As a producer, filmmaker, and Hollywood impresario, Ryan Murphy has never been typecast. Think of his major projects: Glee and American Horror Story, Feud and the 9-1-1 franchise, Nip/Tuck and American Crime Story. Certainly he has never let his interest or success in the horror genre, reflected in its most extreme form in the Monster/s franchise, lock him into a Scream King track. (Not even making a show called Scream Queens did that.)
It’s fascinating, then, to watch Murphy’s close collaborator Ian Brennan tackle what happens to artists who are very, very good at horror the way this episode does. Brilliant as Norman Bates, actor Anthony Perkins finds himself forever associated with the role as casting agents offer him Norman knockoffs and men and women alike call him “Norman” during sex. Alfred Hitchcock’s uncompromising vision made Psycho an epochal film, but it also spawned an entire industry of gory, titillating horror schlock — a million miles away from where Hitch’s refined sensibilities wanted cinema to go.
The fact is that it’s hard on an actor or director to be extremely good at scaring the living shit out of people. As Tony’s agent explains to him, there’s a cost to being seen as “strange” by audiences. They have trouble ever seeing you as any other kind of thing again. For Tony, this is all tied up with his ongoing attempt to cure himself of his homosexuality, which is every bit as heartbreaking as you’d think it would be. “Maybe I wasn’t a monster anymore,” he says of his successful hetero hookup, smiling with painful hope. To the audience, though, he’ll always be a monster of a different kind.
Even the films themselves take on a terrible totemistic power: the alleged curse surrounding The Exorcist, the widespread belief that The Blair Witch Project is an actual snuff film, the theories that surround Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as if it’s some esoteric text written by a medieval alchemist. Scaring people is a kind of magic, and we fear the sorcerers among us.
It’s no coincidence that an episode that shows us the price Perkins and Hitchcock paid for their own successes, and which ends with recreated footage from the set of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — one of the most cursed-feeling pieces of media ever committed to film — also depicts Ed Gein trying his hand at show business.
Throughout this episode, which begins with Ed effortlessly throwing off police suspicion regarding the murder of Mary Hogan, Eddie continues to court Adeline Watkins, who it turns out was not wholly put off the idea of a relationship with him by her spooky evening in his house. She accepts his marriage proposal, and his ring, taken off the finger of a corpse. Estranging herself from her family, she moves in with Ed and starts tidying the place up.
She also gets him a job as a babysitter.
Now, obviously, “Ed Gein, Babysitter” is a world-historically awful idea. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, say what you will about John Wayne Gacy, but at least the man was a semi-professional clown. Ed’s idea of a magic show is to take the children he’s babysitting — with Adeline’s strong recommendation — to his house of horrors. There, he plays a game of three-card monty with skulls and a human finger. He tells the kids he can change into a lady, then hides his head in his flannel shirt and puts a woman’s severed head on top of his own. When the kids protest that it’s stupid and fake, he pops his real head out, revealing a mask of human skin.
The sequence works as black comedy, however, because at no point does it seem like Ed is actually going to hurt these kids. That’s the weird thing about Ed: When he’s being sweet and good-natured, he kind of means it? Gein lives fully in the grips of delusion, one with no real seams between the everyday world of saying hello to neighbors and the nightmare world of having a house full of human body parts. This is how he can easily lie to the sheriff one second, then make the insane decision to invite him inside to meet Mother the next. Fortunately for Ed, the sheriff declines.
Ed does shit like this over and over, things that guarantee the people he’s bamboozled with his detached-from-reality charisma will be confronted head on with his psychosis. That’s how he almost drove Adeline away last episode, and how he almost gets caught by the cops this episode. He’s just been lucky enough that no one quite goes through with the act of turning that rocking chair around, so to speak.
But Ed himself no more likes the rubber of his delusion to meet the road of reality than other people do. When he is quite understandably fired from his babysitting gig and threatened with a beating over it, he recasts this in his mind as having lost out on the job that was going to pay for his wedding reception to the poor woman who originally held it, Miss Evelyn (influencer and pop star Addison Rae). Never mind the fact that her bout with polio, which has left her in a leg race, is the only reason he had the job in the first place. Evelyn “dishonored the family,” and so she must pay.
So Ed abducts her from the house where they both babysat and drags her to his, where he strips her to her underwear, ties her to a chair, and drags out the disgustingly decayed corpse he treats as his still-living mother. He puts a mallet in her hand and tries to bash Evelyn’s brains in with it — just as the characters in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre do to Sally, the film’s archetypal Final Girl, in the seedy, grainy footage that concludes the episode.
But it’s not just Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw that gets a shoutout here. Throughout the episode, shot compositions and plot points recall John Carpenter’s Halloween, Wes Craven’s Scream, and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. All of them trace their lineage back through Psycho to Gein himself. More than any other single living human being outside the arts, Ed Gein is owed credit for the horror film as we know it today.
One final note: When Ed and Adeline rekindle their bad romance, they do so over photographs of Christine Jorgensen before and after she received her groundbreaking first-ever gender-confirming surgery. As with the photographs of Nazi war atrocities, I don’t think Ed assigns any particular weight of identity to what he’s witnessing. Becoming fascinated with Christine Jorgensen has as little to do with Ed being transgender as his fascination with the Holocaust has to do with him being anti-Semitic. This is just another taboo he now sees adults can violate, a rejection of the norm they can perform. It’s all a big magic show to Ed, and as he wears the clothes and faces of dead women, he is the magician, the trick, and the audience all in one.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.