When the writer and producer Ryan Murphy was 8, his parents left him to babysit his little brother. (This was the 1970s; these things happened.) Proudly in charge of the family television and TV Guide, Murphy chose a movie to watch.
That movie was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” No 8-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 encyclopedia confirmed that while “Psycho,” based on a novel by 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 installment of Murphy’s “Monster” franchise, premieres on Netflix on Friday. Cocreated and written by Ian Brennan, this season trains a dark lens on Gein, who is played by Charlie Hunnam, a charismatic English actor best known for starring as the muscular leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang on AMC’s “Sons of Anarchy.”
The subject scared even Hunnam, a man who wouldn’t 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.) But Gein also had a practice of disinterring the recently deceased and making masks, clothing and household items from their skin and bones, a gruesome ritual that kindled the interest of writers and filmmakers.
In addition to “Psycho,” his crimes inspired the character Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He has also been the subject of documentaries, true crime books, horror comics and more.
It makes sense that prestige television would eventually come for Gein. Viewers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories, true and false, centered on the more outrageous aspects of human nature — an appetite that Murphy, with his “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story” and “Monster” franchises, has made a late career of whetting. Shortly after this season of “Monster” debuts, “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” will air on Peacock; “Murdaugh: Death in the Family,” based on the South Carolina lawyer turned convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh, will come to Hulu; and Netflix will host the Italian series “The Monster of Florence,” about an Italian serial killer active from the 1960s-80s.
That’s only October. The list, and the murders, goes on.
But hasn’t Gein already had his turn in the spotlight? Not exactly. “Monster,” however grisly, attempts to locate the man behind the movie monsters, the face beneath the skin masks.
“There are ugly things here, but they were all done by a man — by all accounts, a really strange, interesting man,” Brennan said.
Gein is in his way an American original, a homegrown boogeyman. Harold Schechter, the writer of the graphic novel “Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?” as well as “Deviant,” a comprehensive true-crime account of Gein’s life, considers Gein the first all-American monster.
“Gein was responsible for creating this distinctly American kind of horror,” Schechter said. He was a man of the Midwest, a farmer. He babysat local children. He played the accordion.
The unanswerable question at the dark heart of any season of “Monster” is whether a so-called monster is born or made. With Gein there is good evidence on both sides. Raised by a fervently religious mother who attempted to isolate her sons, he also had schizophrenia. But children of abusive parents rarely become murderers, and the vast majority of schizophrenics never engage in violence.
Murphy and Brennan have their own theories about why Gein desecrated corpses, some of them related to Gein’s exposure, through pulp magazines and adventure comics, to images of Nazi atrocities in World War II. But these are of course just theories. (And an opportunity for some lurid scenes starring the actress Vicky Krieps as the war criminal Ilse Koch, who was accused of commissioning household objects made out of the skin of prisoners.)
The show also dramatizes how Gein’s story was adopted by filmmakers like Hitchcock (played by Tom Hollander, beneath heavy prosthetics) and Tobe Hooper (Will Brill), the director of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” who have theories of their own. In an early scene, Hitchcock argues that sexual repression corrupted Gein.
“Polite society burdens us with the fiction that these urges do not exist,” Hollander’s Hitchcock says in an early episode of “Monster.” “That transforms these urges into secrets we must hide. These secrets make us sick.”
Murphy and Brennan claimed that their interest was less in that alleged sickness than in Gein’s treatment by the criminal justice and mental health care systems.
“To me, what’s interesting is not so much the crimes but everything else that surrounds the crimes,” Murphy said. “If you walk away from Ed Gein and all you want to talk about are the two murders, well, that says a lot about you.”
In fairness, Gein’s handicrafts are more likely to dominate water cooler conversations. As such, “Monster” has the unenviable task of balancing the socially responsible with the lurid. Murphy insists that the series is undergirded by high-minded themes — racial inequity in the first season, which centered Jeffrey Dahmer, carceral justice in the second, which focused on the Menendez brothers — but it does not shy away from grotesque details. For example, an early episode this season lingers on a chair made from human nipples.
Fans of horror and true crime should perhaps know more about the actual man who made it. “Ed has been superseded by the pop culture stories,” said Adam Golub, a professor of American Studies who researches the cultural impact of true crime. Although “Monster” makes some leaps of logic, it relies largely on documented fact, grounding the “Psycho” shower scene (which never happened) and the Leatherface masks (which kind of did) in reality.
Golub had another, slightly more cynical theory for why “Monster” might now turn to Gein. “We’re trapped in this endless loop, telling stories about the same handful of serial killers, and it’s time to rotate through Ed,” he said.
This American moment is a provocative one in which to reconsider Gein. His crimes took place in the decade before his arrest in 1957, a postwar period that is now viewed, particularly by many conservatives, through a nostalgic haze. Schechter sees him as incarnating the dissociative split in 1950s American life — gilded postwar prosperity on the one hand, the shadow of the World War II on the other.
“These activities were taking place in Smalltown U.S.A. in the midst of this very bright and bland Eisenhower period,” Schechter said. “I sometimes have referred to him as Barney Fife with a chain saw.”
An added benefit of making Gein a main character: That his crimes were perpetrated 70 years ago means that the odds of retraumatizing victims’ families, a point of contention in previous seasons, are low. (A fourth season of “Monster,” centered on Lizzie Borden, a young woman acquitted of ax murder in the 1890s, will retreat even further into the past.)
As Murphy was beginning to consider whom he might cast as Gein, he saw a paparazzi photo of Hunnam and intuited some resemblance. That resemblance isn’t obvious, but it was enough for Murphy to invite Hunnam to dinner at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles. As they ate, Murphy dilated on the coming season of “Monster,” and Hunnam was moved by his intensity.
“I found myself just thinking, God, I love this guy; I really hope I have an opportunity to work with him at some point,” Hunnam recalled.
That point came quickly. At the end of the dinner, Murphy asked if Hunnam would consider playing Gein. Without thinking too much — and Hunnam, who often adorns his conversation with Latinate phrases and literary references, described himself as a person who always overthinks — Hunnam agreed. He felt that Murphy’s vision favored psychological exploration over sensationalism.
“It felt very human, and I just felt very safe,” Hunnam said.
He began his research. And then he panicked, overwhelmed by the enormity of Gein’s deeds. But when he received the scripts, he relaxed, at least a little, persuaded that this version wanted to see the killer’s humanity.
If Hunnam found it challenging to portray that humanity, he welcomed that challenge. “That terror of the darkness of this was replaced by a terror of feeling like this is going to be impossible,” he said. “And that just felt like the perfect place to be.”
Both Max Winkler, who directed six of eight episodes, and Laurie Metcalf, who plays Gein’s mother, described Hunnam as respectful in his approach. “Charlie was very protective of the character, wanting to present him not as a monster but as a human,” Metcalf said.
Hunnam could not say with absolute confidence that he achieved that. But he gave himself some grace. “I don’t know if I can wholeheartedly say I got to the point where I truly, truly understood Ed,” he said. “What was OK about that is that Ed didn’t really understand Ed,” he said. “He was incredibly confused by what he did.”
Hunnam is not alone. Most people will struggle to understand the “why” of Gein’s actions, even as true crime fans may recoil, pleasurably, at the “how.” His story, in life and in “Monster,” is a story of some of the most extreme things a human can do.
But Murphy, who seems to have recovered from his childhood fright (or is this season just one elaborate coping mechanism?), thinks that viewers might find the show comforting.
“I personally believe that it’s a place to put your anxieties in a very dark world, and to perhaps talk about some of the fears in your own life,” he said.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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