out at CrimeCon, she derives vicarious pleasure from real people’s pain but has empathy for neither the victims nor the tortured villain. Adeline is a forerunner of the hordes we see flocking to Ed once he is a celebrity—the line of gawkers who tour his home and bid on his belongings, without realizing the man running the auction is the son of a victim; the patrons at sold-out screenings of William Castle’s exploitative “sex horror” flicks; serial killers of the ’70s and ’80s who riff on his methods. Adeline is a point of comparison, too, for artists influenced by Ed.”
Time, went on to say: “Monster has, itself, been the target of criticism from people like the Menendezes and the families of Dahmer’s victims, who feel their traumas have been milked for sensation rather than sublimated into high art. I guess it’s possible that Brennan identifies more with Castle than with Hitchcock. In that case, Ed Gein is also a show that hates itself.”
Despite receiving some harsh takes, there were viewers who praised the cast’s acting chops and for it being entertaining. “The Ed Gein story was a good watch! The acting in this was brilliant, yes at times the flash backs were confusing but in the end it was a brilliant series that all linked well in the end. It definitely made me feel uncomfortable, like it’s suppose to. 5 star series all the way; I look forward to the next monster series,” one user wrote on Rotten Tomatoes.
Another user wrote: “Very interesting take on Ed’s life, his personality and struggles with untreated mental health. The way they created storylines within Ed Geins actual story was such a daring and gut wrenching way to show a broken human being in his darkest moments with schizophrenia, trauma, childhood abuse, mental illness (in which he suffered alone with all of it), and the monster it inevitably lead him to be. Truly fascinating.”
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