[This story contains spoilers from the finale of Monster: The Ed Gein Story.]
Following criticism around a sensational portrayal of murder victims in Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the cast and co-creator of the Netflix anthology’s third season, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, addressed what they hope will be sparking conversation this time around.
Charlie Hunnam, who plays the show’s title character, Ed Gein, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter prior to the show’s release on Friday, offering a message for its audience. “If people are compelled to talk about it and think about it, hopefully they’ll actually be compelled to watch the show,” he 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.”
The Netflix horror series follows Ed’s secluded life in rural Wisconsin after he killed his brother, Henry (Hudson Oz), and his mother, Augusta (Laurie Metcalf), died. The 1950s serial killer was known to murder women, wear their skin and dig up graves. The series also shows Ed pleasuring himself while wearing women’s undergarments.
Hunnam defended the series. “I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact,” he said. “It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could.”
Ian Brennan, who co-created the show with Ryan Murphy, wrote the entire season and directed it, added, “This show is always trying to not be exploitative. It’s trying to actually show that you can pull back too much when you’re telling a macabre story. It’s important that you tell the whole story even with the parts that are hard to watch.”
He continued, “I don’t think this season’s sensational at all. I think it’s sensationally good, but it’s a real deep dive into a very strange and important touchstone of the 20th century. It just happened to be this very lonely, strange, mentally ill man in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin who had this enormous cultural footprint that changed pop culture,” Brennan said, referencing that Ed’s crimes inspired the horror films Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The show largely focuses on Ed’s mental illness and his undiagnosed schizophrenia. In episode seven, Ed finally receives a diagnosis and gets medicated. Despite his mental illness, Suzanna Son, who plays Ed’s love interest Adeline Watkins, told THR, “It makes me angry at society and angry at the fact that we didn’t have mental health institutions, we didn’t have educational schizophrenia [at that time.] But it doesn’t make me sympathize with Eddie. It’s very complicated and I feel like we all have a monster in ourselves that could come out if we didn’t get the things we needed.”
Brennan added, “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 … Ed Gein had a different brain, and he wasn’t able to have the perspective to look at something and put it away in a compartment. He saw images and was obsessed with that. He saw things that his brain couldn’t unsee. It started with all the stuff that came out of the Holocaust, which Vicky’s [Krieps] character portrays so brilliantly, just the horrors of the banality of what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. And he couldn’t get it out of his head.”
In the first episode, Adeline shows Ed a comic book with graphic Holocaust imagery and imagines Ilse Koch, a Nazi, played by Krieps. The actress told THR about how difficult it was to play her part. “I said to Ryan, ‘I don’t think I can do this even though I love the show,’ because I’m European and my grandfather was in the concentration camp. And the idea of playing a Nazi was something I at first couldn’t even fathom. I said, ‘I might just break down crying on set,’ which actually happened once. I was unable to leave my trailer because of what I knew I was about to do. But because the team is so incredible and everyone was really respectful to the subject, I was able to transcend that fear and really make it about the story.”
While every season of the Monster series examines a different story, it asks the same question: Who is the real monster? And in this season, there’s a scene where Ed breaks the fourth wall and says to the camera: “You’re the one who can’t look away.”
Hunnam told THR what he hopes viewers question after watching. “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?”
Brennan further explained why it was important to include that scene. “This is the [season] that looks at the question most squarely of what happens when you see horrific things. It’s also a way for us to turn the camera on ourselves to be like, ‘No, we’re aware that we’re also doing the thing of showing something that maybe you shouldn’t be looking at’ … Psycho was Albert Hitchcock topping what had come before it. And then Texas Chain Saw Massacre was Tobe Hooper topping what Hitchcock had done. And so it’s this process of having to continually out-scare ourselves. And I think we wanted to really probe that question of: Is this what people should be watching?”
Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix.
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