Monster: The Ed Gein Story Ending Explained: Ed's Final Fate Revealed

Spoilers ahead for the finale of Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Also: this piece discusses murder and sexual assault.

Netflix wraps its eight-part dive into Ed Gein with a finale that stops being about what he did and leans hard into what he left behind. It is disturbing, surreal, and a little meta. And yes, it goes there.

"This is going to be the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did. But who he was being at the center of it, rather than what he did."

— series star Charlie Hunnam

The setup: legacy over body count

Across the season, the show keeps pointing at how Gein’s crimes bled into pop culture: Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Silence of the Lambs (1991). By the finale, Gein is institutionalized, and the story shifts from his past to his shadow. The idea is simple: he did horrors, and then those horrors echoed.

The opening: two kidnappings, one faceless predator

We start at Lake Sammamish in Washington. Two girls are abducted by a faceless man, held, sexually assaulted, and killed. He comes back later to visit the bodies. It’s grim, and the show knows you will connect the dots.

Profilers, copycats, and a consulting monster

Cut to Salem, Oregon, where the FBI’s behavioral team is chasing that killer. They visit Jerry Brudos in prison. He casually cites Gein as inspiration, which sends the agents to Gein himself. He’s very much alive and oddly helpful: he talks saws, down to the kind of blade, and tells them to look for someone buying that specific setup if they want to find their guy.

Meanwhile, the episode checks in on Richard Speck. He’s working the prison economy for sex, money, and drugs, and the show straight-up frames Gein as the blueprint he followed. It’s a bleak passing of the torch.

Inside Central State: sickness, letters, and punishment

Gein is struggling in Central State Hospital. Staffing has been cut, the place feels neglected, and he’s finally treating his situation like punishment. He gets letters from Speck, who writes with graphic detail and a creepy eagerness to bond over shared crimes. Gein reads everything; he’s a fan of crime mags and novels, and clearly the correspondence hits his sweet spot.

The Bundy thread

Gein decides to be useful. He contacts a local deputy about an ongoing case and tips him that a man named Ted wrote to Speck. Next day, the news breaks: the murderer they’re hunting has been caught. It’s Ted Bundy. Gein is weirdly pleased that he helped.

Dreams, Hitchcock, and the diagnosis

That night, Gein dreams of being wheeled down the hospital hallways to a cheering crowd of nurses, doctors, and notorious killers who idolize him: Charles Manson, Brudos, Speck, Ed Kemper. It’s a perverse curtain call.

He wakes and talks with a nurse about Alfred Hitchcock, who has just died. Gein shrugs that Anthony Perkins looked nothing like him (as in, Perkins didn’t resemble Gein) and that he never made a penny from Psycho. The nurse tops that with worse news: Gein has terminal lung cancer.

Adeline drops by

Adeline (Suzanna Son) visits. Gein confronts her about her damaging reports on him. She admits to her own mental illness and bouts of mania, and the scene lands on a rough truth: they see the same sickness in each other. They say it out loud. They were the same.

Does he die? Yes. And the show makes it operatic.

Gein grows weaker. In front of the TV, he slips into another hallucination that plays like an MTV music video starring his demons. He’s rolled through the hospital one last time, past smiling nurses, doctors, and the rogues’ gallery applauding his legacy. At a staircase, his mother Augusta appears at the top. He walks to her. She tells him she’s proud, that he made something of himself by inspiring movies and more killers, and drops the series’ most chilling line: "You changed the whole world."

We see flashes of the boy he was: running through their house, Augusta brushing his hair while he rests on her lap. She tells him to rest now. Back in bed, he sheds a tear and seems to take his final breath.

The coda: pop culture eats itself

We cut to Gein’s cemetery. It’s Halloween. Kids deface his headstone. A teen notices someone watching: it’s Anthony Perkins. Seconds later, he’s chased by Buffalo Bill and Leatherface. Subtle? Not even a little. That’s the point.

The very last image is a flashback to Gein and Augusta on their porch. She tells him, "Only a mother could love you." This time she smiles. The show nudges you to read it as Gein’s heaven, not reality.

Who pops up in the finale

• Jerry Brudos, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, and Ed Kemper (in visions and scenes)
• Ted Bundy (caught after Gein flags a letter from a man named Ted)
• Alfred Hitchcock (posthumously discussed), Anthony Perkins (cameo in the cemetery coda)
• Buffalo Bill and Leatherface (meta chase gag in the cemetery)
• Augusta Gein, Ed’s mother (central to his final vision)
• Adeline, played by Suzanna Son (visits Gein and admits their shared struggles)

The read

The finale isn’t subtle, and it isn’t trying to be. It ties Gein’s real-world crimes to Hollywood, to other killers, and back again, practically yelling that the myth can be as viral as the man. It’s audacious, queasy, and very inside baseball. Whether that works for you probably hinges on how you feel about a show that puts the man at the center more than the murders, then ends by letting his mother crown him king of the nightmare.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix.