Photo: Brooke Palmer/Peacock
Spoilers for the Netflix series follow. Monster: The Ed Gein Story and the series “Peacock” Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.
Monsters, devils—this spooky season of television is focusing less on supernatural villains and instead using them as metaphors for real-life horrors. This October, Netflix and Peacock released lightly fictionalized eight-part investigations into America's notorious serial killers. In one of these shows, the victims are presented as full-fledged people, rather than just corpses hidden in the killer's house. And one of these shows Monster.
Ed Gein's Storeyes, the latest Netflix Monster The season, from creators Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, looks at Gein's (Charlie Hunnam) victims primarily as food for his arts and crafts projects. The season bombards viewers with decapitated bodies, preserved vulvas and can't draw a line between Gein's fantasies and reality, while exaggerating his influence on the 20th century horror film canon. Devil in disguiseon the other hand, centers his death from the jump. Creator and showrunner Patrick McManus begins with the 1978 kidnapping of Robert Pist, whose wealthy family initiates a police investigation that turns up a slew of bodies buried under the floorboards of John Wayne Gacy (Michael Chernus). The series jumps between the subsequent investigation and photographs of Gacy's victims to illustrate how police bias allowed his predation to continue and then how the media sensationalized his crimes. In many ways, Devil in disguise succeeds where Monster fails. How? Let's plan this out.
This! Mainly because it focuses more on how Gacy's victims lived rather than how they died. Each episode is named after them (“Samuel and Randy”, “Billy and Dale”) and follows their circumstances before meeting Gacy. Some, like Johnny Chic, were trying to figure out how to come out to their parents. Others, like John Butkovich, tried to make a living working for Gacy's contracting company. Some were sex workers, some were criminals trying to change their lives, and some were young people waiting at a bus stop. The little details the series includes are devastating: a mother visiting her son's dentist to pick up records that will identify his body, police fingerprints piling up on the map Gacy drew of all the bodies in his house. Photos of real victims appear at the end of each episode.
Although Devil in disguise does depict some of Gacy's murders in a bloody and brutal manner, the episodes don't dwell on the trauma and instead spend more time on how Gacy ingratiated himself with the police and played up the era's homophobia. Once Gacy is caught, the media reports the details – all these bodies crammed into that basement, some of them buried in trenches that Gacy forced his employees to dig – and portrays his victims as fugitives or degenerates who put themselves in danger. Journalists camp out on families' lawns and casually slander their sons while cops and prosecutors celebrate the promotions they received for their work on the Gacy case. These reminders that rewards are built into our criminal justice system and that closure and peace are more difficult to achieve are more poignant than the story of Gein's outsized influence on Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock's frustration that audiences wanted more.
In general, yes, although the biggest problem is Gacy himself. The early episodes avoid his crimes, but the back half includes two extended scenes of violence at the hands of Gacy, including the death of a young man he only refers to as “Greyhound Bus” because he never bothered to learn his name. The conversation between Gacy and the “female psychologist” hired by his defense team turns into melodrama, with a startling transition to an abusive childhood and dark tales of Gacy stealing his mother's underwear. The series already conveys so much fear, tension and pain through its actions and the design of Gacy's house that it doesn't need to be as explicit as it is now. Devil in disguise far from nearby The Ed Gein Story in terms of violence – Murder of the “Greyhound Waiter” avoids most of the stabbing, instead tracking Gacy's annoyance at how much blood is soaking into his carpet – but it's still disappointing that a series so committed to humanizing the people in the killer's orbit felt the need to indulge in voyeurism at all.
This is not a criticism of Chernus' performance. Viewers who know him only as an inspiring New Age author. Ricken Hale on Severance pay will be suitably terrified by how effectively Chernus transforms from the intimidating, salty type into a calculating predator manipulating his victims into a sense of security. When he contemplates his crimes or prepares to commit a new one, Chernus's eyes become cold, his voice deep and harsh, his body language more tense and authoritative. The moment when Gacy is about to attack one of his potential employees is interrupted by his wife carrying laundry upstairs, and Chernus goes from back-slapping guy to overbearing husband, ignoring his wife's physical affection. Bye Monster enjoyed Gein's unraveling mind, showcasing his otherness through scenes of Gein dancing with spinning chainsaws and posing in his leather suit, Devil in disguise all the more effectively highlighting Gacy's ability to remain undetected.
Yes. Devil in disguise makes many unexpected decisions that make him stand out as a Monster franchise and quintessential true crime genre. He elides from Gacy's time as a clown, the aspect of his personality that most fascinated sufferers in later years, and dramatizes scenes in which the victims' families are unhappy with each other. When Liz Pist (Marin Ireland) insults Rosemary Schick (Christa Bridges) by implying that she was a worse mother to her dead son, the women's suffering is palpable, even if they don't express their pain in the same way.
Devil in disguise also portrays the Chicago Police Department as incompetent. in our mission to protect and serve. Time and again in the series, victims or their parents ask the police for help but are ignored because they are gay, poor or have a criminal record. Contrast these scenes with Gacy's deft and disturbing explanations to the same police officers about how he had consensual sex even though the victims were covered in bruises and had chloroform burns on their faces. Devil in disguise clearly shows that homophobia and poor policing allowed a white man who was involved in his community and owned a business to get away with all kinds of depravity and violence, then traces how the lawyers involved in the Gacy case became rich and powerful, and the cops who caught him created second careers for themselves as authors and public figures. And all this time the pain of the families did not subside.
Unlike Monsterwho is trying to rid himself of Gein's mania by focusing on other writers and directors inspired by this serial killer, Devil in disguise doesn't try to engage its audience in watching true crime. Instead, he calls us to care about real victims rather than abstract arguments about creative freedom, and he doesn't hide that compassion. Devil in disguise models this.
