Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the Emmy-winning series created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, premieres its third season on Friday. This new installment turns its focus to Ed Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam). The infamous serial killer sent shockwaves through 1950s America when his gruesome crimes were discovered. And for those unfamiliar with Gein or the atrocities he committed, buckle up — this one’s a doozy.
Gein was a murderer and body snatcher with an unhealthy obsession with his mother and the female anatomy. You may not know his name, but you’ve almost certainly felt his cultural impact — his crimes inspired horror classics like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.
Gein gained media attention in 1957 after a hardware store employee named Bernice Worden went missing. Gein had been seen in the shop buying antifreeze before she disappeared. A trail of blood led out the back door, and the cash register was missing. Suspicion quickly turned to him, and his arrest led police to search Gein’s home — where they uncovered a jaw-dropping array of grotesqueries.
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A house of horrors
In Gein’s shed, they found Worden’s headless body, disemboweled like a deer and hanging upside down from the ceiling. The rest of his home was populated with all sorts of gruesome stuff: human skulls he had used as soup bowls, preserved noses and lips, jars filled with organs, furniture upholstered with the skin of his victims, a belt made from human nipples, a “woman suit” made of skin and so on.
When Gein was interrogated, he admitted to Worden’s murder as well as the 1954 killing of Mary Hogan, the owner of a tavern that Gein frequented. Gein used a gun to kill both women and targeted them because they resembled his mother, who had passed away the previous decade.
He was also a grave robber, digging up more than 40 corpses between 1947 and his arrest. He mutilated the bodies, committed necrophilic acts and fashioned clothing from their skin — including masks made from human faces, earning him the nicknames “The Butcher of Plainfield” and “The Plainfield Ghoul.”
Is Ed Gein in jail?
Gein was initially deemed unfit to stand trial and committed to a mental facility, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. More than a decade later, he was ruled competent and found guilty of Worden’s murder in 1968. Because of his insanity diagnosis, he was recommitted to Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin.
Gein lived out the final years of his life at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. He died there at the age of 77 due to complications from cancer.
Who was Adeline Watkins?
A lot of attention has been given to Ed Gein’s crimes, but Monster: The Ed Gein Story adds a layer often overlooked — his alleged romantic involvement with a woman named Adeline Watkins (played by Suzanna Son).
After Gein was arrested, Watkins came forward and told the Wisconsin State Journal that she’d been romantically involved with the man for two decades. According to Watkins, she and Gein “frequently went to movies and nearby taverns together.” She even said they spoke of marriage.
These statements were debunked by Watkins herself, who, two weeks later, told the Stevens Point Journal her words were “blown out of proportion” and that the original news story contained “untrue statements.”
Instead of a two-decade-long courtship, she said in the later interview that “Gein had called on her for only seven months, and then only intermittently.”
Psycho and Ed Gein’s horror legacy
Gein had a complicated relationship with his mother. Augusta Gein (played by Laurie Metcalf) was incredibly religious, domineering and kept Gein isolated from the public. He developed an extreme attachment to her, which turned into an obsession after she died.
And — you know where this is going — Gein dressed in her clothes and used the skin of his female victims to create a suit he could wear around the house, in a twisted attempt to play his mother.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it inspired the basis for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal horror film Psycho. In the movie, Bates dresses in his dead mother’s clothes and commits murder. Robert Bloch, who wrote the 1959 novel that inspired the film, was living in Wisconsin when Gein’s crimes came to light and drew on them for his classic book.
Psycho changed horror cinema, becoming the first film in the genre to delve into a killer’s psychology and put a human face on monstrosity.
Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre also took inspiration from Gein’s crimes. The representation of the Sawyer family’s cannibal house of horrors and the masks of human skin that the chainsaw-wielding killer Leatherface wears are shining examples of this.
Buffalo Bill, the killer in The Silence of the Lambs, is another nod to Gein’s ongoing impact on the genre. In the Oscar-winning horror movie, Bill makes clothing from his female victims’ skin.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story isn’t the first retelling of Gein’s story, but the Netflix series seems intent on exploring multiple facets of his life.
Series star Charlie Hunnam told Tudum, “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.”
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