Why Longlegs Director Oz Perkins Won’t Watch Ryan Murphy’s Ed Gein Netflix Series

The true crime genre is sinister by its very nature. We read and watch detailed accounts of monstrosities because these acts are completely foreign to our sensible way of life. How can people break in as hideously as John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, or Ted Bundy? We can’t help but put their lives under the microscope and try to understand what twisted them.

I’ve read way too many books about serial killers and I’ve certainly watched my share of movies about these creatures. There’s definitely a morbid fascination at play here, but I think this genre has real artistic merit if you can stomach the hard stuff. John McNaughton’s “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” is a masterpiece of dead-eyed fright, and Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” cannot be erased from your consciousness. They address society’s potential to warp the minds of lost or rejected people, and they don’t try to mock the horror of their characters.

Ryan Murphy, however, is a sensationalist, and his turn to document the lives of serial killers via his “Monster” series has been little more than vulture. Its third season, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” takes a meta approach to telling the story of a murderer who inspired both “Psycho” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” but it is, at its core, a blood fest. The show goes beyond Gein’s killing spree to examine his pop cultural imprint, which includes the filming of “Psycho” and Anthony Perkins’ portrayal of Gein’s Norman Bates. TMZ asked Oz Perkins, the legendary actor’s filmmaker son, if he had watched the series, and received a firm and disgusted no.

Perkins told TMZ that he has no interest in watching the series (which depicts Perkins struggling with his homosexuality) because it is complicit in turning true crime into “glamorous, meaningful content.” Perkins has directed some incredibly gory films recently, but “Longlegs” and his adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Monkey” are pure fiction. According to Perkins, shows like “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” are “increasingly devoid of context,” while asserting that “the Netflix-ization of real pain” [i.e., the authentic human experiences wrought by ‘actual events’] playing for the wrong team.”

Perkins would prefer that filmmakers peer “behind the veil into the unknowable and love one another through new, expansive art.” He’ll try it next month when his new surreal horror film “Keeper,” starring Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland, hits theaters. In the meantime, you can decide for yourself whether or not you should let “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” into your life.