Dispatch • The Cast and Creative Team of 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story' on the Man Behind the Horror

Ed Gein left a mark on American culture that has never fully faded. His infamy didn’t come from the scale of his crimes so much as from what investigators found when they entered his farmhouse in rural Wisconsin in November 1957: evidence that defied any existing criminal or moral framework. What followed—the trial, the decades of imitation—suggested the country was still working on one.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third installment of Netflix’s popular true crime anthology, is the latest work to reckon with that legacy. Across eight episodes, the series stars Charlie Hunnam as Gein and Laurie Metcalf as his domineering mother Augusta, following a narrative that spans roughly four decades and draws in, along the way, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, and the making of Psycho—a choice that reveals what co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are really after: not just a portrait of one man, but an examination of the cultural machinery his crimes set in motion. At an FYC event for Monster: The Ed Gein Story in Los Angeles on April 25, moderator Stacey Wilson Hunt, a longtime contributor to The Hollywood Reporter, led a conversation with Brennan, Hunnam, director Max Winkler, cinematographer Michael Bauman, production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson, and editor Adam Penn about the unique challenges of bringing the material to the screen.

The panel’s most revealing moments came when the discussion moved beyond the familiar catalog of Gein’s crimes and into the stranger realm of how one man’s darkness became so etched in history.

Born in 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Gein grew up on a remote farm under the control of a mother who preached the sinfulness of the outside world and kept her sons largely cut off from it. People in Plainfield considered him an oddity, seemingly harmless. But what followed shocked the country in ways that outlasted the headlines. In the years before his arrest in 1957, Gein exhumed bodies from local cemeteries and later admitted to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan, who disappeared in 1954, and hardware store owner Bernice Worden.

Inside the farmhouse, authorities found furniture and objects made from human remains. In 1968, after being deemed competent to stand trial, he was found guilty of killing Worden but deemed insane at the time of the crime, and he returned to a psychiatric institution, where he died in 1984. His story, however, continued to move through American horror: Norman Bates, Leatherface, Buffalo Bill—three of the genre’s most enduring villains—all carry some trace of him.

That cultural persistence was a point Brennan addressed directly. Before the Holocaust, he argued, Western culture located evil in the mythological—in creatures outside the human condition. After those atrocities became known, that distance collapsed. Evil had to be relocated somewhere closer. Gein arrived at that inflection point and became, in the public imagination, far more than a criminal case: a blueprint and the figure standing just offscreen in decades of American horror.

Brennan described the throughline he found across all three seasons of the anthology: the danger of isolation, particularly for men. “What the show really highlights is just how devastating and how dangerous it is for men to be isolated,” he said. “If you combine mental illness and maleness and complete isolation—men are particularly bad at reaching out, at having emotional relationships, particularly with other men.”

Part of what drew Brennan to Gein, he suggested, was that intersection: a man shaped by the same cultural shock the show tries to examine. To weave that into the show, Brennan and the creative team embedded a short film depicting the Nazi atrocities that fixated Gein, shooting it deliberately in a disturbingly romantic visual language to capture how his mind processed, rather than recoiled from, those images. It’s a bold choice, and it announces the show’s ambitions early: this isn’t just a crime story, but also an argument about where monsters come from.

Brennan explained that Gein surfaced during research for Monster’s first season because Jeffrey Dahmer was obsessed with him. But the team kept setting the project aside—it seemed too desolate, too macabre. The story finally became accessible when the creative team found a way into Gein’s inner life, exploring not just what he did, but who he was before his crimes became known.

The show reflects that. The first half weaves Gein’s story with Hitchcock’s development of Psycho, tracing how a real man’s crimes were absorbed into fiction. The season’s second half follows the ripple outward into the slasher films of the ’70s.

For Hunnam, the key was finding institutional transcripts from Gein's decades in psychiatric care. Those transcripts gave him something the public records didn’t: Gein's own account, and a portrait of a man who spent decades in “harrowing remorse.”

“Everything I read about him was just these sort of sensationalist catalogs of horrors,” Hunnam said, describing the early weeks of preparation, when the material felt impenetrable. The transcripts changed that. Once he found them, he said, he began to feel something closer to an understanding of Gein—not excusing him, but seeing him more fully.

For Winkler, the challenge was related: how to hold an audience’s attention across 40 years of storytelling centered on a figure well-covered by media and true-crime podcasts. The show is larger in scope with time jumps and tone shifts, but Winkler also sought a kind of intimacy. “It’s really just about this guy who doesn’t have the language or the help or the friends to say there’s another way,” he said.

Bauman, who grew up in Wisconsin and learned during production that people in his parents’ retirement community actually knew Gein, brought something to the work that couldn’t be researched: knowledge of that landscape, where loneliness accumulates like weather. His visual references—Capote, In Cold Blood—belong to a particular American tradition of rendering that kind of solitude without softening it.

Hunt raised the nature-versus-nurture question late in the panel, asking where Gein seemed to fall in the old debate over whether people are shaped more by genetic inheritance or by the conditions around them. Both Hunnam and Brennan were understandably careful in their answers. Hunnam acknowledged he didn’t feel qualified to address it directly, but he pointed to the elements the series keeps returning to: isolation, abuse, shame, exposure to disturbing imagery, and the absence of anyone to help when Gein seemed to need it most.

He also emphasized timing. Gein committed no known crime until well into adulthood, after his mother’s death left him alone. As Hunnam characterized it, the series presents Gein’s earliest grave-robbing as an expression of that unbearable emptiness: an attempt, however grotesque, to reach back toward the mother he couldn’t let go of.

Augusta was abusive and controlling, the only source of warmth her son had and the source of his deepest shame. Even under questioning after his arrest, Gein insisted she was a good woman—and he never wavered on that, not once across decades of institutionalization. No one during the panel conversation needed to elaborate on what that kind of unwavering devotion can cost a person.

Ferguson’s production design earned an Art Directors Guild award and began with a fundamental problem: almost no visual record of the farmhouse interior existed. Life magazine had photographed it three days after Gein’s arrest, and those images became the blueprint. Ferguson found a Chicago-area structure with compatible bones, constructed a floor plan as faithful to the photographs as he could manage, matched it to an exterior location in Illinois, and sourced period wallpaper from a vintage dealer in New York. The show’s Depression-era visual language ran through everything, from the farmhouse interiors to the larger portrait of rural American life.

Penn described one recurring part of his editing process: quick food inserts throughout the series, most memorably Augusta tearing into a chicken at the dinner table, the sound design pushed until a low menace becomes audible beneath each meal. “There’s something aggressive,” Penn explained. “It really kind of interrupts this otherwise kind of quiet moment.” Winkler, for his part, described what he was after: a way of putting the viewer inside the experience of an intrusive sensation and inside how Gein possibly experienced the world.

Hunnam credited Winkler, a friend and previous collaborator, with helping him navigate the work. “Max is one of my favorite human beings on planet Earth,” he said, noting that the two had worked together before and remained close friends. “It really made a huge impact, having somebody that I loved and knew loved me and that we laugh together a lot.”

What Monster: The Ed Gein Story ultimately reaches for is a question the true-crime genre rarely attempts: why we keep telling these stories, and what that compulsion reveals. Gein didn’t simply leave a trace on three of the most iconic horror films ever made. He exposed an appetite in the culture that received them—not for violence exactly, but for the unease that comes from recognizing how ordinary life and unthinkable acts can occupy the same small American town.

Maybe that’s why his story passed from crime scene to cultural myth, from Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Silence of the Lambs, until the reality became nearly impossible to separate from the images it produced.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story doesn’t offer release from that history. It follows the trail back to its source, then leaves us with the more unsettling recognition: the myth was never only about him. It was also about a culture that simply couldn’t stop looking.

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