CHICAGO — Having previously watched the first two installments of Ryan Murphy’s “Monster” series on Netflix — part of this prolific producer’s extraordinarily lucrative project ($300 million or so over five years) — I came at his latest expecting to be impressed by some of the acting and polished production values and a bit frustrated by liberties taken with facts.

“Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is currently available on the streaming service and, if you watch, is sure to pepper your nightmares. At eight episodes, it’s shorter than the previous two seasons (10 and nine episodes respectively), but it is nevertheless attracting a crowd. The show debuted earlier this month and, as I write this, is the No. 1 series on Netflix

Like some, I knew the basics of Gein’s life and crimes: a lonely and shy Wisconsin farm boy with an alcoholic father and wildly religious mom (shouting “women are sin”), who committed “only” two murders but more disturbingly became a grave robber who stole corpses for the purposes of disinterring the recently deceased and making masks, clothing and household items from their remains — these crimes committed between 1947 and 1957.

That relatively thin biography, creepy as it is, made Gein what the series calls “the first celebrity killer,” his well-publicized crimes “evolving into a pop culture phenomenon” that inspired the book and film “Psycho,” as well as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and others.

But I (no prude, mind you) was not expecting to be disgusted by some of the more outlandish elements of the eight episodes, or the dramatizations that pepper the series. And I certainly did not expect to be meeting such other folks as demented Nazis, poor Anthony Perkins, and a strange Alfred Hitchcock.

It is all turned into a spectacle, complete with dramatized dreams that feature plenty of blood and screaming. And, oh, for reasons confounding, we get serial killer Ted Bundy, killing and defiling two young women, as well as mass murderer Richard Speck in prison.

All that said, Charlie Hunnam plays Gein with a compelling style. He is an English actor best known for starring as the leader of a motorcycle gang on FX’s “Sons of Anarchy.” With his eerily quiet voice and halting mannerisms he creates a memorable character and, against all odds, a sympathetic one.

His character is certainly given an active dream life by the filmmakers. (Murphy does not head the production, with Ian Brennan as its sole creator and writer.) Most of the acting is compelling. Chicago’s own Laurie Metcalf is terrifying as Gein’s mother. Tom Hollander is unrecognizable as Hitchcock, and how surprising to see a lively cameo by Elliott Gould as the New York City photojournalist Weegee. Tobias Jelinek as the prison-bound Speck is perfectly disgusting.

Watch if you like, but be aware that the story is heavily fictionalized. Harold Schechter, author of what many consider the definitive book about Gein, “Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho,” has recently complained to the New York Post that “a very large percentage of the show is just made up.”

He points to such things in the series as Gein engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation and having a romance with a girl named Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son). Eventually, Gein winds up institutionalized, where he is formally diagnosed with schizophrenia. But he remains prone to dramatized (most bloody) dreams and hallucinations. It is in these final episodes that we must suffer his never-happened connections to Speck and Bundy.

The next Murphy “Monsters” series, set to arrive in 2026, is to be “The Lizzie Borden Story,” about the case of the Massachusetts woman who was accused of brutally murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. It will star Ella Beatty as Borden. She’s the daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. Also in the series will be the aforementioned Hunnam, who plays Lizzie’s father.

That’s a tempting duo but I might have to take pass.

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(Rick Kogan is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.)

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