Did you know that the same real-life serial killer inspired the likes of Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs?

Ryan Murphy’s latest Netflix series, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, is keen to remind you that Gein’s gruesome reputation has loomed large over the American horror canon for decades. Yet in giving into their own worst voyeuristic impulses and failing to make its central character into anything resembling a human being, the latest installment of the Monster anthology series that dropped last week once again lapses into the very sort of titillation it claims to critique.

For all the lurid, big-screen horrors that Gein influenced, his fictional counterpart’s early years are a study in the most ordinary of miseries.

When Ed (played here by Sons of Anarc

See Full Page