Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s show “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” (2025) continues the inveterate legacy of insensitive, garish, and reckless fetishisation of serial killing mania. In the guise of a deep dive into a killer’s psyche, the makers roll out a grotesque display of misguided empathy for the loveless Gein, whose rampages are dispensed with little ethical consideration. Violence limns the scenes, without any due thought as to how women’s bodies are re-assaulted in filmic depiction. The victims are yet again harried and hounded on screen, with reprieve wholly missing. Despite visual extremities, the series keeps going on and on, lurching from one careening, horrific episode to the other.
There’s no abating; the viewer keeps getting battered with tiring re-staging of unspeakable acts. Despite all the posturing about psychoanalysing Gein’s motivations, there’s little it advances on the rankling misogyny flooding the show. It only recapitulates in a mindless loop the cycle of violence and debauchery, rendering the streamer Netflix and audiences complicit in eager consumption. It’s an insensate circus repeating ad nauseam, cashing in on a built, uncomplaining viewer base.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025) Netflix Series Recap:
The tale of the lonely Wisconsin serial killer, infamous for his deeds in the 1950s, occupies the show. When the narrative kicks off, we meet him in a pall of isolation, attending to his mother, Augusta. She schools him in deeply puritanical views, breeding his hate and intolerance of women who don’t pertain to a strict moral code. There’s a lot of self-abnegation he has internalised, wearing his mother’s undergarments as well.
Who’s Ed’s first victim?
When Ed meets Adeline and she shows him grotesque photographs from Nazi concentration camps, he’s instantly piqued. This would become the bedrock of his carnal, hedonistic pursuits. He also stumbles across Ilse Koch, who would keep human skin remnants. Ed kills his elder brother, Henry, when the latter insists he must free himself of his mother’s clutches.
The whole thing gets buried. But soon, his mother dies, and he puts a corpse in his mother’s chair. Ed’s fantasies take on hallucinatory, grisly edges, intercut with the Nazi reign. We can also gauge Norman Bates’ behaviour, having a direct line from Ed. The relationship with Adeline seems to get intimate until she arrives at his house and sees a corpse in Augusta’s chair. Horrified, she scampers off. Ed kills a bar owner, Mary, and yet again, no such seriousness is attributed to his having a hand.
How does Ed’s perverse kink take shape?
Ed gets clad in his mother’s clothes and dances around. The cops don’t suspect Ed; he feigns innocence and oblivion throughout. Ed proposes to Adeline at the graveyard. He frightens kids at a babysitting gig. Adeline starts living with Ed. The show keeps intercutting with his actions, inspiring certain films. Anthony Perkins struggles with the impact of playing Norman Bates.
Adeline plays along with Ed as he shares what he did to the woman’s body that she discovers. He has also killed Evelyn and wears her panties. He has a tryst with a store cashier, Bernice, who urges him to move in with her. Ed hallucinates his mother telling him Bernice has a sexually transmitted disease. Ed ends up shooting Bernice and chopping her up. He shows Adeline the body. There are detours into the making of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” juxtaposed with Ed wearing Bernice’s skin.
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How is Ed apprehended?
Clashes between Ed and Adeline erupt. She goes to New York, bolstered by ambition, but it doesn’t pan out well. She comes up against harsh situations, leading to her killing the landlord. Returning to Wisconsin, she’s spurned by her mother as well as Ed. He hurls ice over her as she passes out in a bathtub. Frank, whose mother was Bernice, sees a gift box in the store with Ed’s name and goes with the cops to his house, which is a mess. He chances across his mother’s mutilated body in Ed’s barn, but the latter insists he’s done no wrong.
Ed is taken into custody, and Adeline maintains she is only an acquaintance. Ed discloses that he did rob corpses but denies feeding on human flesh. He tells the cops he cannot recall having killed those he did. Ed is placed in a mental institution. Frank is determined to auction off Ed’s belongings as a way of getting justice. Ed’s house was burnt down. Ed has a conversation with Ilse, who later hangs herself. He has deeper doubts about his gender and attacks further in the hospital bathroom.
The doctor shares with Ed details of his schizophrenia, all the conversations he had. He assures him he will give pills that can ease the hallucinations. There’s no sincere, searching attempt to look through the moral rot, scan the pressures and spite that push someone into this kind of monstrosity. How does a person reconfigure from losing all humanity to such barbarity? Where’s the tipping line?
Can one go over so brusquely? Yes, there’s the pent-up rage boiling underneath, catalysed and precipitated by a bitter, stormy mother, who insists and cautions Gein about women being vessels of sin. He takes this dictum to heart and primes it as the rationale for his terrifying, snowballing crimes that know no halt. There’s no intermission to the string of killings as they descend unchecked.
There are no correctives or salves as a man wreaks havoc with no fear of repercussion. The empathy the makers gesture towards him strikes as misplaced, lacking a firm context and underpinning, as far as his victims are concerned. They are allowed no personality or dimension, lumped together in a slapdash, uncharacteristic succession.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025) Netflix Series Ending Explained:
How does Ed help the FBI nab another serial killer?
The eighth and final episode opens with a detour to 1970s Washington, and the exploits of another serial killer, Ted Bundy, come up in the picture. Bundy rapes and murders women, only to come back and do the same with their corpses. The FBI shows Ed pictures of Bundy’s victims. He tells them that they should look for people who recently bought the particular kind of saws, which is how Bundy uses them as his tool
Ed pores over newspaper clippings, scattered details, and grim fragments of Bundy’s crimes, trying to piece together a psychological profile — to trace a pattern that might reveal the killer’s mind. Soon after, we’re introduced to another murderer, Richard Speck, who has been terrorizing nurses. Richard confides in Ed that he idolizes him, seeing in him a kindred spirit. But through sharp intuition and careful deduction, Ed realizes that another man Richard mentions — someone who also worships him and has been preying on young women — is none other than Ted Bundy. When Bundy is finally arrested, Ed feels a rush of vindication, the chilling satisfaction of having been right all along.
Later, Ed is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. So, he’s just counting the days. When Adeline visits him, Ed shares his disappointment in her, insisting she take medicines. Ed dies, soon after Adeline says she has put together a list of people she’s keen on killing. The final scene of the show is more idealised, depicting a happy, merciful, loving Augusta reassuring her son. One only wishes Ed had received the same love and attention while growing up. So much bloodshed and spite could have been dispensed with.
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