Ed Gein, American Monster

Ed Gein was not a serial killer in the classic sense. He confessed to two murders, was suspected of seven more and was guilty of mutilating at least nine dead bodies, many of which were the product of grave robberies. Despite this, his name looms large in the annals of American crime and is often brought up in relation to serial murderers such as Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez. Monster: The Ed Gein Story, a limited series on Netflix, explores the life, times and legacy of one of America’s most notorious and macabre criminals.

Gein came to national prominence in 1957 when authorities discovered that he had been digging up bodies from his local cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin and fashioning mementoes from their remains. His gruesome exploits became the basis for Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho, which inspired the Hitchcock film. Gein’s legacy – if a murderer can be said to have one – was to influence not only Bloch and Hitchcock, but also Tobbe Hooper’s seminal 1974 slasher flick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In a less constructive way, one also suspects that Gein’s macabre ways also exerted some influence over the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, who engaged in similar desecration of corpses. Monster: The Ed Gein Story tells Gein’s story in a series of flashbacks from differing perspectives, nested together like figurines within a Matryoshka doll.

Within the master narrative of the film itself (i.e., the large doll), we join both Ed Gein and the American pulp imagination in journeying back to Nazi Germany during World War II. These flashbacks do service to describe Ed Gein’s para-social erotic fixation on Ilse Koch, wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp. By immersing himself in an erotic comic book entitled The Bitch of Buchenwald, which depicts Koch’s horrific sexual degradation of inmates, Gein seeks to come to grips with the cruelty of the Holocaust while slaking his imagination’s need for violent sexual fantasies.

The next layer of flashbacks are Ed Gein’s alone. Following the death of his ultra-religious and controlling mother, Gein is free to indulge his sexual impulses. These run the gamut from auto-erotic asphyxiation, to cross-dressing to necrophilia. Intercut with these episodes are recollections of life with Mother, which soon become spectral visitations. Mrs. Gein lives as a voice in her son’s head, shaming his every impulse toward love and connection, dooming his hopeful romance with Adeline, a local girl with whom he shares a fascination for the macabre. For when Mother’s spectral visitations expand into the positioning of female corpses around the house as stand-ins for the dead woman, Gein’s fascination repulses her and destroys his final opportunity for interpersonal connection.

Another series of flashbacks involve Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins during production of Psycho. These are presented as the sudden appearance of Ed Gein in the background during discussions about developing the film. Intermixed into these cameos is the sub-narrative of Anthony Perkins’ own struggles with his concealed homosexuality. Young Perkins is a character in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, portrayed as a Hollywood ingénue staring down the barrel of his first major film role, directed by no less an intimidating personage than Alfred Hitchcock himself. During a haunting discussion on the set of the Bates home (Gein makes a cameo), Hitchcock explains that he chose Perkins for the role because, like Gein, he suffers from a sickness caused by sexual repression.

The sequences that involve the filming of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – the narrative of which was allegedly directly inspired by Gein’s pursuit of two hunters through the woods with a chainsaw – provide the most jarring invocation of Gein-as-legacy. Portions of Chainsaw are intercut with the “real life” action portrayed in Monster. Gein’s arrest in 1957, and the public’s fascination with the macabre details, may be – if not the first, then certainly the most influential elevation of a killer to public scrutiny within the American media landscape. This connection between murder, media celebrity and cultural influence is perhaps best embodied in the character of Adeline Watkins, portrayed with considerable artistic license by Suzanna Son.

The real life Watkins, far from the sultry girl-child portrayed as Gein’s staunch companion and sometimes romantic partner, sprang to public attention when, at the age of 50 in 1957, she claimed to have been Gein’s girlfriend for two decades. She recanted this some weeks later in an interview with the Stevens Point Daily Journal where she offered a more circumspect version of her friendship with Gein. Watkins may be the first example of a “serial killer groupie” – a species of female fan like the ones who sent love letters to Richard Ramirez and who sought marriage to the likes of Charles Manson. The centrality of Watkins to the narrative, while historically inaccurate, underscores the theme of legacy, which is central to Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

It is one thing to tell the story of a killer. It is something altogether different to do so with a tacit nod to America’s fascination with the evil and the macabre. Monster: The Ed Gein Story explores both with gruesome efficacy and great economy of narrative: Recommended, but with viewer discretion advised.