Our serial killer obsession might be making us less human

Landing on Netflix s title page for Monster The Ed Gein Story automatically plays a clip of the titular psychopath wearing a dress wig and hosiery while nimbly dancing to a merry ragtime tune A wide lens captures the scene allowing the viewer to appreciate the discordance of the rotten squalor surrounding Gein portrayed by Charlie Hunnam as he prances with a broom before a knock on his door interrupts this intimate moment Then the shot zooms in on his face to make the full horror of his elation unmistakable because the features aren t his They belong to Mary Hogan one of the two women he confessed to murdering and one of a multitude of whose faces he turns into masks Since Monster co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan know their audience there s a tacit understanding that majority will process that gruesome sight as distant enough in the past to become unreal It takes sitting through The Ed Gein Story to see the living version of Mary played by Rondi Reed before Gein takes her life so he can wear her flesh as a costume And it should take more effort to wrap our heads around that deed s vileness than it seemingly does these days Murphy and Brennan s purported point in making this third chapter of Monster is to drive home how central Gein s macabre occurrence is to the horror genre Gein confessed to killing Hogan in and Bernice Worden in but was suspected of having murdered others He s mainly known for upcycling the flayed skin from his neighbor s corpses into household furnishings allegedly inspired by Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch Netflix L to R Laurie Metcalf as Augusta Gein and Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein in Monster The Ed Gein Story These Monster episodes depict how directly the details of Gein s killings grave robbery and stomach-churning hobby of making household items out of human skin and bones influenced classics like Alfred Hitchcock s Psycho Tobe Hooper s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and inspired The Silence of the Lambs antagonist Buffalo Bill But it is Murphy and Brennan s employment of narrative license with Gein s tale and the series lurid tight shots on upholstery made of human skin that declare the series intent more loudly I m not just referring to the objective stated in its logline that monsters aren t born they re made by us Brennan spells out the show s core message in the second episode dialogue spoken by Hitchcock Tom Hollander Our audience lives in a world in which God has been banished They live in daily fear of nuclear annihilation the director remarks They have stared quaking minds numb at the sheer magnitude of the evil that was the Nazi Holocaust Seen for the first time in history what human beings are capable of when the moral compass is off Lost Related Monster The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is an example of the brand undermining the mission Plenty of decades and unconscionable acts have transpired since that speculative conversation Will Brill s Hooper points to the bloody business of the Vietnam War s appalling visuals brought into American living rooms by the evening news as an indicator of our hardened sensibility Thus he distills the mindless buzzsaw of armed conflict into Leatherface circling back to Gein yet again It may seem as if the point is to turn the mirror on society s endless appetite for monstrosity But as usual the makers of Monster want to have it all avenues Whatever moral disgust we may express at its explicit showcase of severed heads and preserved sexual organs is mitigated by the enduring popularity of this Netflix title The Ed Gein Story has lingered in the streamer s list of top ten shows since its debut nearly a month ago reflective of the robust marketplace for horror With the genre claiming of the domestic box office for production studios are eager to feed our seemingly bottomless appetite for cinematic grotesques especially those based on true stories This isn t news to us or to Murphy and Brennan whose first Monster turn sustained criticism for sexing up Dahmer at the emotional expense of his casualties surviving family members That didn t stop people from making it Netflix s fifth most-watched series of all-time and Dahmer a disturbingly popular Halloween costume in Brooke Palmer PEACOCK Michael Chernus as John Wayne Gacy in Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy That reaction informed showrunner Patrick Macmanus approach to rendering Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy for Peacock however Between and Gacy tortured and murdered at least boys and young men in a Chicago suburb burying bodies in the crawlspace under his house He was sentenced to death in and executed by lethal injection in Michael Chernus depiction of Gacy as the jovial Midwestern contractor next door is chilling enough without displaying his killings onscreen The series also resists the temptation to show Gacy dressed up as Pogo the Clown the image that helped kick several generations maintains of coulrophobia into high gear Serial killers aberrant psychopathy and body count make them novel But a writer s and director s willingness to stretch the boundaries of narrative deviation changes our notion of what s acceptable in film and in life Such a measured approach enables the real people still connected to the story the siblings and parents of the murdered and missing the cops tasked with uncovering the deteriorated remains of sons and brothers whose lives Gacy stole to retain their humanity and dignity Primarily framing the story with the experience of the Piests whose child Robert was Gacy s last victim bolsters this approach Nevertheless Devil in Disguise interrogates the police s tendency to mischaracterize his casualties fueling the media and the constituents s subsequent rush to cast the dead as somehow deserving of their fate Robert was a hard-working teenager who crossed paths with Gacy when the contractor floated the opportunity to make extra money The first person to notice he s missing is his mother Elizabeth Marin Ireland who shows up at the pharmacy where he usually works to pick up her son only to be explained he left hours before responding to Gacy s call for additional labor Brooke Palmer PEACOCK l-r Marin Ireland as Elizabeth Piest and Greg Bryk as Harold Piest in Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy But when Gacy narrated police about his modus operandi of raping particular of his male sufferers before killing them local news seized on that detail to broadly paint his targets as gay men looking for a good time One reporter cites that theory as if to diminish the loss of their lives Elizabeth s reaction is wrenching We need your help to stay independent Subscribe currently to sponsorship Salon s progressive journalism Dramatizing the acts of notorious serial killers fires up the journalistic engine devoted to picking at the carcass of accuracy Reporters view this as a operation keeping recorded facts separate from sickening mythology The Ed Gein Story is a tapestry of subplots stewed in dramatic license inviting all variety of clickbait addressing whether Gein had sex with dead bodies or consumed his casualties Or if Gein s rumored girlfriend Adeline Watkins was the cruel gore-obsessed vixen that Suzanna Son s performance makes her out to be Perhaps the preponderance questionable fabrication involves Gein s second confessed victim Beverly Worden Lesley Manville a local hardware store owner rendered as a nervous lonely divorcee who throws herself at Hunnam s killer and entices him with sex Later her son Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden Charlie Hall has the horrid misfortune of not only discovering his mother s eviscerated headless corpse but being in the presence of Gein s collection of vulvas including hers Netflix Lesley Manville as Bernice Worden in Monster The Ed Gein Story Gein historians and there are plenty decry the inaccurate portrait of a drunken Frank sponsoring an auction selling off the items in Gein s home when in reality he was revealed to be disgusted by that idea Gein s dilapidated farmhouse burned down and although arson was suspected the fire s cause was never determined But this flexibility with the scenario s facts is one of multiple acts of distancing that aid in countenancing the unthinkable Devil in Disguise doesn t allow the audience to get off that easily Flashbacks illustrate who Gacy s sufferers were to the people who knew and loved them landing on the more sensitive and sensible view that they saw Gacy as trustworthy upstanding and therefore unthreatening Similar descriptions summarize any number of crimes previewed in episodes of Dateline and the galaxy of crime shows it and other organization newsmagazines spawned Start your day with essential news from Salon Sign up for our free morning newsletter Crash Curriculum Serial killers aberrant psychopathy and body count make them novel But a writer s and director s willingness to stretch the boundaries of narrative deviation changes our notion of what s acceptable in film and in life We don t have to wonder how much real-world atrocity we re willing to absorb due to our shifted relationship with these highly personal fantasized versions Ours is an era when every shred of ephemera is for sale so why wouldn t a mourning son attempt to liquidate a killer s personal effects to claim compensation for his mother s death When pictures of children murdered in wars and footage of a society figure s assassination circulate on the Internet at the speed of a page refresh what s the harm in a minimal more grisly sights presented as entertainment At least the flesh is made of latex Brooke Palmer PEACOCK l-r James Badge Dale as Kozenczak and Gabriel Luna as Tovar in Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy Macmanus conscious acknowledgment of Gacy s survivors lends a weight and dignity to Devil in Disguise that isn t present in Monster Since Gein s ghoulish acts were discovered in and he s been dead for years perhaps Murphy and Brennan counted on the residents to relegate the reality of what he did to the area of Plainfield Wisconsin to the status of an urban legend a bogeyman tale supersized by lengendary revulsion Any of Gein s contemporaries who are still alive would have been too young to fully grasp the enormity of the way he desecrated the memory and bodies of their district s loved ones But this ignores consideration for any descendants touched by this history Even Osgood Perkins the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins depicted in The Ed Gein Story by Joey Pollari decries the way franchises like Monster try to spin meaning out of cases epitomizing human depravity The Longlegs director shared his concern with TMZ that the Netflix-ization of real pain ie the authentic human experiences wrought by actual events is playing for the wrong unit The algorithm indicates that side of populace sentiment is winning It s frightening to ponder what that says about us Monster The Ed Gein Story is streaming on Netflix Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy is streaming on Peacock Read more about this topic The Perfect Neighbor crosses a line Ryan Murphy s Monster turns Dahmer casualties into people but is it enough Why serial killers are drawn to politics The post Our serial killer obsession might be making us less human appeared first on Salon com