‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Episode 4 Recap: The Wisconsin Chain Saw Massacre

“The tale grew in the telling.” I can’t imagine J.R.R. Tolkien would relish being quoted to open a review of a television programme about murderer Ed Gein, but that’s the story here, isn’t it? Though the discovery house of horrors, which I can only assume Monster: The Ed Gein Story is building towards, was justifiably infamous, he wasn’t much of a serial killer all things considered. He was convicted of only two murders: Mary Horgan, the bartender he killed in a previous episode, and Bernice Holden (Lesley Manville), the hardware store owner he kills in this one. His brother, the babysitter, and the hunters he slices to pieces with a chainsaw to close this episode, among others, are speculated victims, not confirmed ones.

But writer-director Ian Brennan makes you feel like it’s real, right? Just like you feel it’s real when Gein’s girlfriend/girl friend Adeline admiringly photographs Bernice’s decapitated, trussed-up, chainsawed corpse. Or when Ed accidentally seduces an older woman absolutely out of her mind on speed and caffeine by asking to wear her bra, to which he is more sexually attracted than he is, ultimately, to her. Or when he mummifies the babysitter’s corpse with gauze and paste.

Did any of this actually happen? It’s literally impossible to say — how do you disprove a negative — but for all intents and purposes it’s made up. The real Adeline Watkins’s claims to have been Ed’s love interest are of dubious veracity. The hunters’ disappearances were never definitively tied to Gein. The babysitter’s remains were not found among those recovered at the Gein house.

But by 1975, in the hands of Texas independent filmmaker Tobe Hooper (Will Brill), Gein’s crimes will have graduated to wholesale slaughter of a group of teenagers by a hulking masked killer called Leatherface and his demented family. Hooper, who was scared when he was a kid by campfire-style tales of Gein’s depravity by an uncle who’d lived in the area, sees in his fictional reinterpretation of Gein’s crimes an opportunity to reflect America’s murderous war in Vietnam back at itself. “I’m not makin’ the movie America wants,” he tells a coworker. “I’m makin’ the movie it deserves.” He prefaces the movie — also inspired by a daydream of cutting down an overlong Christmastime department store checkout line with a chainsaw — with an opening voiceover that claims the events of the films are true. It’s bullshit, of course. But is it actually any worse than reality?

(The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, indeed, a punishing film to watch, though I’ve watched it countless times. In high school my friends and I put it on, anticipating from the title some campy splatterfest; by the time it ended we all looked and felt like we’d been in a very bad car accident.)

Is inventing a whole storyline in which Ed and Bernice have sex and prepare to move in together before the Mother voice in Ed’s house shuts it down that much further out of sync with reality? If nothing else it gives Manville a chance to inhabit a flaming-out supernova of a person, high out of her mind and aroused beyond reason by the first sexual interest she’s been shown by anyone since a traumatic, reputation-ruining breakup. I never thought I’d say a sex scene in which one half of the participants are Ed Gein is hot as hell, but here we are.

It does Bernice no good in the end. Her flirtatious dirty talk with him, referring to herself as “wanton” and a “Jezebel,” echoes his hateful mother’s words too closely. Seizing on a rumor he must have heard someplace that Bernice has a sexually transmitted disease, he bullies and berates her…then demands to buy a gun from her on his way out the door of her store. He uses it on her immediately, killing and removing her just as he did with Mary. This time, rather than rob the register, he literally robs the register, carrying it with him in one arm while he drags Bernice’s body with the other. 

It’s not a modus operandi of a master criminal, in other words. Ed’s dead skin mask reign of terror will surely end soon. The question is how much worse he’ll get in the meantime.

A final note: The Texas Chain Saw section raises the thorny issues of Ed Gein’s gender and sexuality, as Tobe explains to the crew how two of Leatherface’s three personae are female. Simultaneously, he claims Ed “wasn’t queer” because he was into women sexually. It’s nowhere near that simple of course — trans lesbians exist, just for starters — but I don’t think Ed Gein is represented by any of the colors on the pride flag. (Buffalo Bill, the killer from The Silence of the Lambs modeled in part on Gein, is a similar false flag situation.)

I think Ed associates femininity and womanhood with sin and wantonness after years of brainwashing by his emotionally abusive fundamentalist mother, and so takes on those aspects himself to feel, in Bernice’s words, “naughty.” That’s a gross understatement for a man wearing a woman suit made of human skin, but it’s closer to the mark than “trans” or “genderqueer” would be. You’ll note that at no point does Ed say he feels like or is a woman, a pointed absence.

At the same time, his obsession with his mother, which was no doubt at least partially sexual, was so intense that he had to replace her by partially becoming her. (Just like the shrink says at the end of Psycho!) Had he been obsessed with his father, or his brother, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, it seems just as likely the mental conditions which caused him to do what he did with women’s bodies would have caused him to do the same with men’s. 

But for Ed, everything alluring and awful and magical and menacing in the world is embodied in a woman’s brassiere. He no more considers the humanity of the person who originally owned them than he does when he wears their faces.

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.