Caution: Spoilers ahead.

Shock value or substance? The dilemma over the portrayal of serial killers is as enduring as the unending stream of films, books and shows about them. A new Netflix series dives into the debate, claiming to offer a peek into the twisted soul of the American murderer Ed Gein.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story doesn’t just reopen the case file. The show by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan is equally about Gein’s influence on popular culture because of his gory crimes.

Gein was arrested in 1959 for killing two women. Investigations revealed that Gein also raided graves, using the skin and bones from the corpses to fashion objects that lay around his house – including facial coverings, leggings and a lampshade.

Gein’s unhealthy fixation on his mother Augusta, his inability to form normal relationships with women, possibly undiagnosed schizophrenia – these were among the explanations given for his actions.

The Ed Gein Story follows two previous seasons about the serial killer Jeffery Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, who were convicted for killing their parents. The new instalment tilts heavily in favour of tawdriness, sensationalism and over-ripe drama.

Uncomfortable parallels are drawn between Gein’s crimes and the Holocaust. Despite his awkwardness, Gein (Charlie Hunnam) attracts true crime devotee Adeline (Suzanna Son). Adeline is fascinated with dreadful imagery, triggering Gein when she show him photographs of the horrors at the concentration camps.

The pictures paradoxically disturb and numb Gein. If humans can treat other humans in this way, why should he be blamed for maintain his own house of horrors in his basement?

Vicky Krieps plays Isle Koch, based on the German woman whose Nazi officer husband was the commandant at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Koch appears before Gein in campy dream sequences. The show accepts as fact the apocryphal story that Koch had a lampshade made out of the skin of Jewish prisoners lying around in her living room.

The woman who affects Gein the most is his abusive, puritanical mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf). Augusta constantly reminds Gein that women are vessels of sin. She severely punishes him when she catches him trying to satisfy his needs – while wearing her lingerie.

Gein finds ways to keep Augusta alive even after her demise. The series is littered with visuals of women being objectified, attacked and brutalised.

Misogyny – the central theme of serial killers who target women – is entirely missing from the slickly staged chronicle of sickness. Rather, directors Ian Brennan and Max Winkler are deeply sympathetic towards Gein, even while showing his depravity in gruesome detail.

The severely bloated series makes Gein out to be a victim himself of a terrible mother, compelled by inner needs he cannot fathom and tipped over by external forces he cannot control. The perception of Gein as a lonely, pathetic and ultimately tragic figure is enhanced by Charlie Hunnam’s astutely judged performance.

The Ed Gein Story has a more fruitful conversation with popular culture’s fascination for serial killers. Gein’s exploits inspired several works of fiction, including Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho in 1959, adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into the film of the same name in 1960.

Gein also served as the direct inspiration for Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs, adapted by Jonathan Demme for the Oscar-winning film of the same name.

Several scenes in The Ed Gein Story are devoted to the making of Psycho. The show concocts meetings between Psycho’s author Bloch, Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) and his wife and collaborator Alma (Olivia Williams).

It is a violent country, Bloch tells Hitchcock while attempting to make sense of Ed Gein. In reality, Bloch didn’t met Hitchcock until after the film adaptation was completed. Also, Hitchcock had moved to America in the 1940s itself, and would have been well aware of the country’s ways.

The series gives Hitchcock lines that actually feature in Bloch’s novel. Our audience lives in a time when the moral compass is off – the real monsters are humans, Hitchcock drawls.

Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari), the actor who plays Norman Bates in Psycho, is portrayed as a tortured soul, not too different from Bates. In a fantasy sequence, Gein appears before Perkins, telling him, you are the one who can’t look away.

If the Holocaust appears to have provoked Gein, the Vietnam war is the backdrop for Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Can you imagine what Ed Gein would have done if he saw what America is doing in Vietnam, Hooper (Will Brill) wants to know.

By this time, Gein is an asylum, where he is a benign, silver-haired version of his perverse self. Gein is a role model, if it can be called that, for other serial killers. In one of the most egregious dream sequences, Gein is heralded by the men who have tried to outdo him in cruelty, from Charles Manson to Jerry Brudos.

The creator who bypasses Gein’s grisly trail to understand how he got there deserves a medal. That honour can’t be bestowed on the show’s creators, who are too fond of hideous imagery and too suffused with misguided empathy to give Ed Gein’s monstrosity the reappraisal it deserves.

Also read:

Book versus film: How Alfred Hitchcock transported the spine-chilling ‘Psycho’ to the screen

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