Monster: The Ed Gein Story unmasks killer who inspired Psycho

Back in the 1970s, when American writer and producer Ryan Murphy was eight, his parents left him to babysit his little brother.

- Alexis Soloski

Proudly in charge of the family television, Murphy chose a movie to watch.

That movie was English director Alfred Hitchcock's seminal horror film Psycho (1960). No eight-year-old, alone at night, should watch that shower scene.

"I went berserk," Murphy, 59, recalled in a recent group video call. "I screamed and cried, and I had to call my grandmother to come and help me."

A few days later, he went to the library. An encyclopaedia confirmed that while Psycho, based on a 1959 novel by American writer Robert Bloch, was a work of fiction, it had a basis in fact: the gruesome crimes of a Wisconsin man named Ed Gein.

Some of us repress our primal wounds. Others, like Murphy, create a limited series about them.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third instalment of Murphy's Monster franchise following Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024), is available on Netflix.

Co-created and written by American screenwriter Ian Brennan, this season trains a dark lens on Gein, who is played by Charlie Hunnam. The charismatic English actor is best known for starring as the muscular leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang in drama series Sons Of Anarchy (2008 to 2014).

The subject scared even Hunnam, 45, a man who would not seem to scare easy. There were a few weeks, he said in the video call with Murphy and Brennan, "where I felt like maybe I'd actually made a mistake, that this was going to be too bleak and too difficult".

A killer of outsize infamy, Gein is definitively responsible for only two deaths. (He was charged with a single killing and later confessed to one more.)