The third season of Ryan Murphy's anthology series Monster, titled The Ed Gein Story, dropped on Netflix on October 3, 2025, plunging viewers into the macabre world of one of America's most infamous killers. Charlie Hunnam stars as Ed Gein, the reclusive Wisconsin farmer whose gruesome acts in the 1950s shocked the nation and inspired horror icons like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the Bates Motel archetype. Indeed, Gein's twisted obsession with his domineering mother, Augusta, forms the emotional core here, portrayed with a haunting intensity that echoes the real woman's iron grip on her sons.
Reviews have poured in quickly, with critics calling the eight-episode run graphically violent yet somewhat unfocused. Hunnam's transformation into the soft-spoken, eerie Gein—did the real man talk in that halting, whispery drawl the show suggests?—draws praise for its unflinching depth, though some say it veers into exploitative territory. The cast bolsters the tension: Lesley Manville as the formidable Augusta, Tom Hollander in a supporting role as a suspicious local, and cameos nodding to past seasons, like Evan Peters' shadow from the Dahmer installment. However, the series doesn't shy from Gein's real horrors—his body-part lampshades and masks, pulled from fresh graves and worse.
Gein died on July 26, 1984, at age 77 from respiratory failure in a Madison hospital, after decades in a mental institution. Questions linger about his brother Henry, who perished in a 1944 farm fire; suspicions that Ed started it and left him to burn have fueled speculation, though never proven in court. Moreover, Gein's capture came swiftly in November 1957, when a hardware store owner's disappearance led police to his ramshackle home, uncovering undeniable evidence of murder like Bernice Worden's slashed body. No direct link ties Gein to helping catch Ted Bundy, despite the era's serial killer overlap—that's more myth than fact.
The show weaves in Gein's cultural footprint, from Texas Chain Saw Massacre Leatherface to broader slasher tropes, but at what cost to sensitivity? As true-crime fascination grows, one wonders if retellings like this illuminate darkness or just feed it.