When the Monster Becomes the Performance

I’ve watched enough of this Monster series now to realize something deeply unsettling — not about Ed Gein or Richard Speck, but about us.

We live in a time when horror is stylized and depravity is re-packaged into prestige television. Actors embody real killers, music swells behind scenes of brutality, and viewers are told it’s a true story.

But when a story stops being truthful, can it still be true?

🎭Dressing Evil in Costume

Episode 8 left me uneasy, not for the reasons the show intended. It portrayed Richard Speck — the man who murdered eight student nurses — as a kind of prison “Birdman,” prancing around in women’s lingerie and pumps.

Yes, Speck really did smuggle hormones and developed feminine features in prison. Yes, a smuggled tape showed him taking drugs and speaking without remorse.

But the costume, the prancing, the caricature — that was fiction.

And that’s where I find the sickness turning on itself.

Because taking something that horrifying and dressing it up for drama isn’t brave art. It’s voyeurism. It’s a modern, televised form of deviance that calls itself creativity.

It’s easy to call it “artistic license,” but really it’s distortion with good lighting.

🧩When Fiction Becomes People’s Truth

Most viewers won’t go research what really happened. They’ll watch, believe, and repeat.

The fiction becomes the new fact — passed around at dinner tables, whispered as trivia, etched into cultural memory as the truth.

And that’s dangerous.

Because truth matters — even when it’s ugly.

Especially when it’s ugly.

There are people still living who knew Bernice Worden, who loved Evelyn Hartley, who worked in hospitals that treated the victims of men like Speck. When the industry that claims to tell their stories instead rewrites them, it violates them all over again.

🕯️The Ripple of Distortion

When we glamorize evil — or blur it with fantasy — we risk awakening fascination in minds that shouldn’t be fed.

Some people will see these shows not as cautionary tales, but as invitations — a new mythology of twisted fame.

The truth of what these men did is already dark enough.

Adding sequins doesn’t make it more powerful — it makes it performative.

🌑Art vs. Exploitation

I can appreciate symbolism when it’s honest.

The scenes where Ed Gein hallucinates conversations with Ilse Koch or Christine Jorgensen — those were artistic, psychological. They meant something.

They showed delusion and isolation, not glamour.

But when you turn a serial killer into a flamboyant antihero or invent relationships that never existed just to make the story more interesting, you’re not exploring evil anymore — you’re accessorizing it.

🍯Honey Note

There’s a difference between holding up a mirror and painting a mask.

Art that exposes truth deserves praise.

Art that distorts it — especially when real lives were taken — deserves reflection.

The truth of these people and their victims was already more than enough to haunt us.

We don’t need the costume.

✍️With truth unembellished and empathy intact,

Honey

P.S.

While I’ve shared strong feelings about how truth can be distorted through artistic license, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary talent that brought this story to life.

Charlie Hunnam’s performance was absolutely breathtaking — layered, believable, and haunting in its depth. His portrayal of Ed Gein captured the torment, loneliness, and eerie humanity of a man so broken that he became unrecognizable even to himself.

I’ve long admired Hunnam’s work, but this role truly set him apart.

The entire cast gave powerful, unforgettable performances — proof that art can be beautiful and brilliant, even when the story it tells is dark.