The Monster anthology’s third season reopens the jar on Ed Gein’s haunted biography. Charlie Hunnam portrays Gein, the man whose crimes—grave robbing, body-part bricolage, and murder—would echo through popular horror lore. The series frames parts of his story in dialogue with Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, not as random homages but as tangled offspring of his real terrors. In Brennan and Murphy’s vision, Gein becomes less a cartoon monster and more a wounded, twisted cipher, one whose crimes are horrific yet whose mind the show insists we try to enter (with trembling toes).
Hunnam sinks into Gein with a slow, gutting creepiness. His eyes carry a brittle emptiness—never quite manic, but always on the verge. He doesn’t bark; he whispers, drifts, obsesses. There’s terror in his quietness. Yet I found myself conflicted: the show leans hard into presenting Gein as a tragic victim—his mother’s death, isolation, religious trauma—maybe too hard. At times it nudges you to pity him, or even rationalise him, and that moral balancing act stumbles. Sympathy is one thing; exoneration is another.
The supporting cast bolsters the tone beautifully. Laurie Metcalf as Augusta Gein is the weight around his neck—rigid, unforgiving, suffocating. Suzanna Son’s Adeline Watkins is positioned as both companion and confessor, a romantic thread inserted later in the narrative (and historically debated). Tom Hollander plays Alfred Hitchcock with wry distance, while Olivia Williams as Alma Reville offers sharp commentary on art, illusion and the ethics of storytelling. Vicky Krieps as Ilse Koch adds a dark mythic edge, tying Gein’s aesthetic obsessions to darker historical shadows. Joey Pollari, as Anthony Perkins, haunts the show in spectral cameos that underline the chain of influence. Meanwhile, in the background, investigators like Sheriff Schley and Deputy Worden slowly close the circle.
One of the show’s bravest moves: its Psycho-inspired cutaway. When the narrative strains, it fractures into black-and-white Hitchcockian tension—shower water, silhouette, music. That moment doesn’t feel like a disconnection; it reads like memory bleeding into myth. And the series doesn’t stop there — later we sense a hothouse nod to something more visceral and chainsaw-adjacent, without ever overplaying it. It’s raw cinematic teasing, not a cheap stunt.
There are places where the show departs sharply from the sparse real record. SPOILER: the Adeline romance, the ties to Bundy, the flights of fantasy with killer icons—all of it is dramatized, sometimes boldly so. Some production commentary admits these liberties. That said, the choice to blur fact and hallucination drives home a point: storytelling becomes its own monster. And indeed, Monster leans into that beautifully.
Visually, the series nails the mood. The rural chill, the sagging wood of the farmhouse, the harsh Wisconsin winters—the palette drifts between iodine pale and sepia shadows. And the pacing? Deliberate. It doesn’t rush. The dread grows in the silence between moments. At times I wished for just a little more momentum, but the payoff lands.
In comparison to Season 2, this feels more focused, more thematically ambitious. It’s not perfect (some arcs meander), but it has a gutsy heart. It reminds us why Monster works: not because it replays crimes, but because it questions how we mythologize them. Ian Brennan is building something gore-soaked and grimly reflective, and with Ed Gein he may just have his sharpest season yet.
