In November 1957, police in the aptly named Plainfield, Wisconsin, entered the remote farmhouse of 51-year-old handyman Ed Gein after he’d been arrested in connection with the disappearance of a local shopkeeper. What they uncovered inside would inspire some of the greatest horror films of the 20th century, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho. The shopkeeper, 58-year-old Bernice Worden, had been strung upside down, decapitated and “dressed out like a deer”, authorities said. After searching Gein’s house, police found a nightmarish array of paraphernalia made from human remains, including face masks, bowls made from skulls, and, most horrifying of all, a “woman suit” crafted from female skin. The local sheriff, Art Schley, was reportedly so disturbed by the scene that those close to him attributed it to his untimely death of heart failure aged 43 in 1968. He would not live to see Gein’s trial.
While Gein has inspired fictional psychopaths such as Psycho’s Norman Bates, Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs (1991), he has never been directly reincarnated in a major Hollywood film or TV series – until now. The so-called “Butcher of Plainfield” is the latest subject in Ryan Murphy's controversial Monster anthology, which has previously dramatised the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer in 2022 and the Menendez brothers in 2024. British actor Charlie Hunnam plays Gein in this new instalment, which looks set to explore the killer’s troubled upbringing and obsession with his mother, as well as his legacy in Hollywood (Tom Hollander has been cast as Hitchcock in the series).
