The third installment in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series stars Charlie Hunnam, Laurie Metcalf, Suzanna Son, Tom Hollander and Olivia.
After two seasons examining killers that have had extensive media coverage over the past 40 or so years, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster franchise takes a turn to the historic. There will be a season about Lizzie Borden in the near future, and the third season is about Ed Gein, who killed numerous people in Wisconsin in the 1940s and 50s; he was a huge influence on a number of horror movie directors and writers, including Alfred Hitchcock.
Opening Shot: A farmhouse on a snowy day, seen through the door of the adjacent barn.
The Gist: Ed Gein (Charlie Hunnam) milks a cow, dipping his hands into the milk bucket after its filled. He walks to another house and stands and watches a girl through her bedroom door.
Back at his house, his mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf) is screaming for him; Ed is in her bedroom, wearing her undergarments and performing some extreme self-pleasure. When Augusta finds him, she tells him he brings her shame with his sins. She’s a very religious sort, and she yells at him that “women are sin,” and he won’t be “spilling your seed” with one, or marry one.
Ed does have a girl he likes, though: Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) meets him in town and shows him horrific concentration camp photos that somehow made their way to her. They’re both fascinated by the Nazis and the death camps they run. She also gives him a comic book about Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), “The Bitch of Buchenwald.”
His older brother Henry (Hudson Oz) comes around the barn to tell him that they both need to get out of Augusta’s clutches; Ed’s response is to crush the back of his brother’s skull with a log. But Ed imagines Henry is still alive, popping up from the pool of blood he was in to say “you got me good.” Only the next day, when Ed comes back to the barn, does he learn that’s not the case. He makes a brush fire to cover up the murder, and it seems that the medical examiner is willing to rule Henry died of smoke inhalation, despite evidence to the contrary.
In her grief, Augusta has a stroke. Ed launches into taking care of her, stripping her down to give her sponge baths.
