Ed Gein, the monster season that flirts with the unbearable (critic)

With the 3rd chapter of his anthology “True Crime”, Ryan Murphy exhumes one of the most terrifying criminals in America who became a cinema. A completely fascinating nightmare story, which hides a tribute to the 7th art … to make it all bearable?

It is almost a return to the origins of evil for the anthology “true crime” of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan.

You are not ready for Ed Gein, an American murderer from the depths of the Wisconsin, an incarnation of human ignominy to his climax since the 1940s. Ed Gein, it is the absolute psychopath, the killer without conscience or limit. If the portrait of Dahmer had something truly freezing and the trial of the brothers Menendez of fairly disturbing, this new season of monster – launched this Friday on Netflix – rocks, in the outright horror.

It all starts on his little Midwest farm. Ed, a nigudic and influencing boy, lives under the yoke of a disturbing mother, a woman of faith rigor with brutal punishment. Marked by the psychological violence of his geniror, by the departure of his father, but also by the revelation of the death camps and Nazi barbarism, the young farmer feeds more and more dark impulses. Increasingly sordid. Until the day his older brother announces that he leaves the house for good.

Small jump in time: when the authorities discovered his farm, in the late 1950s, they came across a nightmarish spectacle that resonated for decades in horror cinema. Ed Gein, it was the killer who inspired psychosis, massacre with the chainsaw or the silence of the lambs. A real croquemitaine that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan auscultate from every angle.

A necrophilic feverish assassin

First, they try to explain, through a striking psychological study. Because we always want to understand. But very quickly, the story rocks towards the terrifying various facts. Spectacular murders of Ed Gein, they mainly retain raw madness, that of an unpaid unbalanced. A schizophrenic never diagnosed, capable of killing anytime without ever becoming aware of his gestures. The macabre collection of gein is so delusional that it seems unreal: we are still talking about a necrophilic tomcator who took her breakfast in a human skull and had ended up cutting the face of her dead mother to make a mask. His unhealthy obsessions went to an unimaginable fascination for Ilsa Koch, the “Buchenwald witch”, known for making objects with the skin of the camp prisoners.

How to play something like this? Charlie Hunnam goes there. He gives Gein a little voice of “killer to mom” confusing and uninhibited. He is both amazing calm and terrifying violence. But it is so inhabited that you end up looking at its performance with a certain distance. This is the reproach that could be made to this season 3 – moreover very successful: Monster goes so far in the abject that it creates as an involuntary filter. Impossible to convince yourself that such a monstrosity has really existed: we look at this little store of horrors like a fascinating spectacle.

From the birth of a chainsaw massacre psychosis

This is undoubtedly also why Ryan Murphy chose to transform his monster into a tribute to the 7th art, scrutinizing the trace left by Gein in American culture. The series often makes side steps, abandoning the “True Crime” to show its influence on cinema. The authors even stage Alfred Hitchcock (interpreted by Tom Hollander) in full creation of psychosis, revealing how Anthony Perkins seized the character, who himself lived a double life in Hollywood (forced to hide his homosexuality). Then comes massacre with the chainsaw, which takes up the “trophies” of Gein. Monster almost traces the history of horror cinema by showing how the real horror has nourished the collective imagination.

Yes, there are a lot in this season 3. Maybe a little too much. By dint of multiplying prisms, the series dilutes the terror and sometimes is less afraid that it could have. Certainly 8 hours of Ed Gein without filter would have been inregardable. Such horror, humanity is not ready to take it head on.

Monster – Ed Gein, in 8 episodes, to see on Netflix from October 3, 2025