Osgood Perkins criticizes Monster: The Ed Gein Story and the other Ryan Murphy shows for glamorizing true crime
Osgood Perkins is on the rise in the horror community. After making his feature directorial debut with The Blackcoat’s Daughter in 2015, he got his second film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, out into the world just one year later. But then there was a four-year wait for his third film, Gretel & Hansel, and another four-year wait for his fourth, Longlegs. Then he switched into maximum overdrive. His Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey, reached theaters just seven months after Longlegs. His movie Keeper is set to reach theaters on November 14 (nine months after The Monkey), and before Keeper is released, he has already started filming his next movie, The Young People.
However, Perkins recently had some criticisms of the new wave of TV horror/thriller genres, which adapt true crime stories into mini-series. Specifically, Ryan Murphy’s Monster series. According to Deadline, Perkins told TMZ that he hasn’t viewed Monster: The Ed Gein Story and he “wouldn’t watch it with a 10-foot pole.” The writer/director slammed the shows of this nature for adapting real murder cases into “glamorous and meaningful content” and he is concerned that the popularity of these shows has culture being “reshaped in real time by overlords.”
Perkins expounded that he thinks the true crime genre is “increasingly devoid of context and that the Netflix-ization of real pain [i.e., the authentic human experiences wrought by ‘actual events’] is playing for the wrong team.”
Additionally, The Ed Gein Story depicts the influence the real events had on horror classics like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. With Psycho, Perkins’ father, Anthony Perkins, famously portrayed Norman Bates for Alfred Hitchcock. The new show features him struggling as a closeted actor, as well as being defined by his iconic killer role and feeling like a “monster” for being homosexual. There is no reported reaction from Osgood Perkins on that angle.
Harold Schechter, author of the Ed Gein book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho, has stated that “a very large percentage of the show is just made up” and that this season of Ryan Murphy’s show “veers so wildly from the reality of the case.” Schechter told the New York Post, “So much of it is pure over-the-top fabrication.”
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