By Matt Kowalski | Kowala Media
When Monster: The Ed Gein Story dropped on Netflix, it arrived wrapped in familiar dread. Ed Gein — the reclusive Wisconsin grave-robber whose crimes inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs — has long stood as a grotesque mirror of American horror. But this latest dramatization feels less like a horror series and more like a meditation on what makes America itself so drawn to the macabre. It’s equal parts elegy, cultural diagnosis, and visual hallucination.
Across its eight episodes, the series wrestles with an impossible duality: is it chronicling a monster, or building a requiem for one?
The Cold Geometry of Memory
From the opening frames, Monster establishes winter not as a backdrop, but as a state of mind. The filmmakers use snow the way Tarkovsky used rain — not for beauty, but for meaning. Every flake falls heavy with silence. Every drift hides the dead. Wisconsin becomes a psychic Siberia, a space of exile where morality and sanity freeze over.
The cinematography deliberately rejects warmth. Interiors are lit like morgues, all sodium lamps and low-key amber that spill over the heavy orange woodwork of a bygone Midwest — the kind of sanitarium architecture you’d expect in Anoka County in the 1940s. The aesthetic feels unsettlingly authentic, right down to the white uniforms and varnished trim, evoking the historical asylums of Minnesota and Wisconsin where America stored its forgotten.
Yet what’s most haunting is how the camera itself seems ill. The lenses bend the world — literally. The series makes striking use of vintage Russian portrait optics, glass that distorts and swirls the bokeh until straight lines curl inward, as though reality itself were collapsing under the weight of Gein’s delusions. It’s the same optical language Tarkovsky used in Mirror and Stalker — a spiritual warp, not a technical one.
In one devastating sequence, Adeline — Ed’s would-be companion — becomes the lens’s subject as the background buckles around her. The moment he tries to introduce her to his dead mother is rendered through warped focus, an optical metaphor for the breach between the living and the dead. The lens isn’t just filming madness; it’s participating in it.
The Russian Connection
The series’ uncanny resemblance to Soviet cinema goes deeper than style. Many of the visual effects and post-production credits belong to Eastern European studios in Prague and Saint Petersburg. You can see it in the texture — the pallid, otherworldly light, the slow pans, the near-static compositions that feel more Tarkovsky than True Crime. The winters don’t look like Wisconsin winters; they look like purgatory.
That choice makes sense. In Tarkovsky’s films, weather is divine judgment — nature’s way of externalizing the soul’s decay. Here, snow becomes the mind’s final stage, burying Ed in the stillness of his own unreality. The frozen barns, the skeletal trees, the desolate plains — it’s like Doctor Zhivago by way of Silence of the Lambs, with madness in place of romance.
Monster and the American Myth
But the series isn’t only about Ed Gein — it’s about the America that made him. Halfway through the series, we begin to sense that Gein’s story is being woven into the fabric of postwar American paranoia: the crumbling small town, the religious repression, and the rise of the suburban nightmare. The filmmaker even juxtaposes Ed’s hospital life with Nixon-era austerity — a metaphor for institutional decay. The viewer is left wondering whether Ed’s personal descent mirrors a broader cultural one.
In a way, Monster becomes a self-reflective study on the industrialization of horror. Gein, a man who desecrated the dead, is now commodified endlessly by Hollywood. His crimes are the blueprint for some of the most iconic horror films ever made:
Psycho (Norman Bates and the mother fixation)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Leatherface and the flesh motif)
The Silence of the Lambs (Buffalo Bill and the transmutation of identity)
Each film borrowed Gein’s pathology and transformed it into art — into money, into myth. The Netflix series understands this and doubles down on the meta-reference. We are not only watching Ed Gein; we’re watching the cinematic ghost of his influence haunting itself.
Humanizing the Inhuman
Perhaps the most daring — and divisive — element of Monster is its portrayal of Gein’s mental illness. By the final episodes, it’s clear that he’s not a calculating serial killer in the modern sense, but a man trapped in schizophrenia or dissociative psychosis. He seems not to remember, not to understand, and his detachment from reality is treated almost with pity.
The show flirts with empathy but never collapses into sympathy. It humanizes without forgiving. The viewer is left in a liminal state — repulsed yet riveted, aware that what’s unfolding is both monstrous and pathetically human.
The Guardian captured this duality best:
“It panders to viewers’ basest instincts by lingering gleefully over the worst depredations humanity can commit.”
And yet, that same indulgence is what gives the series its edge. It dares to stare too long — not just at Ed, but at us, the audience who keep resurrecting him.
The True Crime Feedback Loop
No modern studio has turned moral obsession into a business model quite like Netflix. The streamer’s fixation with interrogations, confessionals, and posthumous psychology has become its own genre — a kind of digital séance. Mindhunter set the template: two FBI agents staring into the abyss, trying to classify evil while Netflix sold us the spectacle of it. Then came the parade — Dahmer, Bundy Tapes, Night Stalker, Conversations with a Killer. Each promised understanding; each fed the same hunger.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story inherits this impulse but filters it through a warped lens — literally and thematically. It wears the posture of an art film: Russian optics, Tarkovskian snowfall, long silences, schizophrenic reality shifts. But beneath the avant-garde surface, it’s still participating in the ritual of serial killer resurrection.
By the midpoint of the series, the viewer even gets a faint whiff of Mindhunter’s connective logic: detectives tracing Gein’s pathology forward into later decades, hinting that his crimes may have informed or even inspired later figures like Ted Bundy. It’s speculative, cinematic, and morally queasy — the kind of psychological cross-pollination that Netflix can’t resist.
There was a minor uproar after Mindhunter ended — many fans complained that the show never got to Bundy, as if the cultural catalog of killers needed completing. Monster seems aware of that appetite and plays to it subtly, feeding us the idea of lineage — that Gein begat the modern American monster.
And here’s the dark trick: by inviting us into his isolation, into his delusions, into the frostbitten landscape of his mind, Monster turns empathy into complicity. We begin to understand him too well. The longer we watch, the more we see the world through Ed’s fractured lens — and the less shocked we feel.
That’s the quiet horror of Netflix’s true crime machine: it doesn’t just dramatize atrocity, it normalizes intimacy with it. We’re not asked to look away. We’re asked to stay, analyze, empathize, binge.
And when the snow finally covers everything — the crimes, the guilt, the outrage — what’s left is a mirror. One that shows not Ed Gein, not Bundy, not the killers who made horror famous, but the audience who keeps pressing play.
Conclusion: A Cinematic Requiem in the Snow
Monster: The Ed Gein Story is not perfect — it teeters between introspection and exploitation, sometimes stumbling into melodrama. But it’s undeniably crafted with visual intelligence. The winter is real, the silence is earned, and the camera’s sickness is poetic.
For all its flaws, it achieves something rare: it makes American horror feel foreign again. Like watching your own reflection through frosted glass — distorted, distant, and coldly beautiful.
If Tarkovsky had ever turned his camera toward the Midwest, this might have been the result: a slow, mournful descent into the mind of a man — and a nation — that lost its bearings in the snow.
