‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Episode 2 Recap: Shower, Seen

“You can’t make people look at something like this!” 

In a scene that’s half set visit, half fever dream, the line above is stammered in something approaching abject terror. Young actor Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari) tells his director, Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander plus prosthetics), that the real-world horrors he’s attempting to translate into cinema in their forthcoming film Psycho shouldn’t be shown to anyone at all. 

It’s not just that he’s revolted, though he is. It’s that the crimes of Ed Gein that inspired novelist and H.P. Lovecraft protégé Robert Bloch (Ethan Sandler) to write Psycho, the book on which the film is based, are so far beyond his comprehension that their existence in itself is frightening. Tony can’t wrap his mind around the idea that anyone would upholster furniture using human skin, or maintain a collection of preserved vulvas in a drawer. “No one would ever do that!” he insists, unbelieving, even as (in his mind’s eye at least) he watches Ed Gein doing it.

According to Bloch, a similar psychological mechanism was at work within Gein himself. Bloch says he was just a “small-town simpleton” with any young American’s ghoulish fixation on gory, racist stories of the alleged depravity of indigenous people in America and the South Pacific. (Not to mention the depravity visited upon them by white men in exchange.) It wasn’t until he saw Adeline’s box full of Nazi memorabilia that his fixations began to take on a dangerous shape.

It’s not because Gein had any particular interest in or sympathy for Nazi ideology. He seems as indifferent to their anti-Semitic übermenschen routine as he is to the fact that their primary targets — people he hallucinates chasing him across his farm’s barren field because they know “what I’ve been doing” — were Jewish. To the extent he thinks of Germans as Germans, he thinks of his mother and “my mother’s people,” (German-Americans like many in the area), and not with great favor at that. Nor does he seem particularly driven by the Nazis’ sadism and cruelty, by a desire to inflict pain or fear; his two murders so far have both been instantaneous. (To the extent that he’s sexually fascinated with the figure of Ilse Koch, I get the impression it’s for the clothing he imagines her in as much as for her.)

In true-crime parlance, Gein is a product killer, not a process killer. He’s not all that interested in the act of killing and the effects that has on his victim, though the taboo of taking a life surely resonates with him. He’s more interested in what he can do with dead bodies. The murder of Mary Hogan (Rondi Reed), a bartender he encounters when he’s in the wrong kind of mood, is just a means to an end.

Why? As Bloch tells Hitchcock and his disapproving, disgusted wife Alma (Olivia Williams) over dinner, what fascinated Gein about the photos and the sleazy comic was simply that the things they depicted were, indisputably, things people can do. You can cut your hair, you can drive a tractor, you can go to the bar, you can stack corpses like firewood, you can make lampshades and seat cushions out of human skin, you can eat out of a bowl made from a human skull. It was possible, and because there was photographic proof, it was undeniable.

We’ve already seen how Gein’s mind tries to incorporate this information. It’s notable that both times we’ve seen his fantasies of Nazi Germany, the Nazis have been having bacchanalian parties. Now think about where Ed lives. Think about all those shots director Max Winkler gets of him alone in a vast, barren snowy nowhere. The parties would have been nearly as foreign to him as the war crimes! (Look how badly he does when he takes Adeline home, blowing it by trying to introduce you to the corpse he thinks of as his mother, which he yells at for being rude.) Like the parties, the objectification of corpses now falls within the category of strange things grown-ups do. And the only way “Eddie” could truly wrap his mind around the magnitude his discovery, Bloch says, was to start doing it himself.

Getting back to Perkins, his prep work for the film consists primarily of, well, wrapping his head around it. He dresses up in drag to try to figure out how Ed would have looked and moved while crossdressing. (The closeted actor’s closeted boyfriend, all-American heartthrob Tab Hunter (Jackie Kay), takes one look and cannot begin to express what a mistake he thinks taking on this role will be.) When Hitch takes Tony into a recreation of the Gein house that the director had built — complete, somehow, with nine realistic preserved vulvas in a drawer — that’s when Perkins himself starts to lose it, imagining Gein himself is present. It’s here when, for at least a moment, he feels “you can’t make people look at something at something like this.”

The irony is that Psycho really doesn’t make people “look at something like this.” It seems like it does, people feel like it does, opening-night audiences have a series of health scares in this episode because it does, but it doesn’t. There’s no nudity, for example, but the shower scene and the peeping-tom routine by Norman Bates that precedes reveal nothing. (A dark sort of credit here belongs perhaps to Hitchcock’s own penchant for peeping: He’s shown spying on an actress getting changed earlier in the episode, just as both Norman and Ed do.)

There’s no graphic violence in the mother of all slasher films, either. The knife wielded by Norman Bates dressed in Mother drag never visibly pierces the naked flesh of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane. It’s all movie magic — the foley art of a knife sinking into a melon repeatedly, the meticulous storyboarding of title designer Saul Bass, George Tomasini’s precision editing, the famous screeching strings from composer Bernard Hermann, Leigh’s panicked performance, Hitchcock’s near-peerless mastery of filmmaking’s dark arts.

So Winkler and writer Ian Brennan do what they’ve been doing across both episodes, right down to a lengthy look at the fake vulvas: They make you look at it.

With Suzanna Son’s Adeline standing in for Leigh and Marion, and Ed dressed as his own mother rather than Norman Bates as his, the episode cross-cuts immaculately between the shower stabbing and the opening-night audience’s horrified reaction. This time, however, you see the knife stab and slice away at the victim’s naked body, over and over and over again. 

The brilliance of this move lies in how it relies on you, the viewer, to help make it work. That sounds wrong — it’s all right in front of you — but the better you know the original shower scene, the worse the scene is for you. You can probably already hear those horrible knife-in-melon squelching sounds, hear Marion’s gasps and cries and grunts, see the knife rising and falling, see the blood running endlessly down the shower drain. Your brain has already conjured that horror, however many times you’ve seen the movie. 

Once it becomes apparent what the show’s incredibly gutsy, borderline blasphemous act of revealing the violence carefully hidden within Hollywood’s most famous murder is doing, it dawns on you: Oh my god, I’m going to have to see the whole thing. I’m going to watch this man butcher this woman for half a minute. As the dream-Hitchcock says to Perkins during that strange hallucinatory sequence in the fake Gein house, “You’re the one who can’t look away.”

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.