Osgood Perkins Tears Down MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY For Its "Netflix-ization of Real Pain" Regarding His Father, PSYCHO Star Anthony Perkins
Actor and filmmaker Osgood Perkins is known for roles in films like Legally Blonde, Nope, and The Monkey, and for his writing and directing efforts on movies Long Legs, The Monkey and Gretel and Hansel.
But his horror film roots go well beyond his own lifespan, starting with the movie Psycho, which starred his actor father, Anthony Perkins, in the lead role of Norman Bates.
Now Oz Perkins is speaking out against the latest season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix Monster anthology series titled Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which Perkins says he “wouldn’t watch with a 10-foot pole,” given the creative liberties taken and the show’s depiction of his late father Anthony Perkins (played by Joey Pollari).
Perkins criticized streamers for taking the true-crime genre and turning it into “glamorous and meaningful content,” telling TMZ that he worries about culture and being “reshaped in real time by overlords.”
Osgood explained that the true-crime genre is “increasingly devoid of context and that the Netflix-ization of real pain [ie the authentic human experiences wrought by ‘actual events’] is playing for the wrong team.”
In the third season of Monster, now available to stream, Pollari portrays the Psycho (1960) star struggling as a closeted actor, being defined by his killer role and feeling like a “monster” for being gay.
While Anthony Perkins’ sexuality was an open secret among Hollywood, he remained married to Osgood’s mother Berry Berenson until his death from AIDS at age 60 in 1992.
Although the latest season of Monster is about Ed Gein, it relies only partially on his story, also touching on his crime’s influence on such movies as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Harold Schechter, author of the definitive Gein book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho, has said that “a very large percentage of the show is just made up” and that Murphy’s latest controversial installment “veers so wildly from the reality of the case. So much of it is pure over-the-top fabrication,” Schechter told the New York Post.
Murphy has been criticized throughout the run of the series by the subjects and families of those depicted on Monster, which has been known to take creative liberties with the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer and Erik and Lyle Menendez.
For his next season, Murphy is taking on Lizzie Borden, and given the timeframe of her alleged crimes, maybe this next season will be less scrutinized.
via: Deadline