In a sequence that dropped my jaw with its sheer audacity, a dying Ed is wheeled towards the light down a corridor full of people from the hospital, along with a gaggle of mass murderers — Speck, Brudos, Ed Kemper, Charles Manson. While the killers express their admiration and the onlookers cheer Ed on, nurses and orderlies and doctors dance to, of all things, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. (It was the song playing on MTV when he lost consciousness. Yes, Ed Gein wanted his MTV.)

So here’s the thing. I adore that song. I adore a novel use of it that doesn’t simply signify “Hey, it’s the 1980s!” I adore dream dance sequences, especially ones accompanying a person’s final moments — see also All that Jazz and the seventh season of Mad Men. And while it’s been many years since I was really in that dark place, I know an awful lot about those awful men. Seeing them as part of this joyous sequence is the exact note of discord it needed. There’s something awesome and terrible, in the old-school senses of those words, in watching Ed transcend in this way. It reminds me of how the show aims straight for the most indelible images from the three films it references: the shower scene, Leatherface twirling with his chainsaw, Bill in front of the mirror — just going right for it. I fucking loved it.

I reviewed the finale of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider. I thought this was a very impressive and troubling show.

“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.

What did Ed Gein know, and when did he know it?

It sounds like a ridiculous question: Unlike Richard Nixon, who did not conduct the Watergate break-in himself, Ed Gein did a whole bunch of crimes and violated a whole bunch of corpses. But when he is inevitably discovered, arrested, and brought in for questioning, he passes a polygraph test with flying colors even when asked about crimes there is zero evidentiary basis to believe he didn’t commit. But even in the case of Bernice Worden, whose mutilated corpse is found trussed up and decapitated in his barn, Ed sounds like a defendant in the Iran-Contra scandal: He just doesn’t recall.

Is he lying? Boy, it sure seems like it, doesn’t it? Now that he’s busted, that aw gee aw shucks dag nabbit cheese and crackers demeanor sounds not just out-of-place but disingenuous, even smug. This sick son of a bitch thinks he can please and thank you and may I his way out of multiple homicides and a charnel house of human remains that will ring through the ages as one of the worst-ever places to set foot?

But that’s just it: Maybe he does. Monster: The Ed Gein Story writer-creator Ian Brennan has been consistent in his portrayal of Ed as so deep in the grips of delusion that he can dissemble easily one second, then invite the literal police to go see the dead body he has in the upstairs bedroom the next. He seems to have no idea why some people who find him agreeable eventually get squicked out. For god’s sake, when he’s getting the living shit beaten out of him by Deputy Frank Worden (Charlie Hall), Bernice’s loving but lonely son and the poor bastard who discovers her body, Ed seems genuinely confused and upset. They’d always gotten along before, you see.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Monster for Decider.

If there’s a throughline that connects every aspect of this episode — which is Adeline’s more than it is Ed’s — it’s misogyny. Adeline flees her hometown because its only future for her is as a housewife and mother. The women’s circle is a punishing group of judgmental hypocrites who question Adeline’s womanhood even as they make excuses for their rapist sons. She’s half-forced, half-intrigued into indulging Ed’s blue balls like they’re a matter of life and death, going so far as to help dig up a corpse to take care of them.

After Weegee indulgently looks at Adeline’s photography, he first mocks her as a no-talent, then makes crude sexual comments about her until she flees. Even the landlady she savagely beats suggests finding a man is her main option. When she finally returns home, her mother — in a magnificent monologue by Weigert, one of our very best — viciously berates her, suggesting Adeline’s in some way defective because she threw herself down the stairs multiple times in an effort to end the pregnancy. 

The legal lack of reproductive freedom, like contemporary anti-trans measures that seem a million miles removed from the friendly newsreel footage of Christine as a compelling curiosity, is the ultimate state expression of woman-hatred, turning women against one another in the process. In many ways this is the most grim thing about watching The Ed Gein Story right now. Across the country, and at the highest levels of government, men are working to return the country to the benighted state it was in when Ed and Adeline went insane because of it. 

I reviewed the fifth episode of Monster for Decider.

The irony is that Psycho really doesn’t make people “look at something like this.” It seems like it does, people feel like it does, opening-night audiences have a series of health scares in this episode because it does, but it doesn’t. There’s no nudity, for example, but the shower scene and the peeping-tom routine by Norman Bates that precedes reveal nothing. (A dark sort of credit here belongs perhaps to Hitchcock’s own penchant for peeping: He’s shown spying on an actress getting changed earlier in the episode, just as both Norman and Ed do.)

There’s no graphic violence in the mother of all slasher films, either. The knife wielded by Norman Bates dressed in Mother drag never visibly pierces the naked flesh of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane. It’s all movie magic — the foley art of a knife sinking into a melon repeatedly, the meticulous storyboarding of title designer Saul Bass, George Tomasini’s precision editing, the famous screeching strings from composer Bernard Hermann, Leigh’s panicked performance, Hitchcock’s near-peerless mastery of filmmaking’s dark arts.

So Winkler and writer Ian Brennan do what they’ve been doing across both episodes, right down to a lengthy look at the fake vulvas: They make you look at it.

With Suzanna Son’s Adeline standing in for Leigh and Marion, and Ed dressed as his own mother rather than Norman Bates as his, the episode cross-cuts immaculately between the shower stabbing and the opening-night audience’s horrified reaction. This time, however, you see the knife stab and slice away at the victim’s naked body, over and over and over again. 

The brilliance of this move lies in how it relies on you, the viewer, to help make it work. That sounds wrong — it’s all right in front of you — but the better you know the original shower scene, the worse the scene is for you. You can probably already hear those horrible knife-in-melon squelching sounds, hear Marion’s gasps and cries and grunts, see the knife rising and falling, see the blood running endlessly down the shower drain. Your brain has already conjured that horror, however many times you’ve seen the movie. 

Once it becomes apparent what the show’s incredibly gutsy, borderline blasphemous act of revealing the violence carefully hidden within Hollywood’s most famous murder is doing, it dawns on you: Oh my god, I’m going to have to see the whole thing. I’m going to watch this man butcher this woman for half a minute. As the dream-Hitchcock says to Perkins during that strange hallucinatory sequence in the fake Gein house, “You’re the one who can’t look away.”

I reviewed the remarkable second episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.