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Long before Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the titular killer and body snatcher served as inspiration to many iconic horror films and TV series.
Gein, who was nicknamed the “Butcher of Plainfield” and the “Plainfield Ghoul,” was only convicted of one murder committed in the 1950s, but he confessed to two, and was suspected of committing others. When police first searched his rundown Wisconsin farm, they found a house of horrors, including a decapitated corpse, masks made from the skin of female heads, multiple furniture or household items made out of human skin or body parts, and countless other atrocities. Declared legally insane, he spent the remainder of his life in a mental institution and died in 1984 of lung cancer.
Most recently, the ghoul himself is portrayed by Charlie Hunnam in the third season of the Netflix horror anthology, Monster, but before the English actor took a stab at it, here are four other iconic films or TV series that were inspired by Gein’s gruesome crimes.
American Horror Story: Asylum (2012)
Everett
Before Monster co-creator Ryan Murphy tackled the Ed Gein story in depth, he used the killer as inspiration for a fictional homicidal maniac in a different horror series, American Horror Story. Its second season, dubbed Asylum, is set mostly in 1964 and follows the tales of the staff and inmates who occupy the fictional mental institution Briarcliff Manor, run by the Catholic Church and overseen by zealous nun Sister Jude (Jessica Lange). When journalist Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) goes to the facility to write a story about its malpractice, Jude has her committed against her will. There, Lana joins forces with suspected murderer Kit Walker (Peters) and attempts to free other wrongfully committed patients from the asylum. But the real face of evil at the facility is Dr. Oliver Thredson (Zachary Quinto), a court-appointed psychiatrist brought to Briarcliff Manor to assess Kit’s competency to stand trial. He’s later revealed to be the killer known as Bloody Face, who, like Gein, has a house of horrors with items made from human body parts, and who skins and beheads the women he kills in order to use the skin for furniture or his titular “Bloody Face” mask.
Psycho (1960)
Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, which revolutionized and shocked Hollywood in equal measure, was famously adapted from a novel that was based on the case of Ed Gein by American writer Robert Bloch. Unlike some of the others on this list, Psycho pulled less from what Gein did as opposed to potentially why he did it — namely, an obsession with his domineering, hyper-religious mother. In Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) famously assumes the personality of his “mother” when he kills multiple women. (Gein would eventually tell police that he dug up the graves of women who reminded him of his mother, Augusta, who died in 1945.)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Courtesy Everett
The Tobe Hooper film, which itself would go on to inspire an entire franchise, follows five friends who head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On their journey, they come across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover a chainsaw-wielding murderer known as Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) within. The plot and characters don’t have much to do with Gein, but Leatherface, with his penchant for wearing the human skin of his victims as a mask, was directly inspired by him.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Orion/courtesy Everett Collection
Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic follows young F.B.I. cadet Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), who is recruited to the case of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), a serial killer whose MO involves killing and skinning women to make a skin suit. To help catch the Gein-like flayer, Starling seeks the insights of brilliant former psychiatrist and convicted cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Thomas Harris, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based, reportedly pulled inspiration from three different famous killers — Gein being chief among them — after Harris sat in on a psychology class taught by legendary FBI profiler John Douglas in which he talked about the crimes of Gein, as well as other murderers.
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