Ed Gein had an unusual fixation on his mother, which spiraled into insanity after her death, leading him into a life marked by sadistic and disturbing crimes.

Raised on a decaying farm in rural Wisconsin, he became Augusta Gein, his deeply religious mother’s, unsettlingly devoted charge. Following her death, he emerged as ‘The Butcher of Plainfield,’ engaging in grave robbing and body snatching.

When he wasn’t exhuming and mutilating corpses, he embarked on killing sprees. His confirmed victims include at least two women, with suspicions of more.

He would also turn the skin of some of his victims into suits, and wear them. 

While Gein may not share the notoriety of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, his wickedness inspired numerous horror films made by esteemed directors like Jonathan Demme, Alfred Hitchcock, and Tobe Hooper.

Some of these films were Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres on Netflix on October 3. This show is created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the same duo known for Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.

Charlie Hunnam, ‘Sons of Anarchy’ actor, was poached by Ryan Murphy to play the role of Ed Gein.

He told Tudum that Hunnam had a ‘haunting look’ about him when he saw a paparazzi photo of him and recalled ‘there was something very Ed about him.’

The trailer dropped this week, and it is spine-chilling. The opening scene shows an officer arriving at the remote and eerie Wisconsin farmhouse.

Inside the two-story home, human body parts are scattered. Organs are stashed in glass jars. Masks made from human skin occupy a shelf. A woman’s black dress with a lace collar is exhibited.

One clip shows Gein snatching a body from a grave, bringing it back to his house, and placing it on a wooden table before he dissects and skins the corpse. The deceased is an older female around his mother’s age.

Gein stares into the camera, and his mother’s hypnotic voice echoes in the background. ‘You’re working too fast,’ she tells him. ‘I am sorry, mother,’ he responds.

‘Just go slow and steady,’ his mother continues. ‘Take your time, sweet boy.’

In this terrifying clip, he is wearing a dark dress and places the dead woman’s scalp with dark hair over his head and her face over his face.

Hunnam told Tudum that he read many books about Gein, but the most helpful was when he got a recording of him that was made two days after his arrest. 

‘It’s about an hour-and-10-minute interview with him, while he’s in custody. A lot of the musicality, and his inflection, and his choice of words, and where his energy sat, I was able to extract from it,’ he said.

Murphy shared that  ‘[Gein] is probably one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and yet people don’t know that much about him.’

‘He influenced some of the biggest serial killers of the 20th century — which is another thing that I think people did not and do not know about him — Ted Bundy, and on and on and on.’

Harold Schechter, a two-time Edgar nominee and true crime historian who has published more than 50 books, nicknamed Gein the ‘original Psycho’.

He told Daily Mail that Gein inspired three of the most iconic horror films ever made Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.

In the 1960s cult classic horror film Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Norman Bates was also obsessed with his mother and dressed up her corpse.

Gein has also been compared to fictional monsters Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs and Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 

Schechter’s book ‘Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the original ‘Psycho’ – first published in 1989 – has been called the definitive book on the Ed Gein case.

He told DailyMail.com that Gein was in a class of his own.

‘He wasn’t a Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, or a John Wayne Gacy. They were sadistic sex killers, people who derive this very sick sexual pleasure of torturing and killing helpless victims,’ he explained.

‘Gein did not have that mentality. He derived his pleasure from mutilating corpses.’ 

Between 1945 and his arrest in 1957, police said he killed two women. 

‘He executed them very swiftly. He was just interested in bringing their bodies home and doing the things he did to them,’ Schechter noted. 

In his book, the author stated that Gein wasn’t the classic serial killer but more of a ‘ghoul’ or a ‘necrophile’ – someone who is sexually attracted to corpses.

‘Ghouls are creatures who violate corpses, dig up graves,’ he said. 

‘You can’t really compare him to anybody else because there is nobody else certainly in American criminal history who is anything like him,’ he continued.

Schechter explained that murderers Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, The Hillside Strangler, and the Night Stalker were classic serial killers and extreme sexual sadists who preyed on their victims and committed evil acts on them.

Gein, on the other hand, was ‘absolutely unique’..

‘No one is doing the stuff that he was doing. He wasn’t into torturing,’ Schechter explained.

‘Serial killers often have orgasms the moment they murder their victims. That wasn’t Gein.’

Schechter, who was a Professor Emeritus at Queens College, CUNY, where he taught classes in American literature and myth criticism for 42 years, explained that ‘classically, necrophiles do have sex with corpses’.

However, it remains unclear if Gein had sex with the bodies he dug up. 

‘Gein claimed that they smelled too bad for him to have sex with them,’ Schechter said.

In the book, he explores Gein’s obsessive relationship with his mother. 

Gein had grown up with an alcoholic father, who beat him and eventually died of a heart attack. His older brother, Henry, also died under mysterious circumstances.  

Though some theorized that Gein killed his brother, Schechter said he doesn’t believe that to be true.

After their deaths, Gein lived alone with his mother for many years. 

He described her as a God-fearing woman – a religious fanatic who would frequently lecture her son on the evils of modern womanhood and the dangers of sex.

‘His mother was such a dominating figure in his life,’ Schechter said. ‘I think he was trying to reconstitute her by bringing these corpses home but also taking this revenge on her by perpetuating these relations on the female body.’

Though he said there was no indication that the mother and son were incestuous, Schechter pointed out that in some way their relationship was ‘psychologically and emotionally incestuous.’

When his mother died in 1945, Gein spiraled into madness. He kept her bedroom untouched.  

He would scan obituaries in his small town, travel to the graveyard, and dig up the bodies of the listed deceased. 

After his mother’s death, he tried to dig up her grave, and when he came up empty-handed, he went in search of other women who resembled her. 

Many of the bodies he dissected and skinned were used as home and fashion accessories.

Skin became chair covers, masks were made from human faces, kitchen utensils from skulls and bones, and nipples were used to make belts, he said.

Schechter described Gein as a recluse. He worked as a handyman, but in fact earned money as a babysitter.

It was only when two women in his small town mysteriously disappeared that cops began investigating him.

Among them was Mary Hogan, 54, who ran a tavern that Gein frequented and went missing in December 1954. 

Three years later, Bernice Worden, 58, disappeared from a hardware store she worked at in the town of Plainfield, where Gein lived.

Worden’s son worked as the town’s deputy sheriff and became suspicious of Gein. 

When Gein was apprehended, the authorities went to his dilapidated farmhouse. Once inside, they were confronted by a house of horrors. 

Worden’s body was found hanging from the ceiling. She had been decapitated. Her head was found in a sack, and her heart was in a plastic bag.

It was revealed later in the search that the remains of more than 15 bodies were found at Gein’s home.

Schechter explained that after Gein was arrested, they assumed that the body parts in the farmhouse were women he had murdered, but Gein explained that they were bodies he had dug up. They didn’t believe him.’

However, they soon realized he was telling the truth when they went to the victims’ graves and saw their coffins were empty. 

Gein confessed to killing both Worden and Hogan. During his confession, he also spoke of the ‘saintly woman’ his mother was.

He eventually entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and was later found unfit to stand trial after a schizophrenia diagnosis. He was committed to Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin.

Gein was later transferred to Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, where he died aged 77 in 1984 from lung cancer and respiratory illness complications.

Monster: Ed Gein begins streaming on Netflix on October 3.