Son of ‘Psycho’ Star Ditches ‘Ed Gein’ Series, Won’t Watch With ’10-Foot Pole’

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 this… or so says a prominent filmmaker with a connection to the series.

We have spoken Osgood Perkins — son of the legendary actor and star of ‘Psycho’, Anthony Perkins — on the new series … because his father plays a prominent role in at least one episode.

If you haven’t seen the show yet, or don’t know the story, be warned… Ed Gein is a brutal, real-life murderer and necrophiliac who Robert Bloch – the author of the novel ‘Psycho’ – loosely based his main character, Norman Bates, on. Perkins played the character in the Alfred Hitchcock movie classic.

The making of that film is discussed in the second episode of the Gein series, entitled ‘Sick as Your Secrets’. In a particularly brutal scene, Hitchcock compares Perkins’ “secret” – he is depicted as a closeted gay man who vomits after having gay sex – with Gein’s own sexual depravities… saying twisted things like “You alone understand this secret”, and claiming that there is a “secret that makes you sick”.

The real Perkins isn’t around to see the portrayal — he died in 1992 from complications related to AIDS — so we reached out to his son to see if he had any thoughts about his father’s portrayal on the small screen.

Osgood didn’t directly address the image…mainly because he hasn’t seen the show – because he “wouldn’t look at it with a 10-foot pole.”

Perkins says streamers have made a lot of money selling true crime… and they regularly try to make it “glamorous and meaningful.”

Osgood — himself a filmmaker who has directed horror films like “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” — says he’s concerned about contemporary culture being “reshaped in real time by Overlords.” [ie the authentic human experiences wrought by ‘actual events’] plays for the wrong team.”

Osgood calls on people to protect history and truth by not reducing it to the easy… but instead by “seeing behind the veil at the unknowable and loving one another through expansive, new art.”