There’s a lot that ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ didn’t get right
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have brought fans Ed Gein’s story. Well, sort of. There are plenty of aspects of the Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story that are made up or sold as truths when there isn’t any truth behind it.
We know that it is confirmed that Gein admitted to killing two women. There have been rumors about others who disappeared that Gein maybe had a hand in and there are a lot of mysteries we just won’t ever have the answers to. Which means that Murphy and Brennan did take some liberties in his story.
Ed Gein was the kind of serial killer who inspired some of our most notorious horror movies. He inspired Alfred Hitchcock with his warped relationship with his mother for Hitchcock’s film Psycho and he inspired the creatives behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre thanks to Gein’s obsession with human flesh and using it to make things.
Those things have sensationalized the serial killer into being an infamous monster. But when written on paper, his crimes are severely less sensationalized than others of his ilk. He’s not a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Ted Bundy. He doesn’t have the murder rooms of H.H. Holmes. And so what the series did was put theories about Gein into the show. Like the disappearance of babysitter Evelyn Hartley (Addison Rae), who Gein was questioned about but never admitted to killing.
While many of the “fictions” of the show are based in rumors about Gein, there is one twist that doesn’t have a real connection to Gein’s story at all. But the show does have a unique ability to “explain” this away by saying it is all in Gein’s mind.
Did Ed Gein help catch Ted Bundy?
The end of Monster: The Ed Gein Story takes us into Murphy and Brennan’s version of Mindhunter. Which, no thank you, but the episode in question is a completely fabricated look at Gein. FBI agents would profile convicted serial killers to try to help them capture current ones. Famously Ed Kemper helped kick off the program within the FBI.
Gein, however, was never part of this program. And the final episode, which features Gein talking to two FBI agents, insinuates that Gein helped to catch infamous killer Ted Bundy. That is far from the truth and not anywhere close to what happened. Now, the show could have been saying that this was a figment of Gein’s imagination but it does have people asking if it was true.
No, it was not. Gein was not helpful in catching Bundy. The show does insinuate that Gein gave new information on Bundy that helped lead to his arrest but famously Bundy was arrested at a traffic light and then escaped authorities two times in total. None of the arrests from authorities were because of Gein.
Whether the episode was meant to show that Gein thought he was more important than he was or whether it was the team just having fun, it isn’t true.
(featured image: Netflix)
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