Gein Exhumed: The Serial Killer Myth Machine of America Unleashed

Brennan and Murphy have just committed an act of desecration. And it’s brilliant.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story betrays everything you’d expect from a series about serial killers. Ed Gein killed two people. Two. His shattered mind barely registered the crimes. He wasn’t Bundy charming victims with a smile. He wasn’t Gacy burying bodies under his house. He wasn’t Dahmer perfecting a homemade lobotomy. Gein was a mentally broken man who robbed graves and made lamps out of human skin. A psychiatric case, not a predatory killer. But Robert Bloch turned him into Norman Bates. Hitchcock turned him into a cultural nightmare, an icon of “sex horror.” Tobe Hooper gave him a chainsaw and made him the patron saint of the slasher film. Thomas Harris and Rob Zombie extracted his marrow and turned it into mythology. The real monster was never Gein, it was America discovering that its own sons could rival Nazi horrors.

Here lies Brennan and Murphy’s perverse genius: they know the real story of Gein isn’t enough. A potato and an onion, as Demna Gvasalia once said about his creative days at Balenciaga before leaping to Gucci with an infinite pantry. But Brian Eno knew something Gvasalia forgot: limitations don’t kill creativity, they force it to evolve. Eno’s Oblique Strategies were deliberate self sabotage, cards that imposed absurd constraints to provoke unexpected solutions. Minimalism as creative violence. Brennan and Murphy faced the same dilemma: how do you build an entire season around a man who barely qualifies as a serial killer? The answer: ignore the facts and ruthlessly plunder the grave of American culture without a shred of mercy.

The series abandons true crime and mutates into deranged cultural archaeology. Brennan and Murphy unearthed the EC Comics of the 1950s, those magazines that mixed sex and dismemberment until the Hays Code castrated them. They summon Robert Bloch’s pulp novels, where terror no longer came from gothic castles but from the neighbor next door. They exhume the collective hysteria surrounding concentration camps, the exaggerated tales of lampshades made from human skin that turned out to be propaganda but infected the public imagination. They resurrect Christine Jorgensen, America’s first openly transgender woman, whose very existence in the 1950s terrified the nation more than any murderer could. They invoke Hooper’s brutal slasher ethos, where violence no longer needed psychological explanation. The series devours references the way Gein devoured borrowed identities.

Some choices are unnecessary, yes. Linking Gein to Ted Bundy stretches credibility past its breaking point. Showing Gein chasing hunters with a chainsaw is pure fan service for those who think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a documentary. But then comes the sequence where Gein communicates by radio with Ilse Koch, the so called “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and Christine Jorgensen. It’s obscene. It’s impossible. It’s imagination running without safety brakes. Koch, like Gein, was mythologized far beyond her actual crimes. America needed both to be more monstrous than they were, because it needed to believe evil had a recognizable face.

The series dissects the overgrown myth. Gein didn’t inspire anyone, the concept of Gein did. It validated the idea of the serial killer, put them on the cultural map. The shock of discovering depravity wasn’t exclusive to Nazis but thrived in Wisconsin farms among seemingly harmless men. Brennan and Murphy know they’re filming folklore, not history. That’s why it works where the Menendez season collapsed, those brothers demanded documentary truth, but Gein was always fiction. From the moment Bloch wrote Psycho loosely based on him, Gein stopped belonging to reality. Like that hallucinatory ending where Gein, after dying, ascends to the afterlife to the tune of Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart, in their New Wave phase, welcomed joyfully by Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Ed Kemper, and Jerry Brudos.

Jennifer Lynch should’ve been here. Her Dahmer episodes had that lucid nightmare texture this expanded mythology demanded. And one scene is missing: Errol Morris and Werner Herzog desecrating the grave of Augusta Gein, the mother who destroyed Ed, while Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask” plays. Herzog understood that some acts of cultural transgression reveal truths that respect never can. Brennan and Murphy almost get there.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story will disappoint the serial killer obsessives who collect facts like trading cards. But for those who understand that popular culture is built by grave robbing and dressing the bones, this is a masterclass. Necessity remains the mother of invention. And when all you have is a potato, an onion, and a mythological corpse, you cook something no one’s ever tasted before.