Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Is True Crime Ethical?

Throughout humanity’s literary and artistic history, tragedy has remained one of the most popular genres. There is something so cathartic about watching the downfall of somebody else’s life, and clearly this obsession with the tragic–and often macabre–is one that has extended far beyond our current fixation with the drama and devastation characteristic of the true crime genre. However, since the resurgent popularity of true crime in the 2010s, this fascination has teetered more towards fetishism, as audiences demand bloodier and more gruesome stories. Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025) is the third season of Ryan Murphy’s American biographical crime series, which depicts some of the most notorious murders that have shocked the nation. While its previous seasons, The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024) were extremely popular, this most recent installation has sparked debate online about the ethics of producing true crime content, especially when its stories are embellished to meet popular demand for more sensational entertainment. 

Of the existing seasons, The Ed Gein Story is most intentional about crafting an empathetic narrative for the infamous murderer. Ed Gein was plagued by schizophrenia, a disorder that deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial. He was also raised by a religiously fanatic mother, growing up in a turbulent and unsafe home. To his credit, Murphy does heavily intertwine these elements of Gein’s life throughout the season, including a pivotal moment when Gein is officially diagnosed with schizophrenia by a psychiatrist. The series juxtaposes the ghastliness of his crimes with the suffering of mental illness, questioning if Gein can truly be qualified as “monstrous” considering the severity of his condition. The show goes so far as to insinuate Gein’s afterlife is some version of Heaven, as he is serenely reunited with his late mother on their front porch, bathed in a soft white light. 

However, for a show that goes to such great lengths to humanize the man behind such a horrific case, Murphy has taken great creative liberty retelling the gruesome facts of the Ed Gein story. Many viewers have criticized the depiction of a romantic relationship between Adeline Watkins and Ed Gein, as well as Gein’s inflated kill-count. Though the finale suggests Gein was a sort of tragic figure who suffered from intense mental illness, the rest of the series depicts him as a sexually deviant gynephiliac who slaughtered and defiled women to satiate his perverted desires. 

In many ways, Murphy has legitimized the sensationalism of Hollywood, which famously adopted Ed Gein as the inspiration for some of its most iconic horror films, such as Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). While The Ed Gein Story was initially marketed as biographical, the intentional blurring between fact and fiction reframes its narrative from informative to sensensational, squandering an opportunity to provide insight on how true crime influences the horror genre, which further generates more true crime cases in a repetitive cycle of violent mimicry.

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