Monster: The Ed Gein Story

"Only a mother could love you, Eddie."

The incestuous, manipulatively twisted, psychologically torturous relationship between a young Ed Gein and his controlling mother, in the countryside just outside La Crosse, Wisconsin is where the third season of the Netflix series Monster takes off. The year is 1944 and Ed hammers his older brother Henry to death after he announces his intention to leave the farm, escape their psychotic mother and start a new life elsewhere, far away. It is then and there that Ed the killer is born. When he realises for the first time how easy it really is to escape the long arm of the law and live a life without any real obligations, restrictions, prohibitions, duties or musts. The rest, as we say, is history. A highly publicised and well-documented one over the years about the man still described as the worst serial killer in criminal history.

Ed Gein murdered mostly women and one of his most passionate hobbies was dismembering them, eating their internal organs, skinning them, washing their skin and making them into leather dresses. His dead mother (who died of a stroke shortly after her son Henry was found dead at home on the farm) was kept, dressed in her Sunday best, in a rocking chair upstairs in the family home, and Ed was more than happy to spend time dressing up as his own dead mum in his home-made women's leather dresses and performing little dances for her rotting corpse. No, it doesn't get any sicker than this. You can't find the sickest events in the history of crime and in many ways it seems a bit strange that Netflix has waited three seasons to delve into Eddie's psychotic behaviour.

Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam portrays Ed and considering how little I like his work in the FX series, Pacific Rim, The Gentlemen and Rebel Moon I had zero expectations that he would be able to change and portray a deeply insane serial killer in a sufficiently interesting and unpleasant way. However, it was already apparent in the pilot episode that, most likely for the first time in his career, Charlie really worked hard to portray a person rather than a shrill, exaggerated caricature and there is no ambiguity whatsoever in the fact that he is doing by far the best role of his life here. Hunnam's portrayal of Gein is as dark, evil, insane, psychotic and bizarre as it is nuanced and at times very gentle. Hunnam is at his best when he brings out the soft side of Ed Gein and then, with a kind of chilling unease, really gets to the heart of how an insane person is most likely to function. Often he does not remember what he has actually done. Rarely does he do anything out of pure rage, but is rather calculated and calm, which only reinforces the feeling of discomfort.

Equally good is Suzanna Son as Ed's girlfriend Adeline Watkins. Their relationship begins over a milkshake where both see something... odd and abnormal in each other, leading to a romance and ultimately a kind of crazy collaboration in which Adeline, who is interested in photography, takes pictures of the chainsaw-cut corpses that Ed has hung up in his own barn. The chemistry between Suzanna and Hunnam is brilliant, and they paint a picture of a relationship that's filled with darkness and strange interpretations of what a non-psychotic serial killer would see as social normalities. There is depth here, a kind of reverse humanity portrayed with excellent dexterity, and along with great cinematography and superb editing, many of the densest scenes are built up solely by careful, slow-paced dialogue packed with underlying tension and intensity. The Ed Gein Story is tight to the core and nothing is left to chance or left on the cutting table that doesn't drive the story forward. There is no fluff here, in my opinion, just a deeply creepy and fascinating insight into the mind of perhaps the worst serial killer of all time.

We know, of course, that Ed Gein and his many murders inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The British film mogul made no secret of his deep fascination with the then-imprisoned killer's relationship with his rotting mother in the 1960s, and of course based the entire story of Norman Bates on it. Tobe Hooper also based much of The Chainsaw Massacre on the stories of Gein's bloody executions and the character of Leatherface is based entirely on Gein and the murder of two lost hunters he chainsawed to death in his barn, with one of his murder victims' flayed faces strapped over his own. Two of the episodes here (out of a total of eight) revolve around the production of Psycho as well as the Chainsaw Massacre which is a daring route to go down and could have destroyed the nerve that Hunnam has built up in the role of Gein, but showrunner Ian Brennan navigates this nicely and builds a narrative structure that feels surprisingly fresh and changeable.

I liked the Monster season about Jeffrey Dahmer and thought the Menendez instalment was just fine while Ed Gein and the story of his many murders stands out as the highlight of this soot-blackened series. In other words, if you have the stomach to watch someone carve out the heart of their murder victim and cook it for dinner, you should definitely check this out.