As Ryan Murphy continues to make waves with his Netflix true-crime series, Osgood Perkins is calling out the latest season.
The Keeper director admitted he hasn’t seen Monster: The Ed Gein Story and “wouldn’t watch it 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).
He 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.”
Watch on Deadline
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 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 previously been criticized 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.