Monster: The Ed Gein Story — Netflix’s Latest True Crime Series Tests the Limits of Our Morbid Fascination

I’m a big fan of true crime series — I’ve watched all and sundry, the very good and the very bad — and even I feel a creeping grossness as I ponder why we as humans return again and again to gaze into the maw of human depravity. Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third instalment of the Monster anthology, is a bold, unsettling testament to that strange compulsion — and like many attempts at dramatising real evil, it teeters between illumination and exploitation.

From the first frames, the series plunges us into a cold, haunted Wisconsin, where the fields are skeletal, the farm decrepit and silent, and Ed Gein (Charlie Hunnam) is like a strange, softly spoken spectre barely tethered to reality. The show promises an “intimate, unflinching portrait” rather than a mere parade of gore. In places, it delivers: we see the fractured young man wrestling with his faith, the corrosive influence of his domineering mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf), and the claustrophobic isolation that seems to hollow him. The framing is often moody, the cinematography cold and sharp, the cuts abrupt — reminding you that this is less a horror thriller and more a psychological excavation.

Gein, later found to be legally insane, only technically killed two women — that he admitted to — yet his crimes sent shockwaves through America. His grave-robbing and skinning of corpses created the kind of cultural trauma that would later inspire Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs. Though he was no prolific murderer by today’s true crime standards, he became something worse: a mirror for society’s fascination with evil — the first “serial killer” of the twentieth century, long before the term was coined.

A chilling portrait or a lurid spectacle?

Yet even as it strives for a more reflective tone, the series cannot resist its own appetite for spectacle. The gore is lurid and prolonged, the descent into the grotesque stretched past the edge of what feels necessary. There are moments when the camera lingers on flayed flesh, organs, dismemberment — not to provoke empathy or insight, but to shock, titillate.

In this, Monster: The Ed Gein Story repeats a recurring trap: giving in to true crime voyeurism.

And the creators know it. The series winks at humanity’s curiosity for morbidity — the trailer even shows Gein breaking the fourth wall,  as he murmurs, “You’re the one who can’t look away.” It’s an accusation disguised as  a taunt that exposes the uneasy truth of the genre: we watch because we want to, and they make it because they know we can’t help ourselves.

Charlie Hunnam does what he can with this “tortured” role. He frequently looks haunted, and there’s a weight in his portrayal when Gein confronts memories of his mother or slips into hallucination.

But the show too often nudges us towards empathy, making us feel pity for a man whose madness literally turned the skin of human beings into lampshades and human skulls into cereal bowls. It’s not that understanding is misplaced — it’s that the show seems to want to explain away his actions, and even us to forgive him for it. Those moments of sympathy arrive uncomfortably close to scenes of mutilation and horror, and the juxtaposition feels manipulative rather than meaningful.

The series is at its most compelling when it ventures into Ed Gein’s obsessions — particularly the eerie parallels it draws between him and Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald”. In these moments, Monster: The Ed Gein Story briefly swerves from the typical true-crime formula, exposing how horror is not confined to the individual but seeps through history itself. The echoes between Gein’s fixation with human skin and Koch’s grotesque trophies of wartime cruelty are chilling, illuminating a macabre lineage of dehumanisation and control. These sequences are taut, horrifying, and purposeful — grounding the story not in gore for its own sake, but in the psychology of obsession and the cyclical nature of human evil. It’s here that the series finds its clearest voice: a reminder that monstrosity, while personal, is never unique.

Laurie Metcalf is vivid as Augusta, her presence oppressive as a coiled voice of the Old Testament — and how emotional neglect, family violence, and fervent religious guilt intertwine to give equal shape to a broken psyche. But the series leans so heavily into this mother-as-monster myth that it threatens to eclipse the real horror: the women Gein murdered and the bodies he desecrated.

Whiplash between horror and humanity

Watching Monster: The Ed Gein Story feels like being thrashed about by a relentless tide of emotion and tone — one moment you’re deep in Gein’s psychosis, the next you’re watching something that you almost feel sympathy for, then abruptly flung into grotesque, nauseating gore. There’s a constant whiplash between fascination and disgust, between the impulse to understand and the urge to look away. You’re made to feel sympathy, then horror at your own sympathy.

It’s a dizzying push and pull: reality dissolving into hallucination, guilt into voyeurism. Your own frantic pendulum swing makes it hard to stop and appreciate any singular moment of craft or character, and while the pacing and time jumps of the series are good, but this leaves no space to breathe.

Where the show might have interrogated this oscillation — the moral vertigo of trying to understand a man like Gein — it instead gets lost in it. The direction seems fascinated by its own depravity, revelling in the power to make us recoil and then soften, recoil again, then question why we softened at all. That, perhaps, is the most unsettling aspect of all: being manipulated not just by Gein’s madness, but by the show itself.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story: A Flawed but Fascinating Descent

By the final episodes, the ambition of the horror-drama drifts. The hallucinations, the twistings of reality, the intercutting with cultural aftershocks — these all converge in a blur that confuses shock with profundity. It leaves you with an impression not only of horror but of personal emptiness. And when a series about death and desecration fails to grapple with life and consequence, it leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Alfred Hitchcock says — after a young Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari) actor stares at shrunken heads (and… other body parts) and tells him “they will never let him make” Psycho — in the second episode: “I wish to change cinema to reflect how we are, not how we wish we were. The urges of some individuals are baser than others, but polite society burdens us with the fiction that these urges do not exist. That transforms these urges into secrets we must hide, and these secrets make us sick.”

So, it asks — is it better that this is all out in the open, in front of our eyes? Would we look less? I’d say no — brutality is in front of our eyes every day, to the point that we are desensitised. Our movies are now more action-packed and bloodthirsty than ever before, we fall asleep listening to gory true crime podcasts, and we now live in a world of heinous war crimes that are not hidden an ocean away anymore, but caught on video which play non-stop on tiny screens in our pockets. It’s a nice point they’re trying to make here, but it’s not the secrecy that makes us look on in fascination.

Still, I’ll grant it this: it’s not easy to depict someone like Gein without veering into caricature or glamorisation of gore, ghastliness, or serial killer lore. Perhaps by making the series about us, and our inability to look away, is the only way this series could be done at all.

So: if you, like me, are drawn inexorably to true crime, know that Monster: The Ed Gein Story will challenge, disturb, and sometimes frustrate you. It is a flawed experiment in what happens when we try to dramatise, even revel in, evil in all its abjection. It is not a masterpiece; it is a mirror — one that demands we ask not only why we watch, but what it says about us that we do.

After watching, I find myself unsettled — not particularly by what I’ve seen, but by what it means about my own psyche and person, that I sat through it.