“It’s like your mind is a mirror that somebody dropped on the floor. So everything you’ve ever seen or heard or read or imagined — there are all these shards reflecting back at you, and you can’t tell what’s real and what’s a fantasy.”
This is how the psychiatrist (Randall Newsome) treating Ed Gein at the mental hospital where he has been institutionalized describes Ed’s condition. It’s schizophrenia, he says, and it’s caused him to remember commiting crimes he never committed — like killing the new head nurse for bullying him, in a scene that may or many even have been real itself — he didn’t do, as well as forget ones he did — like killing Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, the latter of whom at least he considered a friend. (He does eventually remember killing Bernice and Mary, the only two victims every officially linked to Gein, and he’s devastated to realize it.)
It’s also writer-creator Ian Brennan’s approach to this material. The titular story is only partially about Ed Gein the man; it’s largely about Ed Gein the myth. Covering both his official victims and those he is suspected of killing, it’s working through the entire American Gein gestalt. As such it ricochets back and forth from the past to the future, from fiction to reality.
I reviewed the seventh episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, Monster, monster: the ed gein story, TV, TV reviews