Monster: The Ed Gein Story Finale Drops a Sinister Mindhunter Callback

Netflix wraps up Monster: The Ed Gein Story with two big swings: a cheeky, inside-baseball nod to Mindhunter and a very frank dive into Gein's gynephilic fixation. It is a strange combo, but it tracks with the show's whole vibe of mixing true-crime beats with horror-movie language. Here is how the finale threads it all together, what it tweaks for drama, and why the creators wanted to spell out a hot-button distinction about Gein's obsessions.

A Mindhunter wink, right at the buzzer

The finale slides into a different visual mode: stark location cards, FBI agents, the whole Fincher-adjacent toolkit. Co-creator Ian Brennan told Tudum they did it on purpose as a direct bow to Joe Penhall and David Fincher's Mindhunter. The idea is to situate Gein's story inside the early days of FBI profiling and the pop-cultural lineage that runs straight through Silence of the Lambs.

It is a meta flourish, sure, but it is also the show tipping its cap and saying: this guy's crimes helped shape the way we talk about serial killers on screen. If you felt the tone shift, you were meant to.

How the show handles the arrest (and what really happened)

Monster plays Gein's capture as a slow, procedural unraveling rather than a dramatic showdown. It starts with the disappearance of Bernice Worden, then snowballs as deputies comb her hardware store and follow the evidence back to Gein's farm.

• Worden goes missing; police find blood in her store.
• The trail points to Gein, so deputies search his property.
• Inside: body parts, trophies, and those infamous items fashioned from human remains.
• Witness accounts and the scene itself lock in probable cause; the farm becomes a full-on crime scene.

Historically, Gein was arrested on November 16, 1957, after authorities found Worden's body and traced the evidence from her shop back to his farm. The show keeps those anchors intact but juices the investigation with extra forensics and a few heightened confrontations to keep the tension humming. It is not a documentary; it is aiming for clarity and dread.

The controversial part: calling Gein gynephilic

The series does not tiptoe around Gein's obsession with the female body. It leans into the grim specifics: women as objects, as remains, and the so-called 'woman suit.' It also stages imagined conversations with two figures: German war criminal Ilse Koch (who reportedly inspired him) and Christine Jorgensen, the pioneering American figure who became widely known for undergoing sex reassignment surgery.

In those scenes, Gein mistakes his fixation for being transgender. Jorgensen, in the show's telling, corrects him: he is gynephilic — a man so intensely aroused by the female body that he wants to inhabit it. That distinction matters to the creators, who wanted to draw a clean line between transgender identity and Gein's pathology.

'It was really important for us to make that distinction... these are two very different things.'

The broader thesis — 'Are monsters born or are they made?' — frames his sexual obsessions as something shaped by trauma and mythic imagery, not just raw violence. Some critics will call that sensational; others will argue it is the only way to explain why Gein became the horror template he is. Personally, I think the show walks a tightrope. Whether it overreaches probably depends on your tolerance for stylized psychology.

So, does the finale's big swing work?

The Mindhunter homage is a neat bow that makes the storytelling lineage explicit, and the arrest plays out with a crisp, unsettling inevitability. The gynephilia storyline is going to be the sticking point — but the creators clearly wanted the audience to hear that nuance out loud, not in a footnote.

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