When a crime is so monstrous it defies imagination, imagination sometimes strikes back. To understand the calamity that has befallen the world, to process it in such a way that the mind can move forward, it can enlarge the problem, embellish it, twist it into even more lurid and fantastical forms. Thus the obscene horror of the Holocaust is transmuted into taboo sexuality in the form of Nazispolitation, BDSM-themed books, comics, and movies in which blonde-bombshell SS officers sexually torment their prisoners. And thus fully three of, conservatively, the 20 best horror films ever made — Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs — can be said to originate from the same single, sad, sordid source: Wisconsin farmer and necrophile Ed Gein.

Work as extreme as what Ryan Muphy and creator-writer Ian Brennan have been doing across the Monster series — its first installment tackled Jeffrey Dahmer, its second Lyle and Erik Menendez and their abusive parents — is rare on the small screen. Seeing it done this well is rarer still. Between the two Monster/s seasons and the American Crime Story seasons on O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan, Murphy, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker and impresario, has brought us the four best true-crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Will Monster: The Ed Gein story give us more of the brutal, vital same? 

That the show is brutal is obvious very quickly. Directed by Max Winkler, the pilot introduces us to Ed Gein, a young farmer so meek his vocal cords and one eyelid appear to have atrophied. Not his body, though, which is corded with muscle  from manual labor around the farm. When we meet him, he’s breaking into someone’s house to peep on a couple of teenagers, then heading home to dress in his mother’s lingerie and erotically asphyxiate himself. His mother, Augusta Gein (Laurie Metcalfe, a terrifying force of nature) catches him and makes him repent by standing naked before her while she reads the Bible at him. “Only a mother could love you,” she concludes, not for the last time.

By the time we watch Ed strike out with a couple of girls at the drug store soda fountain, you think you know the story: sad-sack loser, abusive and emotionally incestuous hyper-religious mother, can’t get any girls, blah blah blah, you’ve heard the story a million times. So it comes as a surprise when Adeline (Suzanna Son), the girl he was spying on and whom his mother believes is his girlfriend…actually kind of is his girlfriend?

At least she’s both a girl and a friend. What’s more, their connection is a secret and taboo one. She likes Ed because, like her, he’s into weird shit…like the box full of concentration camp photos a friend of a friend of a friend took off a slain Nazi officer, plus the pornographic comic The Bitch of Büchenwald. 

It’s eroticized representation of the real crimes of Ilse Koch (Vicky Kreips), the wife of a concentration camp commandant whose enthusiastic participation in truly repulsive war crimes landed her both a military trial and an undying, hypersexualized reputation. In one of the episode’s most upsetting sequences, we take a whirlwind tour of Ilse’s house as she and her husband host a party for Nazi luminaries, where concentration camp prisoners serve as slave labor and little girls practice shaving their victims’ heads. (They’re subhuman, you see, and they carry lice.) It’s an uneasy cross between The Zone of Interest and Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS — which is how you might expect this material to play out in the mind of a budding murderer.

The murdering begins quickly, albeit unintentionally. Ed’s brother Henry (Hudson Oz), who’s been missing from the farm for some time, comes to see him and announces his intention to leave it all behind. He’s in love with a woman, which Mother doesn’t allow; he wants to marry her, which Mother doesn’t allow; she’s twice divorced, which Mother super doesn’t allow. That’s just it, a desperate Henry tells Ed: Mother is sick, she’s used the Bible to build herself a cage. Recognizing that Ed has “always been a peculiar type,” he says their mom is only making him worse. If Ed doesn’t get out now like Henry is, he’ll be trapped in that cage right along with her.

Unfortunately for Henry, Ed’s best friend is his mother. In an impetuous rage, he conks Henry over the head with a log, then seems barely able to understand how this could possibly have resulted in his brother’s death. He’s so convinced it couldn’t, in fact, that he hallucinates Henry alive and well, and rediscovers the body later on in shock.

From there it’s a cascade of disasters. Though Ed manages, somehow, to cover up the crime by making it look like Henry died of smoke inhalation from a brushfire — consider this a Dahmer-like oopsie! on the part of the local cops — Augusta is so upset she has a stroke. This leaves Henry in the position of cleaning her with daily sponge baths, which conjures up the Ilse Koch imagery described above with an incredibly unpleasant match cut to Ilse cleansing a tattooed camp victim’s corpse.

But Augusta, a nightmarishly unpleasant, almost manically misogynistic woman, decides it’s time to collect overdue rent from a tenant, so off she and Ed go as she walks with a cane. She finds the couple in question fighting as the man of the house attempts to drown their dog, but she doesn’t care about that — what matters to Augusta is that they’re unmarried, and the woman is a HARLOT!!! She gets so upset she has a second stroke and dies — igniting a montage of imagery in Ed’s mind in which black-suited men of unknown origin dominate.

She’s gone, but she’s not forgotten. Ed begins hearing her voice the second he tries to sit in her chair, hearing her command him to bring her back by digging up her body. When her metal coffin proves too tough a nut to crack, “Augusta” tells Ed the solution: “Just dig up this whore layin’ next to me?” In another sequence of sickening graphicness, Ed props the woman’s bloated, gray corpse in his mother’s chair and strips her down to her underwear. His smile ends the episode.

I sympathize with people who think shows like this, stories like this, should not exist and should not be told. I can only speak for myself, but in my life, my own traumas have best been confronted head on. 

The week this episode aired, ICE gestapo conducted a sweep of an apartment building straight out of a film like The Raid or Dredd; meanwhile, two different 40-year-old Iraq War veterans conducted two different mass shootings. FBI Director Kash Patel has issued challenge coins commemorating his reign in the shape of the Punisher’s famous skull logo, which for some reason the famously litigious Disney Corporation does not seem eager to protect; nude children have been seen being thrown by masked agents of the state into U-Hauls in zip ties. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told every general and admiral in the armed forces that their new motto is a meme; the United States government, apparently run by Stephen Miller, murdered some more people on a boat in the Caribbean.

Personally, I’m glad to be watching a show the central argument of which is that the only difference between an Ed Gein and an Ilse Koch that the latter was well-connected.

It’s always been a mistake to say that art inspires crime. No one kills anyone after seeing a movie or reading a comic who wouldn’t have killed someone already, though the art they consume might influence their modus operandi. Rather, the art and the murder are two different expressions of the same soul-deep sickness plaguing society. Without the camps, we wouldn’t have either The Bitch of Büchenwald or Ed Gein. What separates Gein from a run of the mill harmless if unpleasant pervert is that his arousal doesn’t stop at the border of the comic-book panel. His arousal is from the real thing: removing the shoes from the feet of a dead woman, staring with his one good eye at piles of murdered Jewish people the way the G.I.s who helped liberate them stared at pictures of Betty Grable. 

A show like Monster: The Ed Gein Story trusts its audience to understand and appreciate the difference, and to feel there’s value in plumbing the liminal depths between fantasy and reality. That’s baked right into the premise, which (spoiler alert) will also see Psycho and Texas Chain Saw directors Alfred Hitchcock and Tobe Hooper appear as characters, adding their own epochal works to this toxic mixture. All I can say is that I’ve always felt that way too. However you feel, you’re under no obligation to take this long journey into the Wisconsin winter and the horrible warmth at its cold heart.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.