Criminal Adaptations
Criminal Adaptations is a True Crime/Movie Review Podcast discussing some of your favorite films, and the true crime stories that inspired them. With hosts Remi, who spent over a decade working in the film and television industry, and Ashley, a clinical psychologist and forensic evaluator. They discuss a new movie each week and compare the film to the real life events that the film is based on.
Criminal Adaptations
Monster: The Ed Gein Story - Part 1 (Bonus Episode)
This week we continue our Halloween bonus series on Ed Gein by diving into the first four episodes of season three of Netflix’s horror anthology series Monster. Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the series explores real-life infamous crimes through a dramatized lens. Season three focuses on convicted murder and graverobber Ed Gein, played by Charlie Hunnam. How will this season compare to the last two and what creative liberties were taken to bring Ed Gein’s story to our TV screens? Listen now to find out.
You can stream the full season of Monster: The Ed Gein Story on Netflix.
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Theme: DARKNESS (feat. EdKara) by Ghost148
My Ed Yes. Did you kill Bernice Warden? I don't remember. Did you kill Mary Hogan? I don't remember. Did you kill Ray Burgess and Victor Travis? No. Did you kill an eight-year-old girl? Georgia Jean Weckler? No, I didn't. Did you kill your brother, Ed? He died in a fire. Asphyxiation, they said. Oak Mother's heart.
Ashley:And welcome back, everyone, to part two of our bonus episode on Ed Gean. If you did not listen to last week, you should definitely go back and listen to that. We highlighted the life of Ed Gean and also talked about the three Hollywood adaptations where he is a primary inspiration. This week, we are going to be focusing solely on Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's season three of Monster, which is all about Edward Geane. And this is the second time we're actually covering a TV show. Ironically, also the first one we did, feud Capote vs. Swans, was also Ryan Murphy. But Remy, we chose this one primarily because we were both big fans of season one and season two. Why don't we talk a little bit about those seasons of Monster?
Remi:Yes, we are big Ryan Murphy fans. To an extent, I think I'm kind of falling off the Ryan Murphy bandwagon as of late, but the first two seasons of Monster, Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers story, were surprisingly accurate and I thought did a very good job of even in the Dahmer season at least highlighting the victims in the scenario. They do have scenes that are based on urban legends or hearsay here and there, but for the most part, many of the things ended up checking out, and I thought Evan Peters' performance as Jeffrey Dahmer was brilliant. He did a magnificent job, and I thought the miniseries did a really good job of not just focusing on him, but actually drawing attention to the lives that he took and who those people were. The Menendez Brothers was a very similar story, but I knew a lot less about the Menendez Brothers. And again, we looked into it and a lot of the details ended up checking out and being surprisingly really accurate. Plus it had Javier Bardem as the father, and all of these seasons have really great performances. So when we heard that Ed Geen would be the focus of the newest season, we both were like, yeah, this is the time to do it. We try and focus on usually just one serial killer per season. I guess this technically would be two because we did memories of murder earlier this season. But I remember hearing about this and getting really excited, and then being kinda surprised when I heard that Charlie Hunnam was playing Ed Gean in this. I mean, he's the good-looking Sons of Anarchy guy. I remember he was in Pacific Rim. He's always like the hero in stuff. And from what I know about Ed Geane, Charlie Hunnam was definitely not the person that I envisioned. What about you, Ashley?
Ashley:He definitely wasn't, and I was really thrown off too when I first heard that casting. But then, right when I saw a picture of him, and I actually compared it to Ed Gean, they somehow did a really good job making him look like him. I guess Ryan Murphy saw something that none of us did.
Remi:It is strange. I had my doubts, but then I did see the comparison photos, and they do have a lot of similarities in their facial structure, and they gave Charlie Hunum the lazy eye that Ed had in real life as well. But the voice definitely threw me off a little bit the first time that I heard it. I do have a brief clip of Charlie Hunnum discussing the voice, and let's start with an example of Charlie Hunum doing Mr. Ed Gean's voice in the series.
Episode intro:She killed herself. Oh boy. And you happen to know where they buried her.
Remi:So, Ashley, what do you think of Ed's voice in the TV series?
Ashley:It is a choice, that's for sure. I actually scrolled past something on Instagram, and I think it said something like he actually heard some sort of clip of the real Edgein's voice, but had to like sign some sort of like non-disclosure, non-re-release agreement or something like that. So he did say I'm pretty sure the voice is based on how Edgein sounded.
Remi:Well, I do have a clip of Charlie Hunnam discussing his choices for that particular voice in the show.
Charlie Hunnam :So that voice that I use grew out of my research. And the thing that I couldn't stop thinking about was Ed's burning desire to get the love and affection and acceptance from his mother that he never got. And she told him every day for 41 years that she hated him because he'd not been born the daughter that she wanted. So I thought if you don't have any other contact with the outside world, what would that do psychologically and emotionally, and how would that manifest in the body? And so I thought this sort of um gentle, high-pitched voice might be a way that Ed, you know, uh gave permission to his mother to love him.
Ashley:Okay, so it's not really clear from that clip if he actually sounded anything like that or not.
Remi:It's clear that Charlie has given this a lot of thought, but I'm not sure that the voice is actually based on the recordings of Ed Gean. I did find some random recordings of Ed Gean's supposed voice online, but I can't verify any of them, and I can't in good conscience play them here today.
Ashley:Yeah, when I typed this into YouTube, one of the videos on the side said, like, Ed Gean remastered voice, but it wouldn't really make sense if that's the case if Charlie Hunnam said that these videos were or these audio recordings were never released and it took him forever to track them down. I have a feeling those are probably all phony.
Remi:Yeah, one of the ones I came across on YouTube had been up for seven years and had 24 views. So I'm skeptical of the legitimacy of that one and basically any of the other ones I found on YouTube. But should we get into the main course, so to speak?
Ashley:Let's do it. And before we do, I want to give our listeners kind of like a little breakdown on how the format of this is gonna go. If you listen to our episode on Capodium and the Swans, we really did a play-by-play of everything that happened in each of those episodes while we discussed it throughout. We're not really gonna take that same route this time. Remy is gonna walk us through the episode, kind of touching more of the big takeaway points, but really what we want this to focus on is highlighting the similarities and differences between Ed Geen and Charlie Hunnam's portrayal of him and Monster, and also really talking about some of the what the fuck moments. Because unlike the first two seasons, there are some wild what is happening moments here. This season has a very, very different vibe from the first two. The first two are actually Golden Globe nominated. Evan Peters actually won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say I don't think season three is gonna get very many nominations.
Remi:It does seem a little more over the top than the previous two seasons do. I know Ryan Murphy's stuff is always pretty boundary pushing, but how the first episode begins alone really set the bar high, I guess, for what the fucks that were to come.
Ashley:And I actually have a theory that I feel pretty confident in about why this season feels a lot different than the first two. Ryan Murphy is actually listed as a writer for all the episodes in season one and season two, but none of the episodes for season three. He's just listed as a created by. So it's Ian Brennan who is the sole writer of all of these episodes. Apparently, Ryan Murphy is working on some other project in this moment. So it seems to me that he took a big step away from season three to focus on another project, and I think that's why it feels different.
Remi:He seems to get bored of projects and move on. I don't think he's very involved with any of the newer American horror story seasons. He's a very, very, very busy showrunner, and he's constantly releasing new shows. There's something coming out starring Kim Kardashian about like divorce attorneys that's coming out in a couple of months. We just watched the trailer for.
Ashley:And I wonder if he's going to come back in because they've already announced season four of Monster, and it is about Lizzie Borden with Charlie Hunnam playing her father.
Remi:The jury is out on whether we will be covering that one or not. But let's get into this season of Monster, the Ed Gean story.
Augusta Gein :Eddie. Why were you in my Brazier and nylons?
Episode intro:Explosives.
Ed Gein:Just trying to be funny. Oh, you're Josh and me. Huh?
Remi:Josh and The title for episode one is Mother. We have also decided that we are going to create our own taglines for each episode, summing up our feelings after seeing what we just saw. Ashley, will you give the tagline for the first episode?
Ashley:My tagline was Ed copes with the death of his family in the most peculiar ways.
Remi:Mine is Quaint Beginnings, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Nazis, and Mother's Underwear.
Ashley:So, uh audience, I think that kind of gives you a little hint that we enter Crazyville with this series right off the bat.
Remi:Yes, we start with Ed on the farm milking a cow. We see his house. The house is huge. And then there's the first scene that threw us both off, where we see Ed peeping in on some girls in their bedroom as they're getting undressed. It's very horror movie killer-ish, and it's not something that I ever found any proof that Ed did. He's literally snuck into this house and is peeping through a little hole.
Ashley:This is a point that I have in the differences column. This woman that he's peeping on, or this girl, I'm pretty sure it's like the girl he's dating throughout, Adeline, but I never found anything that he was peeping, and it looks like he's like snuck into this house to do so. It's really weird.
Remi:The girl in the scene is Adeline, who I will get to more in a minute. But the girls hear Ed outside of their door and they begin to freak out, and Ed runs away. But things get crazier from there because in the next scene, we see Ed back home, dressed in his mother's underwear, jerking off while hanging himself from a belt.
Ashley:And this practice is something he does several, several times in this episode, which is another point that I put in the differences. There was nothing about any sort of autoerotic asphyxiation or him literally masturbating into his mom's bra and underwear.
Remi:I know we both kind of looked at each other when the scene of him peeping was happening, but when this scene happened, we both audibly said, What the fuck is happening here? Like, this is not anything that I have read that is in any way based in reality.
Ashley:Well, and then immediately we get another what the fuck moment. He's standing in the middle of his like living room, naked, covering his genitalia, but naked, while mother is reading scripture to him and chastising him for his behavior.
Remi:Yeah, he is caught by his mom, Augusta Gean, who scolds him for being sinful and, as Ashley said, brings him out to the living room naked and just ridicules and humiliates him and berates him. His mom is played by an Academy Award nominee named Lori Metcalfe, who I primarily remember as playing Roseanne's sister on the old 90s sitcom.
Ashley:Oh yes, I totally, throughout the first couple episodes, was like, she looks so familiar, but I can't place her. That makes sense. I totally remember her from Roseanne, and she is fine in this. I'm not gonna lie, the entire time we watched this series, every time she was on the screen, I just thought to myself, I wish this was Jessica Lang.
Remi:You had also said that Kathy Bates would have made a good choice for this. And when the trailer came out and I heard the voice, I did think that his mom was gonna be played by Jessica Lang, who I think would have been brilliant. And I was pretty critical of Lori Metcalfe going into this, but by the time her character is dead and comes back as a ghost, she is really giving it her all, and her screechy performance is pretty impressive, I gotta say.
Ashley:Well, even though all we've been talking about now are highlighting the differences, at this point we do start to get some similarities in Mother's teachings about sin and all that. She does go into long diatribes, both here and throughout the rest of the series, about how women are sinful and how Ed needs to have nothing to do with them.
Remi:We also learn that Ed likes milkshakes and Nazi comics, because the next scene, he's in a 1950s-style diner waiting on his girlfriend or love interest or someone he's casually seeing, a girl named Adeline, which was another what the fuck moment for me, because I never heard of Ed Dean having any sort of relationship with a girl. So this was very surprising to me when this person showed up.
Ashley:From my research, he had two love interests, but they were both when his mom was alive, which I guess at this point she still is.
Remi:Well, Adeline is based on a real woman from Plainfield named Adeline Watkins, though a lot of the show's portrayal of her is obviously fictionalized. In real life, Adeline Watkins came forward in 1957 claiming she'd had a long-term relationship with Ed Gean, describing him as kind and courteous. However, she later retracted many of her statements and denied involvement in any of his crimes beyond their alleged acquaintance. In Monster, she is dramatic as a much more active romantic partner and accomplice, which has absolutely no historical evidence to back it up.
Ashley:She's also kind of painted as the person who is really fueling his obsession with Nazis and true crime in general.
Remi:She brings him like a box of horrific photos from the Holocaust, including a Nazi comic book, which I'll get into more in a moment. But yeah, she seems very into horrific scenes of murder and that sort of thing, so the two kind of seem like a match made in heaven at first. But again, I've never envisioned Ed Gean with a living normal woman in anything that I've read. From here we go to the death of Ed's brother. Ed's brother in the show seems like a pretty normal dude.
Ashley:Yeah, I have that. That's kind of a similarity with how Henry came across in my research. He just is portrayed in the film and from what I've read as much more well adjusted than Ed, and someone who's really striving for his independence and fighting against their mother to get it.
Remi:He wants to leave with, I think, a girlfriend of some sort, but he just wants to get out of town and get away from Mother, and he advises Ed to do the same, but the moment that he starts to badmouth Mother, Ed snaps and then kills him by beating him in the head with a hammer. Which again was pretty unexpected. After murdering his brother, Ed leaves him in the barn in the freezing winter for about a week, and then drags his brother out to a field and starts a brush fire. The police are called, mom is distraught. Ashley, how accurate do you think the series of events depicted in the TV show were?
Ashley:So there definitely are some similarities here, but also differences. The biggest difference is from what I recalled, they were fighting a fire together, and he died the day of that fire. And the fire was not in the dead of winter, because how would there be a brush fire if there was snow covering the ground? That does not make no sense. And the coroner in both real life and the show do rule his cause of death asphyxiation. So, with the real life death of Henry Geen, if you recall from our last episode, he was found in a field that was scorched, but the body wasn't burned, and he did have some unexplained bruising on the back of his head. And so, with this show, which I am assuming this is what the writer of the show, Ian Brennan, thinks happened, is that they got in some sort of argument about mother and Ed impulsively killed his brother and then went to report him missing as a way to cover it up. The big key differences here, regardless of what did or did not happen, because the death was obviously suspicious, is that they're saying Henry was killed a week before, which if you kill someone and let them sit in a barn, regardless of if it's cold or not, for a week and then drag them into a field, they're not gonna look the same as someone that's freshly killed. So I think that's a big key difference here. I don't think Edgeen killed his brother a week prior and then concocted this master plan. We've seen that Edgein is an impulsive person and is not good at covering up his crimes. If he did kill his brother, I do think it was an impulsive thing. And this show is framing it as the motive being jealousy because he wants his mom to himself.
Remi:Do you think that Ed killed his brother in real life? I know that there wasn't enough evidence to substantiate it, but personally, do you think from everything you've read and all the research, do you think Ed was the one who murdered his brother? Or do you think it was just some sort of accident?
Ashley:I think the fact that he was found in a place that Ed led investigators directly to, where everything around the body was burned, but the body of his brother was not burned at all, and he had contusions on the back of his head. It does seem to me that it was a murder, whether it was accidental, whether maybe they got into a fight and his brother fell and hit his head, I don't know. But it does sound to me that Edgeen had something to do with it.
Remi:I agree with you. There are just too many suspicious elements involved with the brother's death. But his mom takes the death very, very badly, leading to her first stroke.
Ashley:Which she did have a stroke not long after the death, but this show is implying that the death had a direct impact on it. In reality, it was like eight, nine months later, not right after he's found.
Remi:In the show, there seems to be things that set off her strokes, and in this, the death of her son is one of them. And afterwards, Ed is, of course, her caretaker, doing everything for her. There's a really creepy scene where he's giving her a sponge bath. But in retrospect, this is something you would have to do to a person you were tending to in this way. Though the focus on it in the show is questionable.
Ashley:This is also when we get a nice little nod to how Augusta viewed sex and that the only purpose of it was to have children, and she actually tells Ed that she was only defiled twice, which resulted in the birth of him and his brother.
Augusta Gein :All I wanted was a girl. Prayed and prayed to the good Lord for it, but was not his will, so I must abide by that. No matter how much it pained me to lay with your father. Oh, they only let him defile me twice. You know that. I told you that. Stank like a farm animal. And what did that shiftless drunkard ever give me? First, an evil son who humiliates his mother and is determined to drag us all to hell, and then I got you, a son so prone to all manner of weakness, who seems set on breaking his mother's heart.
Remi:Well, not long after, Ed takes his mom to a neighbor's house, or the closest thing to a neighbor they have in their secluded little home, in order to sell them some straw. And something happens where the mother sees like a couple coming out of the house, and it causes her to have a stroke right then and there.
Ashley:So this woman is supposed to be someone who is leaving the neighbor's house that Augusta knows is not this man's wife. And they are having what appears to clearly be a lover spat. And so Ed later, when he was arrested, blamed this woman and her unholy ways as what caused his mother's second stroke. So this is true.
Remi:So his mother basically saw someone having an affair, and that caused her to have a stroke. The realization that that was occurring in that house.
Ashley:She had a stroke the same day this happened, yeah. And Ed thinks that this is the reason why. And then she dies.
Remi:Yeah, that is the end of Ed's mom. She passes away because of this. And then we cut to something completely different. Germany, where we are introduced to the quote unquote bitch of Buchenwald, Ilse Kotch, who was a real person. She was the wife of Karl Otto Kotch, a Nazi commandant of the Buckenwald concentration camps during World War II. Ilsa gained infamy for her sadistic behavior towards prisoners, which included beatings, humiliation, and cruelty. Allegedly, she also collected items made from tattooed human skin, though evidence of this was never fully proven in court. Some human skin artifacts existed in Buckenwald, but none were definitively tied to her. So much of her post-war notoriety came from a lot of sensationalized reports.
Ashley:And I had this in one of my biggest what the fuck moments is happening. All of these scenes are portrayed as Ed imagining what life is like in Nazi-occupied Germany, but they are just the most bizarre and out there scenes. In this one, we start with Elsa Koch bitch slapping this little girl sitting on a horse for seemingly no reason, and then teaching little girls how to shave prisoners' heads. And it's a very long scene that just seems completely out of place.
Remi:It did come out of nowhere, and it is revealed that these are stories from some of the Nazi comic books that Ed collects and reads. So I guess it does have some sort of grounding in Ed Geen's real life, but it is definitely jarring when we suddenly cut to these scenes. And it happens a lot. The bitch of Buckenwald comes back in at least the second episode. We haven't gotten to the third one yet.
Ashley:To me, they just feel completely out of place and not in line with seasons one and two. You can easily show that Ed Gean is fascinated with Nazis in these comics without including these weird ass flashbacks.
Remi:Well, after Ed's mom's death, Ed has the house all to himself, and he can finally eat all the pork and beans from a can he wants for every meal.
Ashley:Which was his primary meal.
Remi:Not long after, Ed gets antsy, I guess, and begins missing his mom, and he tries to dig up her grave, but he fails to do so. He can't get through the entombment.
Ashley:This was true. He later did say he did try to dig up her grave but couldn't get in. And before we get to that, before he moves on to the next grave, he lies on her grave and is clearly so upset. I don't know if any of our listeners have seen Saltburn, but I was fully expecting a repeat of what happens in Saltburn with just Ed starting to hump the ground. Thankfully, that did not happen.
Remi:Yeah, it gets a lot worse, actually. From there, he finds another random grave, digs up a body, takes the corpse home with him, and the episode ends with him undressing her and staring at the naked corpse in front of him.
Ashley:Which was my last what the fuck moment. The undressing of the leggings on the corpse was very disturbing.
Remi:The way a lot of this is shot, I guess would be a big part of my problems with this particular season of the show. Stuff like that should not be shot sensually, but they are doing it that way. And I understand they're just trying to be edgy and controversial, but I don't know, man. You don't need to shoot it like that. It's something disturbing. It should not be shot the way that they do.
Ashley:And that leads us to episode two, Sick as Your Secrets.
Ed Gein:Mother, don't pout now. Be polite. This is my friend, and I'd like you to be friends.
Ashley:Remy, what's your tagline for episode two?
Remi:I kept it short and sweet for this one. My tagline is Norm Meets Ed.
Ashley:That's a good one. Mine's very similar. The worlds of Alfred Hitchcock, the production of Psycho, and Ed Gean start to merge.
Remi:Yours is a bit more accurate than mine. I think mine is uh a little bit more vague. But let's kick things off here with the beginning of this episode, which again is another what the fuck moment. Ed is tending to his fields in the farm, and all of a sudden, hordes of Jewish internment camp prisoners begin running through the field towards him, and Ed starts to freak out, and there's more and more and more of them. They're almost depicted like the zombies from Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. And Ed is hiding in his home, he's freaking out, and they're banging on the windows, they're banging on the doors, and I'm just sitting there like, what is happening?
Ashley:I thought for sure this was gonna be the biggest what the fuck moment from the episode, but it's not.
Remi:No, not at all, and that's a trend that will probably continue. It starts off with something very shocking at the beginning, and I would always assume that that's gonna be the craziest thing I see in the episode. But no, something crazier always comes along.
Ashley:It ends up being that this is a hallucination that Ed is having that his mother shakes him out of. And I'm assuming now at this point that all of these hallucinations that we are bombarded with throughout the rest of the series is something that's added because Ed was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Remi:And you mentioned that Ed's mom shakes him out of it. Ed's mom's voice, Ed's mom is, of course, deceased by this point, but he is still hearing her voice on a pretty regular basis. From here, we again cut to something completely different. We go to 1959, where we see the author of the book Psycho, Robert Block telling the story of Edgein to Alfred Hitchcock over some sort of dinner party of sorts.
Ashley:And here we get a really down and dirty summary of Edgean's history. Block tells Hitchcock that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He says his perception of why he thinks Edgein dug up graves. And they have repeated meetings where Block is educating Hitchcock on Edgein. And this very much confused me because from what we have talked about in our last episode, this does not line up with what we know about the production of Psycho at all. And it doesn't line up with Block trying to argue that Norman Bates wasn't inspired by Ed Gein at all.
Remi:Yeah, from all of the research that I have done, it seems like the Ed Gean influence was added much later. I tend to question that a little bit. But again, the show is running with more of the urban legends. And in this particular version, Robert Block is fully basing his character of Norman Bates on Ed Gean. He also mentions that Ed learned about scalping in grade school while he was learning about Native Americans. And Ed had a morbid fascination with true crime magazines, which would typically contain graphic, sexual, and bloody images.
Ashley:And this was true. He did subscribe or at least purchase multiple of these magazines, and at least at some point in his life, it was kind of all he could talk about.
Remi:It is also mentioned that Ed would return the bones to the graves after stripping the flesh in certain instances, and that he was also inspired by the Bitch of Buckenwald. Which brings us to the most what the fuck scene of this episode. For me personally, the Nazi horse party scene.
Ashley:Surprisingly, this is not my biggest what the fuck moment. So get ready, folks, because we are just going up and up and up from here on out.
Remi:Surprisingly, this isn't the only Nazi party scene in this episode. And apparently, according to this show, Nazis used to have some pretty crazy parties.
Ashley:Yeah, none of this was shown in the zone of interest.
Remi:And in this specific party, it shows Ilsa Kotch, the bitch of Buchenwald, in a big Nazi shindig. Everyone's drinking and having fun and doing this and that. And she gets on a large horse, like one of those big horses that you see tromping around Central Park. And then a Jewish person is put in front of her, and it is implied that she tramples this person to death in the middle of this party. All of this occurs inside, I think it's in like a den area. And yeah, none of this actually happened. Witnesses during the Buckenwald trials testified that Ilse Koch would sometimes ride her horse around the camp and whip prisoners from her horse. However, the more extreme stories of her trampling prisoners with the horses, or using a horse to kill them, were never substantiated with any credible evidence.
Ashley:I think this is again an illustration of shit Ryan Murphy would have edited out because it is not true.
Remi:It's just too over the top. I should not be saying what is happening so often in these episodes. And this was definitely a moment that is really off-putting and jarring and unexpected and unnecessary. We don't need to keep cutting back to this character. And fortunately, we do go back to Ed after this scene. Ed seems to have been doing his thing for some time now. And there's also a moth in his apartment during one scene, which is a Silence of the Lambs reference.
Ashley:I do think that that's kind of one of my favorite parts of this entire episode, or pretty much this entire series thus far, is just this slight little moth that flies through, Ed looks at it, and then it just lands. And it is something that is a clear reference to Silence of the Lambs, and it is really expertly placed there.
Remi:And it was at this point that I began to realize that Ed Gean in this show sort of has a forest gump quality to him. I don't know. They are portraying him as a very simple man and the voice and everything.
Ashley:I mean, he is a simple man. He's still eating pork and beans, which he's upgraded his kitchenery set to the tops of skulls, which is what Ed did. His favorite bowl was a skull cap.
Remi:He's been doing this for a while at this point, according to the show. He's been digging up corpses, he's been doing things with the bones and the bodies and the skin. And we then go to Ed on a roller skating date with Adeline. And as we said earlier, she seems really into fucked up shit and murders, especially crime scene stories and photographs and all of that. It's basically all she talks with Ed about. Because of this, Ed tells Adeline about his human skull bull collection back home, as Ashley mentioned. And she seems pretty into it, so Ed takes her back to his place. And he shows her his coffee tin full of used chewing gum, which is accurate. Ed did have that in his home.
Ashley:She also mentions that the lighting in the house is very dark, and that is because Edgeen did not have electricity.
Remi:He also shows her his human skin chair that still has a nipple. And it is portrayed like Adeline is just kind of going along with this, but not really believing anything that she's seeing. But the second that I see a chair that has a nipple on it, I freak out. But she keeps going at this point. Though she's clearly uneasy about this situation. So Ed brings Adeline to meet his mother, which is, again, another what the fuck moment, because it's implied that Ed has his mother's corpse up in the attic. Although it's never really stated it's his mother's corpse and it's never shown directly, so it could turn out to just be a random corpse he kept up there pretending as if it was his mother.
Ashley:It has to be because her body was entombed and they showed us that. So what this series is saying is he dug up another body and is pretending that it's the body of his mother.
Remi:Well, he tries to introduce Adeline to this corpse.
Ashley:Which, by the way, she is sitting exactly like how Norma Bates is sitting in Psycho.
Remi:There is a scene where Adeline and Ed are getting out of his truck and they're getting ready to go into the house. And it shows from Ed's perspective, he sees his mother standing in the upstairs window looking down at them with her silhouette. And then it shows from Adeline's perspective where it's completely dark up there. And I thought that was a really cool scene.
Ashley:And even with this one, when he opens the door and is like, Mother, this is Adeline, and it looks exactly like in the scene of Psycho. So it's some nice references there they're doing.
Remi:Well, Adeline eventually gets too creeped out to proceed and makes up an excuse and gets the hell out of there as quickly as she can, though this is not the last we will see of Adeline. Frustrated, Ed heads out to Mary's tavern and tells Mary, the bartender and owner, that she reminds him of his mother.
Ashley:Specifically pointing out her body type, which is gross but probably accurate. Because it was later revealed that Ed Gean did say that both of the two women he murdered reminded him of his mother in certain ways, most likely probably because of their age and maybe physical appearance, but that they didn't lead the same moral life that she led.
Remi:And from here, we enter Nazi Party number two.
Ashley:Which is my biggest what the fuck moment of this entire episode.
Remi:I am betting it's because of the topless women in Lederhosen that are at this party jumping around.
Ashley:Yeah. And how many of them there are.
Remi:And Ed is walking around the party. It's a pretty rowdy party. Everyone's throwing confetti. The bitch of Buckenwald is there. Her and Ed don't seem to really get along. They kind of get into an argument of sorts. And then from out of nowhere, it cuts back to reality, and Ed is in the bar and shoots Mary in the head with a rifle. He then drags her out of the bar, leaving a trail of blood behind him, and brings her corpse back home with him. The bloody crime scene is discovered the following day, and the police are called, and Ed is immediately a suspect. From here, we cut to Anthony Perkins prepping for his role as Norman Bates. Anthony is portrayed as a closeted gay man who is uncomfortable with his sexuality. In a therapy session, he admits that he vomits after sex, and in this episode, he uses his own internal struggles to help him get into the character of Norman Bates.
Ashley:So this episode led me to do a little bit of research on Anthony Perkins, and what I found was very, very fascinating. So reportedly he had an abnormally close relationship with his mother, to the point that he was jealous of his dad and actually wished he was dead so he could have her all to himself. Shortly after his father's death, when Anthony was seven, which Anthony then blamed himself because he had wished his dad was dead, his mom actually started to sexually abuse him, and this continued into adulthood.
Remi:Wow, so he had a tremendous amount of trauma to draw upon for this performance as Norman Bates.
Ashley:Anthony Perkins wasn't open about his sexuality, but as he started becoming more well known in Hollywood, many people were aware of it. In fact, per multiple accounts, before he began filming Psycho, the president of Paramount, where Perkins had a contract, pressured him to end his relationship with Tab Hunter, who is the unsupportive boyfriend portrayed in this series.
Remi:There is a scene where Anthony Perkins comes out dressed in drag, preparing for his role as Norman Bates, and he sort of surprises his boyfriend, and the boyfriend is not supportive or into what he's doing at all. He thinks it's very strange.
Ashley:The president of Paramount also pressured him into undergoing conversion therapy. The relationship with Tab Hunter did continue until 1959, which is while Perkins was filming Psycho. But during the filming of it, the studio's efforts to separate the two increased and was eventually successful, which Perkins said was a contributing factor to why he later bought out his contract after the film was released.
Remi:Well, I did read that most biographers do believe that he was pressured into living a heterosexual public life because of the studio and, of course, social stigma at the time. In fact, there is an interesting quote from Anthony Perkins, hiding secrets in plain sight, which is, of course, where the title of the episode comes from.
Ashley:All of this just made me really, really sad.
Remi:It is pretty tragic. I know that he did get married and he had some children because he was living in the closet for many, many years. And it is very heartbreaking. I know he was typecast as this character afterwards. I believe he played him in some of the sequels, which I have never seen. And it seems like he just got pigeonholed into this thing, and he never got to be himself. He was just hiding who he was for almost his entire life, and only the people closest to him knew who he really was. So I guess in that regard, he could identify with Norman Bates, having something hidden and projecting something else to the outside world. There is also a scene in the show where Anthony Perkins is being shown around Ed Gean's real home by Alfred Hitchcock.
Ashley:Which, by the way, we have to point out is being played by Tom Hollander, who is the same guy who played Truman Capote in Feud Capote vs. Swans. And while we were watching this, Remy said, That's Truman Capote. And I said, No, it's not. And I looked it up, and it was, and wow, this guy's vocal range is insane.
Remi:And he is wearing a lot of prosthetics to play Hitchcock in this performance. But he is a brilliant actor. Honestly, his cadence and the way he speaks as Hitchcock is really on point. And I think you and I agreed that his portrayal of Capote was one of the more accurate ones as far as vocal range and everything went.
Ashley:Let's play our audiences a little clip of the trailer to Psycho that is being narrated by Alfred Hitchcock, and it will kind of give you a very good idea of how Tom Hollander sounds in this series, because it sounds exactly the same.
Alfred Hitchcock:An old house, which is, if I may say so, a little more sinister looking, less innocent than the motel itself. And in this house, the most dire, horrible events took place.
Ashley:And before Remy tells you what happens in this entire sequence, I'll just say it was another big what the fuck moment for me. The whole time I was basically saying what the fuck is happening, and Remy's telling me, it's metaphorical, it's metaphorical. I don't care if it was metaphorical, I hated it.
Remi:Yeah, obviously, none of this actually happened. It's supposed to be symbolic or something like that. But Perkins is getting a tour of Geane's home by Hitchcock, and Hitchcock makes a point to stop and show Anthony Perkins Ed Gean's Vulva collection. From there, Perkins has a brief dreamlike interaction with Ed Gean upstairs, where Anthony Perkins is dressed as Norma Bates, and he's basically yelling at Geane, saying, What you're doing is disgusting. How can you do this? And he seems just repulsed by what Ed Gean is doing. And Ed Gean's response to him is, well, then why can't you look away? And from there, in my opinion, the third what the fuck moment from this episode, we cut to Ed Geane dressed as his mother, murdering Adeline with a knife in the shower, exactly like the scene from Psycho, only way, way more graphic.
Ashley:That's what I have. They are basically using this scene to show the opening day or premiere of the movie Psycho, but having it be acted out between Edgeen and Adeline, and it is so graphic. There is so much blood, there's so much boobs, there are graphic sab wounds, and I was just thinking, this wasn't like how the movie was.
Remi:Not at all. They seem to up the slasher movie vibe in this series, which I'm not down with. I don't think you need to just gratuitously add all of this shit.
Ashley:They have this scene go on for like a full minute, and then they show the crowd like just being disgusted. They are gasping, looking away, making just disgusted faces. One man goes outside and pukes twice in the trash can, another woman goes into labor. And that's just not really what I remember you telling us about what the reception of Psycho was.
Remi:Well, contemporary news reports did mention that audiences did scream and walk out, and some did faint, but there were no confirmed cases of vomiting or childbirth incidences that occurred during the actual event.
Ashley:It seems like they're taking a lot of that over what was reportedly happening with the Exorcist. Because I know there were people that walked out of the theater and puked at the Exorcist.
Remi:Again, I can't verify that off the top of my head, but a lot of this seems to be based off of urban legends and just how the story has been sensationalized throughout the years. And at this screening, Alfred Hitchcock is there watching all of this unfold. He's totally thrilled with what's going on, however. He's like, this is exactly the reaction I wanted. And the episode ends with Hitchcock going out to his car with his wife waiting for him and looking very, very pleased with himself. Which brings us to episode three, The Babysitter.
Ed Gein:I want to go home, please.
Remi:I will start things off with the tagline I have chosen for this particular episode. My tagline is Who the Hell is Evelyn Hartley? What is your tagline for the episode, Ashley?
Ashley:Well, first I can't wait to learn about Evelyn Hartley, but mine is two children witness a magic trick they won't soon forget.
Remi:Well, let's get into another crazy episode with Mr. Ed Geen. We start with a flashback showing Ed's father passed out on the floor, drunk and covered in his own piss. He is beaten awake by his wife Augusta. She berates him while Ed looks on from just a few feet away. Ed's father finally snaps and ends up slapping Augusta, but Augusta responds by knocking the ever-loving shit out of her husband and kicking him out of the house once and for all. She's had it with his drunken bullshit.
Ashley:During this scene, one of the things she berates him for is soiling himself before he can make it outside to the outhouse. And this is a little way to let the audiences know that the game house did not have indoor plumbing.
Remi:That is something I do forget about whenever we're discussing this home. Literally the fact that they would have to go outside into a wooden structure in order to do their business every single day. It had to be pretty unpleasant in there. Not knocking anyone who still currently uses outhouses, of course. But from here, we get our first what the fuck scene of this episode, in my opinion. The broom dance scene, which I have dubbed it. Ed is dressed as his mother, wearing Mary's skinned face, doing a saucy little dance while sweeping the kitchen floor.
Ashley:I actually have a little comment here that his moves are pretty impressive.
Remi:It sort of reminded me something that I would see in the film Chicago. Swinging that broom around, he's kicking those legs, he's definitely enjoying himself.
Ashley:This is also probably a good time to mention that before we shifted to this in the scene with Ed and his mom, this is really the first time I noticed how thin Charlie Hunnam looks. And so I looked up how many pounds he lost for this role. He actually lost 30 pounds in just three weeks. And it wasn't anyone in production that urged him to lose weight. He chose to do so himself after the first costume fitting, which is why he only had three weeks to do it. He was in some sort of costume and just is like, this doesn't fit right, this doesn't look right, I'm too bulky. So he dropped almost 10 pounds a week.
Remi:You were also curious about how they achieved the effect of Ed Gean's lazy eye on Charlie Hunnam, because it is very noticeable throughout the series. Hell if I knew how they accomplished it. But I was actually able to find a video of the makeup process for the show. So I'm gonna show that to Ashley really quick and she will give you her reaction. Now, Ashley, what you are seeing here is makeup artists Corey Castellano and Mark Neiman applying a delicate hooded lid appliance to Hunum's eye in order to recreate Geen's lazy eye for the camera. And he would have to do this every single day for several months while they were filming this.
Ashley:It is crazy that is a prosthetic. It does not look like it at all. Makeup artists in Hollywood just never cease to amaze me.
Remi:Well, back to Eddie dancing his heart out wearing a human skin mask with a broom, when he is suddenly interrupted by the local sheriff's department who are investigating the disappearance of Mary. Ed answers the door after stashing away his human skin mask and basically says that he wasn't there, and that's good enough for the cops. They're like, all right, we're out of here. No further questions, Mr. Gean. In fact, he even tries to get these sheriffs to ask his mother to verify his alibi. But they don't need it. Ed's word is good enough for them, and they take off.
Ashley:One thing that didn't make sense to me is this is a very small town. I find it hard to believe that these sheriffs, who clearly know who Ed is, I'm pretty sure they even call him Eddie. I just don't get how they wouldn't know that Augusta had died.
Remi:Agreed, it seems like something like that definitely would be spread around in a small town like this. It would be hard for me to believe that the police were unaware that his mother had passed away. Back at the diner, Ed is watching some kid blowing bubbles into his chocolate milk, which I'm sure we all used to do and brought back some fond memories for me.
Ashley:But this kid is doing it so aggressively, it's like overflowing all onto the table. It's pretty gross.
Remi:Then who should show back up? Miss Adeline! She is back, despite the creepy encounter in the last episode. And she is here to give Ed an article about sex change operations. And the show seems to be really implying that Adeline sort of inspired a lot of the shit that Ed started to get into.
Ashley:My theory about why they're making Adeline a much more central character than she was in real life is because if they didn't, it would just be Edgeen and deceased mom that we would be following throughout this whole thing. So by throwing in Adeline, it's their way of being able to include another character for us to follow.
Remi:Well, that was one of the first things that came to my mind when I heard that they were making an Edgeen miniseries. He was a very secluded, lonely guy. He didn't really have a lot of friends, he didn't have many female acquaintances. It was just Ed alone in this house with his crazy thoughts for the most part. So I really didn't understand how they could make that sort of thing into a full show, unless they leaned in heavily into the hallucinations, which they have and then some, but this Adeline character just caught me so off guard. I was just really not expecting Ed to have a love interest throughout this show.
Ashley:It also just doesn't fit with the past two seasons. The past two seasons, there were so many things that we weren't even sure about and would Google, and they would turn out to be true. It just feels like this one is drifting so much further away from sticking as close as they can to actual events to just incorporating a bunch of random shit, a bunch of rumors, and just taking a lot of artistic liberties with it, which is fine, but it's really not what I was expecting or really wanting from this series.
Remi:Agreed. And then we continue into Crazy Town, where we see Ed robbing another grave, per usual. Only this time he is robbing the grave in order to steal the wedding ring from a corpse.
Ashley:Which Edge did, as we know, dig up fresh graves to take freshly buried bodies for his skin collection. But from what I read, he never dug up a grave solely to do what typical grave robbers do: steal jewelry, gold, yada yada yada.
Remi:Well, we're continuing into this never happened, Ville, because Ed takes Adeline out on a date at a nice Italian restaurant, and then they follow it up with a lovely walk through the graveyard, where Ed proposes to Adeline with the ring that he stole from a corpse the previous night, and she says yes, she is totally down, she loves Ed, and she is DTF. She wants to jump Ed's bones in this graveyard. And Ed is kind of going along with it until he sees his mother's grave not far off, and that of course kills the mood for Ed.
Ashley:This was my first what the fuck moment. I found this so weird and disturbing. I can't imagine being so turned on by a proposal in a graveyard that it's just like we gotta have sex right now on top of this freshly dug mound of earth.
Remi:Adeline is weirdly down with like everything, Ed Geen. She is just into Ed. Which brings us to the main plot of the episode, I would say. It's what the episode is named after. The babysitting scenes. And boy, oh boy, buckle up, everybody. Adeline takes Ed to babysit some random kids, and she thinks it will help him prepare for fatherhood and a family with her, seeing how they're gonna get married now. And so she gets him to babysit these random kids for 10 cents an hour. And it's a little boy and a little girl.
Ashley:So I don't know if Ed Gean was ever a family's go-to babysitter. I find that pretty hard to believe just because the time this is set. I feel like stereotypes would have led anyone to prefer women to watch their children. But what I think this is referencing is the fact that kids actually really did like Ed and kind of gravitated to him.
Remi:There is even a scene where Adeline is introducing Ed to the woman whose children he's gonna be babysitting. Apparently, this is a woman who Adeline has babysat for in the past and is just having Ed step in for her. But it's pretty clear that this woman feels uncomfortable with Ed taking care of her kids. She triple checks that Adeline is not the one available to babysit.
Ashley:When he is first meeting the kids, the look on their faces is just like pure terror. And this is even before. The events of the night unfold.
Remi:So Ed gets his babysitting job and he starts off in the kids' home as he's supposed to. But for whatever reason, he decides to take the children on a little road trip over to his house for a while, where he proceeds to show them some skull bowls.
Ashley:Which is another reason why I think this is based on the fact that kids liked Ed. I remember in the book I read, there were those rumors that were going around that certain kids saw shrunken heads at his house. And so I think this is kind of a nod to that: that there are two kids in his home and they're seeing some weird shit.
Remi:That's what I think this is referencing as well, but the show takes it a bit further than that, of course. Ed starts off with a magic trick where he takes a finger bone and puts it under one of the three skull bowls, and then mixes them all up, and then when he reveals it, it is a human finger with the skin and muscle and everything attached. But for whatever reason, the kids think it's fake and they are totally unimpressed with this. So Ed kicks it up a few notches.
Ashley:And this is my favorite quote in the entire series thus far.
Episode intro:I can turn a lady and pull my head off.
little boy:That's impossible.
Episode intro:Yeah. Prove it.
little boy:Okay, I'm turning into a lady. What are you doing? Into her.
Ashley:Which is my second what the fuck moment.
Remi:And for our listeners at home, Ed comes out in front of the children wearing a severed head on top of his head, acting as if it's his head. Underneath, he is wearing one of his human skin masks, and then topples off the severed head on top and reveals the human skin mask underneath, and the kids are traumatized and scream, and yeah, it's bad. So Ed takes them home and the kids' parents are mad as hell and they refuse to pay him the 40 cents he is owed for babysitting for the night.
Ashley:And this made me think like maybe this is supposed to be a mention of how some of the neighbors were robbing him of money. But if that's the case, that doesn't make any sense because if someone essentially like takes your kids away and don't tell you or even leave a note of where they're going, I think these parents, especially considering that the kids come back like scared as shit, and once they tell them what they saw, I think the parents are well in their right to not pay Ed for his four hours of babysitting duty.
Remi:What would you think if you were these children's parents and they were telling you about the things that they saw that night? Would you think that their imaginations were probably exaggerating things? Because it would be hard to believe that the babysitter took them to his home, showed them a severed head, a human skin mask, and several skull bowls.
Ashley:And a finger.
Remi:Yeah, I don't know what I would believe. It would seem so far-fetched to hear this coming from my kids, but I would be wrong. And now we get to the question that was burning in my brain. Who is Evelyn Hartley, the replacement babysitter for Ed?
Ashley:That's not quite true. They mentioned this in very brief passing, but the kids actually know her and are asking her about her ailment, which is why the parents had to find a new sitter. And it turns out that the reason why she was out and unavailable is because she contracted polio.
Remi:This was a character that immediately had us looking at each other like, who is this person? This is not someone that came up in either of our research egg. And it turns out that Evelyn Hartley was a 15-year-old high school student from La Crosse, Wisconsin, who vanished on October 24th, 1953, while babysitting for a local family.
Ashley:Okay, I called it right away. I was like, this has to be a reference to after Ed is arrested, pretty much everyone in Wisconsin tries to link him to every disappearance in the past decade. So I had mentioned that I bet this babysitter is one of those, and it sounds like that's what you're about to tell me.
Remi:You are exactly correct. When the father returned home, there was signs of a violent struggle, a broken window, bloodstains, and Evelyn's body was never found. Over the years, some speculated Edgeen's involvement because he lived only a few hours away, and his crimes were discovered four years later. Yet there is really no evidence that ever linked him to her disappearance, and Evelyn's case still remains unsolved.
Ashley:It doesn't fit his MO. There's no evidence that he ever even left Plainfield except for the one time to fail an army physical, and he passed two polygraphs actually when they asked him about multiple other crimes.
Remi:In the series, she is portrayed by actress Addison Ray and is depicted as suffering from polio and even has a leg brace as a result. However, the medical detail in actuality has never been confirmed, and there are no records of the real Evelyn having polio.
Ashley:Again, this is just such a weird thing to put in.
Remi:Well, it gets weirder from there, because Ed stalks Evelyn as she is babysitting the children, and then sneaks into the house and kidnaps her. From here, we cut back to Ed and Adeline, and Adeline telling her parents that she's gonna be marrying Ed Gean. And her parents totally freaking out and not being into this idea at all. So what does Adeline do? She's like, well, F you, Mom and Dad, I'm gonna go move in with my fiance, Ed Gean.
Ashley:And his mom, who she thinks is still alive and is just a corpse upstairs, sitting and looking out the window.
Remi:Yeah, she really shrugged off that whole interaction with the corpse in the last episode. And the show also begins kind of insinuating that there is a folio doigt type situation going on, where a shared delusion amongst two people, because I believe there's a scene where she hears the mom in some capacity. From here, we cut back to Anthony Perkins taking a man on a date to watch the film Psycho, and he gets head in the movie theater while watching himself on screen.
Ashley:Which was another what the fuck moment of mine. It's very weird.
Remi:Back at his place, Perkins tells the man that he's met a woman and is basically going back in the closet. There is also a scene of Perkins trying conversion therapy, and he is inevitably typecast as the Norman Bates character for the rest of his career.
Ashley:So I did some additional research on Anthony Perkins, and I just don't really feel like this end note on him, because as Remy will share with us soon, this does seem to be the end of Anthony Perkins in this series. But basically, before Psycho, Anthony was a very successful actor. He started in theater and actually won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1956's Friendly Persuasion.
Remi:I have not seen him in anything else, but he steals every scene he is in in Psycho. His acting is on another level.
Ashley:Well, his role in this led to Paramount signing him for a seven-year contract. In 1958, he was nominated for a Tony Award. And between 1956 and 1960, he acted in films with Henry Fonda, Sophia Loren, Shelby McLean, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Jane Fonda. After Psycho and the mistreatment he got from the studio, he actually ended up buying out his contract and he moved to France and began working in European cinema. His first film was Goodbye Again with Ingrid Bergman and earned him the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. He had a successful acting career in Europe and came back to the States where he also resumed acting in 1966. And it actually wasn't until 1983 when he first reprised his role as Norman Bates in Psycho 2.
Psycho 2 trailer :I have a petition here signed by 743 people against Norman Bates' release. Madam, please sit down. This matter is being represented by the district attorney. Norman was not convicted of murder. He was found not guilty by reasonable insanity. Norman Bates is judged and restored to sanity and is ordered released forthwith. It's 22 years later. And Norman Bates is coming home.
Ashley:After that, he starred in and directed Psycho 3 in 1986. This one was not as successful as the first two and did lead to bouts of diminished self-confidence. Psycho 2 actually has like in the 60s on Rotten Tomatoes. Have you seen it?
Remi:I have not seen any of the Psycho sequels, and the trailer we just played for you was actually the first and only footage I've ever seen of any of the Psycho sequels. I forget they exist.
Ashley:Well, the last time he played Norman Bates was in Psycho 4, The Beginning, a made-for-TV movie in 1990. During the filming, he learned he was HIV positive and he died at home on September 12th, 1992.
Remi:It's a very tragic end for a brilliant actor.
Ashley:But how this series is playing it is that immediately after he is in psycho, every sort of acting job dries up and he's just being offered roles as Norman Bates, which isn't true.
Remi:They do skip over a lot of that. The trailer even begins with saying how long it's been since Norman Bates has been in a film, and I didn't realize that it was that big of a gap in between Psycho 1 and Psycho 2. Hitchcock was not involved with any of the Psycho sequels, and the series seems to imply that he sort of got typecast in his own regard, and couldn't get other films financed because Psycho was such a big hit, and it basically invented the horror genre. Because he couldn't get any of his other projects financed, he resorted to making another horror film, The Birds, just a few years later.
Ashley:Again, which also I don't think happened, he made the equivalent of $15 million from Psycho. If he wanted to finance a film, he could have done so by himself. He also at some point ended up getting 15% of the studio.
Remi:Yeah, I do feel like he probably had a bit more creative freedom than the series is letting on. Which brings us to the ending of episode three, where we are back with Evelyn in Ed's basement, tied to a chair wearing only her underwear. Ed drags his mom's corpse downstairs and then tries to get the dead body to kill Evelyn with a hammer. The scene is clearly referencing a scene from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, which we watched recently.
Ashley:And I feel like this is something they're gonna do throughout, where they're introducing these movies and recreating them with Ed Gean and a quote-unquote supposed victim.
Remi:This was also the point in the series where it dawned on me that the show is kind of doing a slasher movie thing that seems wildly inappropriate for the story of Ed Gean. And from here, the episode ends on the scene of Evelyn and Ed transitioning into that scene from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre being filmed, and we see Leatherface in all of his big creepy glory.
Ashley:And that leads us to episode four of Green.
Episode intro:He's seeing me! Fornicating with a divorced woman? Drinking wine and these sinful coal cuts.
Ashley:Remy, what is your tagline for episode four?
Remi:My tagline for this episode is Liberties, Leatherface, Glowing Green Underwear, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Ashley:Mine is my favorite quote from this entire episode. If you pump me good, Eddie Geen, I'll let you wear my panties.
Remi:We'll get to that line in just a minute. This episode starts with Ed lotioning up Evelyn Hartley's corpse. He wraps her up in bandages like a mummy, and meanwhile, upstairs, Adeline discovers that Ed's mom is a corpse and proceeds to freak the fuck out. She runs out of the house screaming, and Ed chases after her.
Ashley:I'm gonna preface this by saying we have watched this episode and then the one after this one thus far. And there are going to be increasingly less similarities for us to highlight, and increasingly more what the fuck moments for us to comment on. And this wrapping the babysitter up like a mummy and rubbing lotion all over her entire body is the first one of this episode.
Remi:Well, it keeps going from there because Adeline makes it back to her home, which is apparently running distance from Ed's house. And Ed sneaks in through the basement just like he had when he was peeping on Adeline, changing in her bedroom in some earlier episodes.
Ashley:It was also really weird because when Adeline runs home, there's a note from her mom on the door that says, Out to church, won't be back anytime soon. And Adeline has moved out at this point, or so I thought. So I just found it really weird that the mom would just broadcast to the world that, oh, the door's unlocked and no one's here. Small towns, I guess.
Remi:I guess a little bit of a spoiler for the next episode, but it seems like she's kind of going back and forth between staying at Ed's home and staying at their home. And back in the day, a letter on the door was the best way to communicate to people, apparently.
Ashley:Or put it on the kitchen table or something, like my mom would do when she needed to communicate something to me as a teenager.
Remi:No, you gotta put it on the door. You will see it if it's on the door. It doesn't matter in this situation if it's on the door because she just goes inside and Ed Gean is after her in a moment. But in normal situations, I would say you should just leave the note on the door. It's the first thing someone will see. I leave a note on the door for the Grubhub person every time. Anyway, while Ed is in the house searching for Adeline, he gets sidetracked by a pair of glowing emerald green panties that are laid out on one of the beds in one of the other rooms. It's literally like Wizard of Oz panties. They are glowing like the Emerald City, and Ed is so drawn to them. So Ed is there basking in the green glow of these panties, and Adeline comes into the room and casually joins him.
Ashley:And I'm gonna point out she ran away from this house screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs, and now she is super, super chill.
Remi:The two of them proceed to have a bit of a heart-to-heart, and Ed tells Adeline that the corpse that she found in his house was not really his mother's corpse, it was actually just another body that he had taken and is using as her stand-in. And it turns out that Adeline is more mad that Ed lied to her than the fact that he is keeping a dead body up in his attic. In fact, she is so cool with all of this that even Ed seems a little bit freaked out by how well she is taking all of this information. Which leads us to Ed and Adeline back home with Ed now wearing the emerald green panties that were glowing in the previous scene, but aren't anymore. And he is modeling them for Adeline, and I am just sitting there like, what the fuck is happening?
Ashley:What the fuck moment like number four, and we're only what, like 15 minutes in?
Remi:This is the intro. I always tell Ashley that the opening to all of these episodes is usually pretty out there, and this episode is no different. Which brings us to Bernice Warden. We next meet Bernice, a middle-aged woman working at a hardware store selling Ed some lime.
Ashley:And she's dressed to kill.
Remi:And she is also a mess. She is extremely scattered and dramatic and very emotional, but she seems to really like Ed. And there are also a lot of close-up shots of Bernice's breasts throughout all of these scenes, presumably from Ed's POV. And it's funny because every time I was looking down to take notes while we were watching this, apparently that's when these scenes would come up, so I missed every one of these scenes and Ashley had to actually point them out.
Ashley:There were so many of them. And after the fourth one, I realized that you were missing them, and I asked you, like, do you see that? They have just cut to her cleavage so many times.
Remi:I'm being 100% honest with you. I did not see any of these shots. This is 100% based on Ashley telling me that this occurred in these scenes. Apparently they were really quick shots, and I was always looking down, taking notes when they occurred.
Ashley:Well, and these all happen primarily on their date, because yes, they go on a date, and it is literally a recreation of the date he took Adeline on.
Remi:Yeah, he takes her out to dinner at the diner, and Ed is drinking milk per usual, and asks if he can wear Bernice's bra, which Bernice finds totally tantalizing. So she slips off her undergarment right there in the restaurant and hands it over to Ed.
Ashley:And tells him to smell it, which is what I have in my notes here that this entire episode is a what the fuck moment, honestly. This is not true, folks. Ed and Bernice never went on a date. Not only that, everything that transpires between them from here on out is totally, totally, totally, totally fabricated.
Remi:Then we get to a scene of Ed taking Bernice roller skating, and Ed begins to hallucinate, seeing some people that he had killed. And at this point, it occurred to me that Ed is very social in this show. He's starting casual conversations with strangers, inviting girls to dinner, going roller skating on a regular basis. It's just not how I ever pictured the real Edgeen.
Ashley:I do think it is supposed to be a little nod to how the townsfolk described him as someone who was personable and helpful and friendly whenever he did interact with them.
Remi:They didn't describe him as a ladies' man, which is kind of how he's coming across in this series.
Ashley:I do have a note here that Ed Geen is in high demand. He is being portrayed as a ladies' man.
Remi:Anyway, Ed and Bernice head back to her place where they drink glasses of wine like they are shots of tequila. Literally, they both just down an entire glass of wine like it's nothing. And then we get to Ashley's tagline of the show. Bernice tells Ed.
little boy:If you all me good at Eddie Key, I'll let you wear my panties.
Ashley:This is after she just randomly flashes him.
Remi:From there, the two of them have sex, and true to her word, Bernice gives Ed her panties, and he proceeds to model them around the living room for her.
Ashley:And she asks him to move in. This relationship is escalating so quickly. And remember, Edgeen is engaged at this point. Where's Adeline?
Remi:Back home, Ed tells his mother about Bernice, thinking she may approve of him seeing a woman closer to her age. But mom is not impressed and refers to Bernice as a Jezebel, amongst other things. Little note here: a Jezebel is a term that originates from the Bible, referring to Queen Jezebel, who was a Phoenician princess married to King Ahab of Israel. It is a commonly used reference for a seductive, scheming, or morally corrupt woman who uses her sexuality to deceit or control others. I had to look that up because they really do throw the term Jezebel around a lot. So from there, we go back to the hardware store where Ed is watching Bernice through the shop window, which is now full of chainsaws, so they must be having a sale or something.
Ashley:They do mention that it is the start of hunting season, which is one of two similarities I have pointed out from this entire episode. Only similarity about Ed Geen.
Remi:Would you have a chainsaw sale during hunting season?
Ashley:Probably makes more sense to have rifles for sale.
Remi:So Ed comes inside and Bernice takes him to the back of the shop and presents him with her favorite pair of underwear.
Ashley:A box of her favorite bras.
Remi:Well, they're presented as like a gift box with her underwear inside, and Ed is pretty thrilled about this.
Ashley:It is weird, and if I were a descendant of her family seeing this, I'd be fucking furious.
Remi:And it just gets worse from there because Ed starts accusing her of giving him a venereal disease.
Episode intro:You and your unmentionables, you lured me in. Bernice, you made me do something that I didn't want to do. Bullshit, Eddie, how'd I force you to fuck me? You see, that's what I'm talking about. I did every deadly sin in one day. The skis and the fornicating in the white?
Remi:And Bernice is obviously offended by this and starts to kick Ed out. They go to the front area of the shop. Ed asks to see one of the hunting rifles that are, I guess, for sale for hunting season. Bernice is really just giving him a piece of her mind, and Ed shoots her in the back of the head. Her blood also is emerald green.
Ashley:So I looked up why this episode was not only called green, but why there was so many green references. Remy had mentioned the blood coming out of her head, the shiny emerald green underwear. A lot of the backlighting in this entire episode is bright emerald green. Apparently, the green is supposed to represent Ed Gean's delusion about Bernice's blood being poisoned from an STD, and it's used as a narrative tool to explain to viewers why he was declared legally insane at trial.
Remi:Huh. I didn't get that from watching the show.
Ashley:Me either, because usually when you think of green, you think of jealousy, envy. No, in this it's supposed to represent poison.
Remi:It can represent sickness. That is one of the things that the color green represents, but the way it's presented in this show is like a glowing emerald green. It's not portrayed as like the sickly green that you would imagine. It's portrayed as almost a shiny treasure of some sort. Back to the episode. Ed drags Bernice's body out of the store, and on his way out, he also takes the store's cash register.
Ashley:Which apparently he did do in real life.
Remi:And here's a quick update on the real Bernice, now that we have gotten this far. She did own a hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and Ed Gean was a regular customer, and they would often chat whenever he visited the shop. Some of the townspeople said that Ed seemed fond of Bernice or maybe had a crush on her, but there is absolutely no indication of a romantic relationship or that she reciprocated this crush in any capacity. Gean also told doctors when he was being held at Central State Hospital that he'd never had any sexual experiences his entire life. So what is true in this episode is that Bernice owned a hardware store, she disappeared, and investigators found her store's cash register missing and a trail of blood. They would later find her headless, mutilated body hanging in Ed Gean's shed. The show omits the receipt written by Bernice that morning, which had been made out to Gean for antifreeze, and inevitably led police back to Gean.
Ashley:And they track him down real quick within a day or two in the show. It's not that quick. We have a full nether episode that we're gonna talk about next before he gets caught.
Remi:From here, we cut to two random dudes walking through the woods at night who are apparently lost and happen to take shelter in Edgean's barn. Unfortunately for the dudes, Geen is in the barn, dabbling in his various atrocities, and chases the men out with a chainsaw.
Ashley:Well, you left out that before we get to there, Ed Gean actually invites Adeline into the barn and shows her Bernice's mutilated body, and she just starts snapping photos and is so thrilled with what she is witnessing.
Remi:But who the hell are these two guys? That was my big question when I saw this, and it turns out that their names are Victor Travis and Ray Burgess. They were two local men from Plainfield, Wisconsin, who vanished under mysterious circumstances back on December 1, 1954. They were last seen leaving a local tavern in Plainfield after a night of drinking, and they told friends that they were heading home for the night, but they never arrived. Their truck was later found abandoned, and despite extensive searches, no trace of either man has ever been found.
Ashley:Do you think that Ed Gean chased them through the woods and killed them with a chainsaw while wearing a women's mask, which is what is depicted in this series?
Remi:Well, locals did speculate that Gean may have. Been responsible because their disappearance occurred three years before Edgean's arrest, but investigators never found any evidence connecting Gean to either men, and Gean's crimes were overwhelmingly focused on women. So no, I do not think that Edgean killed these two men with a chainsaw.
Ashley:Yeah, this does not fit his MO. His body count has now surpassed the real Edgean.
Remi:From here we go to Texas, 1959, where we see little Toby Hooper learning of Edgean's crimes from his father over breakfast one morning. And little Toby seems super curious about all of this morbid stuff. We then cut to 1968, where adult Toby Hooper is waiting in line to make a return at a department store, and he begins fantasizing about grabbing a nearby chainsaw and massacring everyone around him. This is apparently how Hooper first got the idea for his film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Ashley:I think we can all relate, being stuck in some sort of very long line or just very undesirable situation and wanting to go ham on whatever and whoever is preventing us from reaching our goal.
Remi:We then jump forward to 1973, where Toby Hooper is on set filming his movie.
Ashley:And before we continue, there was one scene in the middle where Toby Hooper is talking about how he is just disgusted by the news media and the government that he believes are lying to citizens, particularly about the atrocities of the Vietnam War. And I think that this is one of the compliments I can give to Ian Brennan, that it was a very nice, subtle reference to why Toby Hooper started his movie with the line of this is inspired by actual events, because he actually did have the perception that the news, media, and the government were lying to people about things that were going on overseas.
Remi:Well, onset, there is an actor dressed as Leatherface, chilling in the van that we see in the film. Toby Hooper hops in the van and begins putting lipstick on Leatherface and explaining the three personalities of Leatherface. The killer, which is the brutal, efficient, and silent one who will attack intruders with a hammer or a chainsaw, and their mask is plain, stitched up, and looks like a human skin mask. Then the old lady, who acts like the homemaker, who sets the table and helps the family with chores, and their mask is more of a wrinkled elderly woman face, with makeup often paired with an apron or a dress. And finally, the pretty woman, who is self-conscious and preoccupied with their appearance and femininity. Their mask is a more feminine mask with lipstick and styled hair, which presumably is the one that Toby Hooper is prepping in this scene. So after Toby Hooper tells the actor all of this, the actor comes to the conclusion that Leatherface is a transvestite cannibal lesbian, and then begins to shriek wildly in his lipstick skin mask. That brings us to the ending of this episode where we cut back to the two dudes, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, running away from Ed with a chainsaw. Ed catches up to them and slaughters them both viciously with his chainsaw, and then begins to dance around, just like Leatherface did at the end of the movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Ashley:And that will bring us to episode 5 titled Ice, but before we get to that, we regret to inform you that we're gonna take a little pause here. We need a break from Edgein. I'm sure you all need a break from Edgein. We weren't intending these bonus episodes to go on for three of them, but it has, and happy Halloween.
Remi:This is certainly a lot of Edgeen, more than I ever anticipated filling up my day-to-day life. But I am happy to bring these episodes to you guys, and I hope you all are enjoying them. And if you are, please like, share, subscribe, tell a friend. It all goes very far to help the word get out about the podcast, which we greatly appreciate. And we hope everyone had a very happy Halloween as well. But until next time, one week from now, court is adjourned.
