Monster: The Ed Gein Story showrunner explains its horror legacy
Ian Brennan says Netflix’s Ed Gein drama follows how one Wisconsin killer reshaped movie monsters from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs.
By Georgia Hale · Staff Writer
3 min read
Monster: The Ed Gein Story showrunner Ian Brennan says the Netflix miniseries looks beyond Ed Gein’s crimes to the long shadow he cast over screen horror, from Psycho to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
In an interview with Deadline, Brennan described the eight-part drama as an attempt to trace both Gein’s life and the pop-culture machinery that turned him into a blueprint for some of cinema’s most infamous monsters. Charlie Hunnam plays Gein, with Laurie Metcalf as his mother, Augusta.
The series arrived to mixed reactions, Deadline reported, with taste among the sticking points. It later picked up seven Emmy nominations, including recognition for Hunnam and Metcalf, plus tech, craft, makeup and costume categories.
What is Monster: The Ed Gein Story about?
The Netflix drama follows Edward Theodore Gein, the Wisconsin farmer arrested in 1957 after police found a headless body in his barn and human remains in his home, according to Deadline’s account. Brennan’s version also follows how Gein’s story fed later horror fiction and film.
Gein’s crimes helped inspire Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted into a landmark horror film. Deadline also noted Gein’s influence on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs.
Brennan told Deadline that the show connects Gein’s private obsessions with the wider fears of the 1950s, including the cultural shock of Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. He said the series uses that period to explore how ideas of the “monster” shifted from supernatural creatures toward human evil.
Why Ian Brennan did not tell the story straight
Brennan said the team did not want a plain birth-to-death true-crime timeline. He told Deadline the series instead uses themes and film history to move through Gein’s story, pulling in figures and reference points tied to the culture Gein influenced.
That includes Christine Jorgensen, played by Alanna Darby, whose newsreel footage is used in the show as Gein confronts thoughts about becoming a woman. Vicky Krieps appears as Nazi war criminal Ilsa Koch, while Suzanna Son plays Adeline Watkins, a local woman Brennan said became a way to examine public fascination with the macabre.
Brennan told Deadline that Watkins was a real footnote in Gein’s story who publicly claimed a romantic connection to him and then withdrew it days later. The series expands her role, with Brennan saying she represents the audience’s morbid curiosity around Gein and the fiction he helped inspire.
The show also folds in the visual language of horror history. Brennan said there were no legal problems he recalled around using references to existing properties, but the challenge was aesthetic: suggesting Hitchcock, Hooper and Demme without copying them outright.
How far does the show go?
Brennan acknowledged to Deadline that the series had to balance entertainment with exploitation. He said he did not want to soften the most uncomfortable parts of Gein’s story, including what he described as likely sexual contact with bodies Gein dug up.
He also said he was more uneasy when the show suggested sadistic behavior associated with the visual world of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, because he said he knew Gein had not acted in that specific way. Brennan framed those moments as part of the show’s method of letting later movies bleed back into the telling of Gein’s life.
Deadline reported that Monster will next turn to Lizzie Borden. Brennan said Ryan Murphy suggested the subject after a different season idea had become difficult, and named Ella Beatty, Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall among the cast.
This story draws on original reporting from Deadline.