Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story: When the “Monster” Speaks
TL;DR: We’re drawn to monsters because they show us what we deny in ourselves. Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story reveals how empathy, horror, and truth coexist in the human mind.
True horror begins in isolation, and ends when we dare to look closer.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story
We keep watching monsters because, on some level, they speak to us.
Maybe they speak to the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see: our fears of madness, guilt, and moral collapse. Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story has brought these questions back into focus, holding up a mirror to what happens when the human mind loses its anchor in relationship and reality.
Gein’s crimes have haunted culture for decades, inspiring characters like Norman Bates and Leatherface. But what lies beneath the horror is something even more disturbing: the disintegration of a person who was already profoundly alone.
Why We Watch Monsters
True crime stories invoke our curiosity. They are ways of approaching what terrifies us in a form we can control. We circle around danger safely, through story.
Therapy does something similar. It invites what feels unbearable into the room so it can finally be faced. When we watch these stories, we are collectively doing what therapy does privately: confronting what we fear will destroy us, and discovering what it means to survive it.
The Psychology of Collapse
Psychologically, although Ed Gein’s story is violent. It is really about what happens when isolation becomes total.
Raised under a mother’s oppressive morality and cut off from social reality, his inner world became unbound. Fantasy replaced connection. Shame replaced reflection.
In psychodynamic terms, this is a collapse of containment, the failure of another mind to help regulate unbearable feelings. Without mirroring or shared meaning, the mind turns inward and fragments. What looks like evil on the surface is often a psyche imploding under the weight of its own unprocessed pain.
Fact, Fiction, and Emotional Truth
The series has been criticised for blurring fact and dramatisation, and that’s part of what makes it unsettling. It pushes viewers into a conflict between wanting to understand and being repelled by what they see. That conflict mirrors a psychological defence called intellectualisation: staying in ideas and analysis to avoid the emotional impact.
Yet something fascinating has happened in the public reaction. Many people have said they felt ‘sorry’ for Ed Gein after the final episode. That response is complicated but deeply human. To feel pity is not to excuse someone. It is to recognise that horror and suffering can grow from the same soil: deprivation, shame, and emotional neglect.
The discomfort that follows: Should I feel empathy for this person? is exactly the moral tension therapists sit with every day. It is the meeting point between compassion and accountability, and it’s where understanding begins.
The Ethics of Looking
In therapy, looking is an act of care. It is slow and contained.
In entertainment, looking can become consumption.
So the ethical question isn’t whether we should tell these stories, but how we look at them.
Are we seeking to understand, or are we feeding our appetite for control?
Good storytelling, like good therapy, transforms the gaze from intrusion to empathy. It allows us to see without needing to dominate.
When the Monster Speaks
What makes this series particularly haunting is that it lets the “monster” speak.
Hearing his voice, fragile and human, forces us to confront a truth: monstrosity is not another species. It is what happens when humanity fractures. When we disown our shadow, it acts out. When we face it, it begins to integrate.
Acknowledging this does not erase responsibility. It simply recognises a fact of the psyche: what is denied returns, and what is faced can transform.
Takeaway
Monster: The Ed Gein Story asks not only how someone becomes a killer, but what happens to a culture that cannot bear to look at its own capacity for darkness. Every story about monstrosity is also a story about disconnection and denial.
Therapy, at its core, is the opposite of that. It is the place where what has been hidden is seen with enough courage and containment to become human again.
If this reflection resonated, you might also explore The Psychology of the Inner Critic: How the Voice Inside You Took Power
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FAQ When the Monster Speaks
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Empathy is not approval. It’s recognition of shared humanity, even in its most distorted forms. When viewers feel sorry for someone like Ed Gein, they’re responding to suffering and isolation, the emotional roots of his breakdown, not the crimes themselves.
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True crime allows us to confront fear safely. Psychologically, it’s a ritual of exposure: we engage with what’s forbidden to understand it, contain it, and reassert our sense of control.
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Therapy teaches that denial fuels repetition. What we face with honesty can change; what we repress returns in more destructive forms. Looking at darkness, in ourselves or others, is how integration begins.