MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY Pushed Hitchcock’s PSYCHO Shower Scene to the Edge with Added Gore and Nudity
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story doesn’t hold back and took a ton of creative license in telling this story. The latest chapter in Ryan Murphy’s dark anthology dives into the twisted mind of the infamous killer who inspired Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
But it’s one scene, a shocking reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic shower murder, that’s stirring up conversations.
In Psycho, Hitchcock turned suggestion into terror. The audience never saw the knife pierce skin, yet the horror felt visceral. Monster throws that restraint out the window.
It shows everything with the nudity, the blade penetrating flesh, and a lot more blood. The moment strips away the psychological finesse that made Hitchcock’s version legendary and replaces it with something rawer, more graphic, and disturbingly literal. It’s not just an homage. It’s a provocation.
Director Max Winkler, who helmed six episodes of the series, explained the approach in a recent interview with Variety. He said the creative team wanted the violence to feel “larger than life” and intentionally exaggerated, Hollywood’s idea of horror made flesh.
“When we redid the Psycho shower scene, it was always supposed to be Hollywood’s version of what it actually is. Seeing Janet Leigh get killed is one thing, but actually what it felt like to put a brutally murdered woman on film screens and how people reacted to that, and how deeply upsetting it was, and how shocking it was then, and how desensitized we are now … we tried to give everything a visual language.”
What he’s saying there captures the core of what Monster: The Ed Gein Story is wrestling with, our collective obsession with violence and the blurred line between fascination and exploitation.
He added: “We never tried to paint them by numbers. We tried to put our own spin on it. The shower scene is significantly more brutal because our perspective of it is via Hitchcock, the monster for bringing this into movies that were not like that before.
“So I loved those sets. I loved the young actor playing Anthony Perkins, Joey Pollari, who I think is incredible. He himself felt like a monster because he had these feelings of being a homosexual and didn’t know who to talk to about it, and his own therapist told him that he should get a lobotomy.
“I have a very big affinity for old backlot movies, so getting to shoot those … anytime you get to shoot a bunch of guys in gladiator costumes, with them walking around taking a lunch break and smoking a cigarette, is a great day of work.”
The show doesn’t just explore Gein’s crimes, it examines how culture turned those crimes into entertainment. Winkler and Murphy even question whether filmmakers, audiences, and media share a part of the monster’s DNA.
“Who is the monster?” Winkler said. “Is it the American healthcare system? Is it his mother, Augusta Gein? Is it Ed Gein? Is it the filmmakers who got inspired by this? Is it Hitchcock, who put it into pop culture and changed movies forever?”
That’s where the series hits a nerve. When Charlie Hunnam’s Ed Gein looks directly into the camera during the series and says, “You’re the one who can’t look away,” the show turns the lens on us, the viewers, and dares us to confront why we keep watching.
From a technical standpoint, the recreated scene is stunning. The lighting, framing, and tone mirror the aesthetics of Hitchcock’s original while amplifying the grotesque details modern audiences have been conditioned to expect.
It’s a visual gut punch, one that feels more like commentary than simple gore. But the question remains: did the scene need to go that far?
Hitchcock’s brilliance lay in what he didn’t show. His restraint forced the imagination to do the heavy lifting. By comparison, Monster’s version feels like an autopsy of the original by being more explicit, but arguably less haunting.
Winkler insists it wasn’t about shock for shock’s sake. He wanted to show what it means to depict violence in an era where true crime and horror are constant fixtures in streaming culture. Still, for many viewers, it may feel like crossing a line that Hitchcock so carefully drew decades ago.
In the end, Monster: The Ed Gein Story doesn’t just retell a true-crime saga. It dissects our relationship with horror itself and how stories of real pain and death get transformed into entertainment, and how easily we look away from what that means.
Whether you see the Psycho scene as a brilliant meta statement or an unnecessary escalation probably depends on your tolerance for discomfort. Hitchcock made audiences scream without ever showing the knife go in. Monster makes us question why we ever wanted to see it.