Netflix have brought back Mindhunter in perhaps the most bizarre way possible, as their newest season of Monster releases today.
Season three of Monster sees Ryan Murphy take on another horrific killer having concluded seasons on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers.
Charlie Hunnam stars in the third season as Ed Gein, a real life serial killer who murdered at least two people, and robbed graves to turn bodies into furniture and clothes made out of skin and bones.
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The season focuses particularly on true crime and horror, showing how Gein went on to inspire a number of the world’s most famous horror movies such as Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In the Netflix show’s finale however, Mindhunter makes a bizarre appearance in the plot.
Spoiler warning for Monster – do not read beyond this point if you want to avoid major spoilers
The finale opens with a man committing horrific murders and sexual assaults. Following this, the episode cuts to a nearby prison in which two FBI agents, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, go to interview Jerry Brudos, a serial killer known as the Shoe Fetish Slayer.
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If the names John Douglas and Robert Ressler are familiar for Mindhunter fans, these are the two real life FBI agents who studied and interviewed serial killers to try and understand their psyche that Bill Tench and Holden Ford were based on.
The pair speak to Brudos who claims that Ed Gein inspired his killings, something that there is no proof of in real life.
Douglas, Ressler, and Ann Burgess, played by Anna Torv in Mindhunter, then go interview Ed Gein in the same style as other serial killers were interviewed on the hit Joe Penhall show directed by David Fincher.
With Mindhunter’s possible third and final season seemingly on permanent hiatus at Netflix, this appears to be the closest thing we can get to a revival of the show.
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There is no proof in real life that the real Douglas, Ressler, and Burgess spoke to Ed Gein to try and get his help in a murder investigation.
While Monster has at times played fast and loose with presenting theories as facts, the newest season on Ed Gein appears to have taken this to the furthest point yet.
In the show, Gein kills his brother Henry George Gein, something that has been theorised but never outright proven.
In addition to this, the episode heavily focuses on the idea that Ed Gein was a man with mental problems who took direct inspiration from Ilse Koch, and the horrific human experimentations of the Nazis.
Whilst his crimes took place in the 1940s and 50s, meaning that inspiration from the Nazis was likely, particularly from Koch due to his creation of skin lamps, there is no confirmed proof that this played anywhere near as large a role as the show presents.
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Monster: The Ed Gein Story is available to stream on Netflix now.
Topics: Netflix, Mindhunter, True Crime, TV and Film, TV
Michael Slavin