“Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is Netflix‘s latest installment in their hit true crime series, and one of the streamer’s biggest shows. But as popular as the show is, it has its fare share of detractors — and that includes horror filmmaker Osgood Perkins.
TMZ reports that Perkins refuses to watch the series, stating he “wouldn’t watch it with a 10-foot pole,” and that’s primarily due to the show’s depiction of his father, Anthony Perkins. The latest “Monster” installment toggles between two narratives: one about serial killer Ed Gein, and the other about the making of Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Psycho,” which adapted Robert Bloch‘s novel of the same name, inspired by Gein.
The second episode of the series is what Perkins finds especially problematic. In the episode, titled “Sick As Your Secrets,” Hitchcock has pointed commentary about Perkins’ closeted gay identity, likening Perkins’ “secret” to Gein’s sexual depravity. At one point, the fictional Hitchcock even tells Perkins, “You alone understand this secret,” and that it’s a “secret making you sick.” The episode also depicts Perkins throwing up after he has gay sex to drive the show’s implications home further.
Perkins won’t condone that depiction of his father. In fact, he condemns the series and Netflix’s attempt to remake true crime into “glamourous and meaningful content.” For “The Monkey” filmmaker, it’s also a precedent set in a modern culture “reshaped in real time by Overlords,” churning out content that’s “increasingly devoid of context, and that the Netflix-ization of real pain is playing for the wrong team.”
Perkins’ father can’t combat Ryan Murphy‘s show’s depiction of him, because he passed away of AIDS-complicated illness in 1992, but his son can, and his commentary makes a incisive point about true crime and culture at large. Instead of bleak fascination with murderers and unsympathetic portraits of queer identity, Osgood posits instead for works “peering behind the veil into the unknowable and loving each other through expansive, new art.” An astute point coming from another filmmaker who works in the horror genre, and a worthy statement to protect his father.
Even so, it’s unlikely Netflix and Ryan Murphy will stop producing the “Monster” series and continue their sensationalist depictions of real-life pain and gruesomeness. The antidote Perkins calls for may be valid, but true crime remains a highly bankable node of pop culture, and not just for Netflix. There needs to be more than just Osgood’s words and more empathetic art to turn the tide he wants to combat completely.
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