(Credits: Netflix)

The Monster anthology series on Netflix has always raised an important debate: whether monsters are born or are they man-made, and The Ed Gein Story, which serves as the third instalment in the series, was handily no exception, and neither is the answer short and simple..

As co-creator Ryan Murphy put it to Tudum, “It’s probably a little of both”, which is why the inclusion of characters like Alfred Hitchcock plays a pivotal role in the story highlighted in this instalment.

Charlie Hunnam, who plays the titular character in the chilling Monster anthology, asks another equally important question: Who is the monster? Is it the boy who endured lifelong abuse only to be left alone in a state of undiagnosed mental illness? Or the people who made his life a source of unfiltered entertainment?

While the answer isn’t easy, Monster: The Ed Gein Story lives up to being a revelation, and if you’re still out of the loop, here’s an overview of how the story ended.

Inside Ed’s relationship with his mother

One of the first victims of Ed Gein was, unfortunately, his brother, Henry, whom he hit over the head, accidentally killing him. Although he tried to conceal the disaster with fire to avoid getting blamed, Henry’s death was a tragic turning point for his mother, which further strained her already rocky relationship with Ed. According to Hunnam, Augusta’s disdain was the breaking point that could reason every aspect of Ed, so much so that even his voice felt somewhat shadowed by their relationship.

“It was an affectation, it was what Ed thought his mother wanted him to be,” Hunnam explains. The voice was not natural; if anything, it was a persona that he nurtured and a character that he played in response to his mother’s desperate urge for a daughter and the fact that she had a son. The actor turned to an obscure source of media to help him interpret the voice, which was an audio tape of Gein during his arrest.

Following Henry’s death in The Ed Gein Story, Ed starts living a life of isolation, especially bolstered after his mother’s demise. The absence of his mother leads him to dig her up, but instead of finding her, he settles for another corpse. More than his streak of serial killing, his grave robbery becomes the far more unsettling turn, where he used dried-out skin to create furniture and a lot more. One of the most horrific images of the series is his drawer full of dried vulvas, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Is Adeline real?

The only source of comfort for Ed amidst all these tragedies is Adeline Watkins, a neighbour and an on-and-off girlfriend, who stays with him despite the heightening concerns surrounding his behavioural changes. In fact, she even tags along with him in his grave raiding, making many wonder whether she’s real at all.

According to Tudum, Adeline is inspired by a real inhabitant of Plainfield, Wisconsin; however, information surrounding her is rather limited. Co-creator Ian Brennan says, “What we do know is that she came out at first talking about how they were an item, and they were going to get married. And then she came out like, ‘No, I made that all up’.”

Meanwhile, Hunnam chimes in, saying, “My interpretation was that she’s, in a large part, a fantasy of Ed’s. He finds, whether in reality or in his mind, this sort of kindred spirit with Adeline, somebody who can relate and understand these primal urges and instincts that he has.” And as seen in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Adeline does become the vehicle of many sordid fantasies of Ed, including his interest in Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald”.

Koch became instrumental in inspiring Ed’s skinning of his victims and using their dried skin for furniture. The revelation ultimately brings a change within Adeline as well, leading her to pursue a famous crime scene photographer, Weegee, in New York, who declines her advances.

How does Ed get arrested?

It turns out that Ed Gein had quite a few chances to take an exit from the streak of his horrific crimes. For instance, when Adeline accepted his proposal and advised him to warm up to a babysitting job to grow familiar with the idea of having children in the future, but what he does instead is become a nightmare for them by showing his “house of horrors”. He is eventually substituted by a young woman, Evelyn, who, unfortunately, becomes one of Ed’s victims in a fit of revenge and rage.

Although Evelyn’s murder case was never resolved, Ed was naturally questioned about it. Following this, he eventually was romantically linked with local shopkeeper Bernice. Although she was far more open-minded to Ed’s sexual kinks, it was not long before he ended up hallucinating Augusta, leading to him murdering Bernice as well. But this death was not to go unnoticed. In fact, this was the final nail that led law enforcement to his doorstep as Bernice’s son was the local deputy who found her body hanging in Ed’s barn.

The judgment landed him in a mental institution rather than prison, where, through a ham radio, he would continue to imagine connecting with Ilse Koch and also Christine Jorgensen, “the first widely known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery in the United States”. He was convinced that he was a transgender person who would wear the skin of his female victims, but Jorgensen pointed out to him that he is a touch different, a gynephilic or “a man who’s so aroused by the female body that he wants to be inside it”.

What was Ed diagnosed with?

During his time in the mental institution, Ed was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was the closure that explained the reason behind his crimes and why he failed to remember any of them. What inspired Murphy and Brennan to tell Monster: The Ed Gein Story, in part, was to spark this discussion surrounding mental illness. “I was very interested in society’s obligation to the mentally unwell, people who are having mental crises,” Murphy added.

What happens to Ed ultimately?

In the final episodes of The Ed Gein Story, the shift in Ed’s fantasies is completely visible. It’s seen that he’s helping FBI agents track down Ted Bundy. When he is diagnosed with cancer, he also meets Adeline one last time, where, although she promises to continue what he started by killing people, he asks her not to.

At the end of his time, he also visualises walking down a hallway where he’s praised by killers who were inspired by him. Meanwhile, in a tangent vision, he is seen crossing a crowd of nurses and ascending a stair where his mother greets him. The final scene, as explained by the co-creators, chronicles the cultural impact of his crimes with a group of teenagers attempting to steal Ed’s gravestone, which is, in fact, based on real events. However, they are ultimately frightened away by his echoes in the forms of Norman Bates to Leatherface.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story concludes with the same imagery that wraps up The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But before the credits roll on screen, viewers meet Ed one last time, years before his streak of crimes, sitting next to Augusta, who says, “Only a mother could love you”, highlighting a terrible sadness that formed his troubled core.