Behind life and deaths of 'butcher' Ed Gein

Season 3 of Netflix's 'Monster' centers on a killer who inspired horror movie classics.

- MALIA MENDEZ

CHARLIE HUNNAM plays killer Ed Gein in Season 3 of Ryan Murphy's "Monster" series, now streaming.

Ed Gein may not be America's most infamous serial killer - he's eclipsed by the likes of Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer in the public imagination - but his macabre crimes were fodder for several classic horror movies that are permanently imprinted on American minds.

Gein, a Midwestern farmer pushed by personal tragedy into pathological criminality, is the focus of the third season of "Monster," Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's crime anthology series.

The show's debut season centered on Dahmer (played by Evan Peters) and its sophomore season focused on the Menendez brothers (Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch).

Charlie Hunnam leads the show's third installment, "Monster: The Ed Gein Story," which premiered Friday on Netflix, as the titular "Butcher of Plainfield."

"Serial killer. Grave robber. Psycho. In the frozen fields of 1950s rural Wiscon sin, a friendly, mild-mannered recluse named Eddie Gein lived quietly on a decaying farm hiding a house of horrors so gruesome it would redefine the American nightmare," reads the show's official logline.

"Driven by isolation, psychosis and an all-consuming obsession with his mother, Gein's perverse crimes birthed a new kind of monster that would haunt Hollywood for decades." Gein's enmeshment with his mother inspired the character Norman Bates, the bumbling motelier and murderer of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960). The killer's habit of fashioning costumes and furniture out of human skin is shared by his fictional counterparts Buffalo Bill ("The Silence of the Lambs") and Leatherface ("The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.") But who was the real Ed Gein, and what moved him to commit the crimes that have fascinated horror directors for decades?

Early trauma