The latest installment of Ryan Murphy‘s Monster anthology series centered around Ed Gein — but how did the show wrap up the notorious serial killer’s story?
Season 3 — titled Monster: The Ed Gein Story — premiered on Friday, October 3, with Charlie Hunnam playing the infamous murderer and body snatcher. Netflix’s version focused on the events leading up to Gein turning into a convicted murderer who robbed graves and created furniture out of human body parts.
The eight-episode season also explored how Gein’s crimes helped true crime evolve into a pop culture phenomenon via iconic films like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
After getting arrested for two murders, Gein was found unfit to stand trial and transferred to a mental health facility. He was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia and was able to treat his mental health issues with the help of medication.
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The show’s finale showed Ed’s fantasies turned from daydreams about murder to him thinking he helped the FBI catch Ted Bundy (John T. O’Brien). He was later diagnosed with cancer and received a visit from Adeline (Suzanna Son), whom he convinced not to follow in his murderous footsteps.
Ed went on to see a vision of the various killers he inspired as they praised him before he reunited with a vision of his mother (Laurie Metcalf). Monster’s final scene showed a group of teenagers trashing Gein’s gravestone before being scared off by the various fictional versions of Gein — Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill and Leatherface — as Hunnam’s Gein watched on.
Before the credits, there is a flashback to a scene between Gein and his mother, who said, “Only a mother could love you.”
“We always knew that we wanted to climax our story with our exploration of the nature of mental illness and how it had affected Ed,” Hunnam told Tudum after the show premiered. “If he had gotten the right treatment sooner, [the question becomes] if he would’ve ever done the things that he did. I really wept inconsolably reading that scene for the first couple of times.”
He added: “He really lived in that world, and the parameters and fantasies of that world were as real to him as anything else. It was just his reality. Those manic episodes were the experience he was having, just like anything else.”
Murphy, meanwhile, was glad they offered Gein a diagnosis.
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“All eight episodes, I thought, depended on that scene. The miraculous thing about that episode was that the take that you see in that, of Charlie’s performance, is his first take, which he nailed,” he noted. “I think I called [Charlie] twice crying on the phone. I was so moved by what [he] had done.”
The creative team behind Monster was determined to start a conversation about mental health.
“I was very interested in society’s obligation to the mentally unwell, people who are having mental crises,” Murphy shared. “Ed was the perfect person to talk about that because when he was apprehended, he [was] very quickly diagnosed, and he was given great care by a society. He was taken to different hospitals. He was treated well. He was given the correct medications.”
He concluded: “We used to be a country that took care of our mentally unwell. There were systems in place. There were hospitals. There were sanitariums. We explore how that has degraded in our country. What I love about [episode 7] is it shows people how it can be: how it can actually help generations of people — and then what happens when that money is taken away.”
Monster is currently streaming on Netflix.
