Anthony Perkins’ Son
Takes Ax to ‘Ed Gein’ Series …
True Crime Dramas Profit Off Pain!!!
Published
Dramatizations of infamous serial killers use real pain to make a quick buck, and “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is just the latest show to do it … so says a prominent filmmaker with a connection to the series.
We spoke to Osgood Perkins — son of the legendary actor and star of “Psycho,” Anthony Perkins — about the new series … because his dad plays a prominent role in at least one episode.
If you haven’t seen the show, or know about the story, then spoiler alert … Ed Gein’s a vicious real-life killer and necrophiliac whom Robert Bloch — the writer of the novel “Psycho” — loosely based his main character, Norman Bates, on. Perkins played the character in the Alfred Hitchcock film classic.
The making of that movie is touched on in the second episode of Gein series, titled “Sick as Your Secrets.” In one particularly brutal scene, Hitchcock likens Perkins’ “secret” — he is portrayed as a closeted gay man, who throws up after he has gay sex — to Gein’s own sexual depravities … saying twisted things like “You alone understand this secret,” and claiming there is a “secret making you sick.”
The real-life Perkins isn’t around to see the portrayal — he passed away from complications related to AIDS in 1992 — so we reached out to his son to hear if he had any thoughts about the portrayal of his father on the small screen.
Osgood didn’t address the portrayal directly … mainly because he hasn’t seen the show — since he “wouldn’t watch it with a 10-foot pole.”
Perkins says streamers have made a huge business on upselling true crime … and says they regularly attempt to give it “glamourous and meaningful content.”
Osgood — a filmmaker in his own right who has helmed such horror films as “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” — says he worries about contemporary culture being “reshaped in real time by Overlords” … adding it’s “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.”
Osgood calls on people to protect history and truth by not reducing it down to the convenient … but instead by “peering behind the veil into the unknowable and loving each other through expansive, new art.”
Bottom line … everyone’s watching “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” — but, Osgood certainly won’t be.
