Ed Gein was a Wisconsin serial killer and grave robber who inspired infamous movie characters like Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's classic, Psycho, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
On October 3, Gein's murders will be brought to Netflix in the latest installment of Ryan Murphy's Monster series. The macabre details of Gein's homicides are horrific. The Plainfield, Wisconsin, serial killer even fashioned lampshades out of the skin of women whose bodies he dug up in a local graveyard.
The character of Ed Gein is being played by Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam.
In an appearance on the TODAY show on Tuesday, September 30, Hunnam opened up about playing Gein, and he revealed that he paid a visit to the killer's grave.
"He's like a very sort of culturally influential person who you've never really heard of. He was a boy living in isolation in Wisconsin," he said of Gein. "He was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre," added Hunnam.
"He had this huge cultural influence," said Hunnam. The actor explained that the show asks who is the real monster, the killer or filmmakers who "sensationalized it for entertainment and darkened the American psyche in the process." According to Hunnam, "Psycho was the pivot point where we became the monsters" because monsters on film were previously limited to characters like Dracula.
Asked how he decompresses after playing a character like this one, Hunnam shared that he visited Gein's grave. Where is Gein buried? In Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the Plainfield Cemetery, although his tombstone is in a museum because it was stolen and damaged.
"It takes time. I went to visit his grave," he said, adding that he drove eight hours to Wisconsin to where Gein was buried. "I thought it would be a good conclusion to visit his grave and say what I wanted to say to him, basically that I hoped we told his story honestly at the very least. And didn't invite him to come on the journey with me moving forward. I was ready to say goodbye to him, that being the end."
Murphy also explained the deeper theme of the series.
“I wanted to talk about that topic, about how every generation creates their own bogeyman,” Murphy told Variety. “Every generation has to up the stakes of violence, because you become inured to it.”
According to A&E, Gein, who lived on a farm, murdered two women and dug up the bodies of other women, allegedly because they resembled his domineering mother, Augusta Gein. He told investigators that he tried to fashion a "woman's suit" out of people's skin to "recreate his mother and become her," A&E reported.
