Watchmen writer Alan Moore’s 1989 graphic novel From Hell used the 1888-1891 crimes of London’s Jack the Ripper as a bloody overture to the coming violence of the 20th century, and even now the serial killer’s trail of carnage seems hard to top. Well, it was until 16 November 1957, when Wisconsin farmer Edward Theodore Gein was arrested at his family home. A human heart was cooking on the stove, and out in the barn its owner’s headless body had been hung upside down, gutted like a deer. Hollowed-out skulls, a female skin suit, and other more disagreeably fleshy body parts — souvenirs of late-night grave-robbing — lay in wait for unwitting police officers, one of whom was the son of the victim.
Ed Gein didn’t have to wait long for worldwide notoriety; less than two years later, author Robert Bloch, a fellow Midwesterner, published his new book Psycho, about a lonely motel owner named Norman Bates whose toxic relationship with his mother turns homicidal. Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights, and the rest is horror-movie history. But the cult of Ed Gein was only just getting started; after inspiring a slew of tawdry drive-in exploitation films, Gein’s crimes were invoked again for two more genre classics — Tobe Hooper’s critically acclaimed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which took the “big five” awards at that year’s Oscars.
The legend of Ed Gein continues to fascinate as much as it repulses, and Ian Brennan’s eight-part mini-series Monster: The Ed Gein Story — his first entry without series co-creator Ryan Murphy — addresses this madman’s disturbing legacy head on. As well as telling us the basics of Gein’s origins story, Brennan’s digressive script takes us off on unexpected tangents, as the rural Gein — played by Charlie Hunnam — gets sucker-punched by the outside world, first by the horrors of the Holocaust and the exploits of notorious Nazi war criminal Ilsa Koch (Vicky Krieps), and secondly by newsreel footage of pioneering transsexual Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby), who triggers Gein’s primitive but so-far repressed thoughts about physically becoming a woman.
Gein’s confidante is local girl Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son), a weird local girl who stokes his interest in true crime and exotic tales of shrunken heads in the Tropics, while pursuing her own lurid obsession with the salacious New York crime scenes photographed by the morally ambiguous Weegee (Elliott Gould).
Though reactions to the show were mixed, mostly on grounds of taste, the show was vindicated when it received seven Emmy nominations: Five for tech, craft, makeup, costume and two for its stars, Hunnam and Laurie Metcalf, who plays his mother Augusta. Here, Brennan reflects on the legacy of the mild-mannered maniac, the killer next door, who literally changed the face of horror.
DEADLINE: I’ve known about Ed Gein almost all my life, but it never once occurred to me that he died in 1984. He was actually alive for most of the cultural shifts that he inspired.
IAN BRENNAN: Yeah, it’s really strange. I hadn’t quite accounted for how affected he was — and how affected the culture was, particularly in the 1950s — by Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. Those things were so outside of the realm of what we thought was possible that they were brushed off briefly as propaganda, etcetera. That was really the key to [understanding Ed Gein] — finding that little wrinkle and how fascinated he was by it. A schizophrenic or schizoaffective brain like his really couldn’t compute it. And not only did it affect him as an individual, but it also altered, I think, what we considered monstrous in our culture, which we get into in the show. I think it comes out of the mouth of Alfred Hitchcock, who says something like, “Before Auschwitz, [the monster] was Dracula or the Mummy, and now it’s us.” There’s nothing more horrifying than what we can do.
DEADLINE: When did you first decide to write this show? The subject matter would lend itself to exactly the same treatment as Jeffrey Dahmer, but you went in a very different direction.
BRENNAN: Yeah. Well, it was during Dahmer [that we had the idea], because Jeffrey Dahmer was obsessed with him. He actually features in the series about Dahmer. I’d always heard about [Ed Gein]. Ryan’s been aware of him for a while, I think. When we were working on Glee, in the writer’s room, we’d be [talking about him], like, “Oh my God, look at this. This is like a skin lamp! Look at this nipple belt, and this chair made out of human skin.” It seemed macabre and really dark.
It was during the research of Dahmer that we found out he got really obsessed with The Exorcist III. He got these yellow contact lenses [to look like the film’s Gemini Killer, played by Brad Dourif]. I think he was trying to explain himself to himself as being demonic, so he could make sense of himself. And it was in that process of taking stock that he came across the story of Ed Gein, which just seemed like a really interesting framing for an episode of Dahmer. Macabre on macabre — what does this sort of monster think of that monster?
BRENNAN: This show, it might be surprising to hear me say, was very enjoyable to write. It’s very satisfying material to work with, just because you really feel like you’re writing about something dark and strange, but that in and of itself is really entertaining. You feel like, for once, you’re actually doing something that could be construed by people as important. But actually, landing on a subject is what’s difficult. That’s actually the really grinding part of it.
There’s a lot of research. There’s a lot of looking into different subjects. And it’s tricky, because most killers — certainly most serial killers or multiple murderers — might seem interesting, but the stories are just really dark. Often, it just seems to go hand in hand with sexual violence, which is not interesting to Ryan or me. The story is just about a psychopath who you don’t want to spend eight hours with. You don’t want to get inside their head because most of them are ciphers. There’s nothing interesting about them. So that’s always what’s tricky: You go down these rabbit holes, and then you realize like, “Oh, but I don’t like this person. I don’t see any sort of humanity in this person.”
But we kept coming back to Ed Gein, who did have a really interesting story of what he did, but was also really interesting in how he was left alone and kind of abandoned by the world. So, in a way, you could construe a way to think about him in terms of something was also done to him. And we kept going back to his story; it seemed very lonely and rural and mid-century and Midwestern and beautiful. But I think we were also really worried. Does this have mass appeal for an audience? Is this a show that could justify its budget and justify its position in this franchise? That was the big question.
DEADLINE: It’s also a comment on the second half of the 20th century…
BRENNAN: That was Ryan’s idea. He was sort of like, “But he’s been so influential. What if there’s a way that we tell it through not just the frame [of Ed Gein’s life], but also the visual cinematic filter of the material, the movies, the stories and the comic books he inspired?” Then it just clicked. Then you’re like, “Oh, here’s this other element, so you’re not just alone in a farmhouse with this guy.” Which I would watch all day long, or I would write that all day long, but I appreciate that there’s a limit to that, audience-wise. And then we were off to the races. We had to figure out the right recipe for how much we were going to be in one world or the other. That was the big thing that we kept toggling back and forth, whether we start in the present day and go back, or start back and come to the present day or come forward in time. And that’s sort of what we landed on. It was a long walk to get there.
DEADLINE: How did you get all these elements to fit together?
BRENNAN: The temptation, I think, with true crime and true stories is to tell them too chronologically, too much like, “Here’s where he was born and here’s when he died.” Usually, the audience will get ahead of it. So, the key to telling stories in this series is to try to find throughlines that are thematic rather than temporal or chronological, so Christine Jorgensen comes into the story when Ed is at his most gender dysphoric.
We wanted to use what Hitchcock thought about Gein to bleed back into the telling of Ed’s story, or use what Tobe Hooper took from Ed’s story, and let that bleed back into it. That’s what was fun about attacking it creatively because Ed’s story is very elliptical. There’s not very many facts to it. You could learn all that’s knowable about him in a couple of sittings. In a day of reading, you could really grasp him. That’s including archives and stuff. He has one series of extensive interviews, because not only was he examined before his trial and took a polygraph test during his arrest and processing, he was also examined later on in his life just as a subject of study.
But he became less and less reliable as a source. I think his internal life just got foggier and foggier. Even as he was more medicated when he was institutionalized and lived more of what you would call a normal existence where at least he had social interaction, he couldn’t remember a lot of it. His own story was quite foggy even to him, which was an interesting way for his real-life story to close in my mind, that he really struggled to come to any sort of self-understanding.
DEADLINE: I was really fascinated by the character of Adeline. Obviously, it’s a fairly fanciful depiction of her role in his life, but it’s a great way of reflecting the public’s fascination with him. The big question I was going to ask you is why has Ed Gein endured? I think Adeline represents the audience for all the fiction and all the movies he’s inspired, that kind of morbid curiosity.
BRENNAN: That’s exactly right. I mean, the fact of her is really interesting. She’s a sort of footnote in the true story, but she is a person who came out and publicly said, “Oh yeah, we were engaged. He was my boyfriend,” or whatever. And then a few days later, she recanted, which just begs a million questions. You’re like, “What?” So, we took that and ran with it. But you’re exactly right, that’s the device that she plays — what is this fascination? And particularly, in the time period, there was an almost juvenile teenage titillation with the macabre that felt like it was dangerous, and of the period and new. And I think that’s what Ed was trying to process as well. He was as fascinated by digging up bodies as he was with reading [Jack London’s 1911 novel] South Sea Tales.
He was really a naïf. He had a real child’s mind in a lot of ways. But then was also a semi-functioning adult and, actually, an upstanding member — albeit a weirdo — in his community. If you were desperate for a babysitter, he could fill in for you. And then the kids would come back and say, “He has shrunken heads on the wall,” and people just thought it was a joke. It just boggles the mind. He was born into a pre-Ed Gein world and then ushered in a world where you would never trust your children with a weird lunatic down the street.
Just speaking to his enduring appeal, I don’t know whether it is this mix of man, child, and ghoul, or it’s the fact of his crimes. When they found his house, they beat him up because they thought this guy had murdered hundreds of people. He was kind of like, “No, I don’t think I did,” and they were like, “Well, look, if you’ve robbed that many graves, every one of those graves in this town would be empty.” And indeed, the first one they looked in had been tampered with. He did it over 30 years, sometimes in the middle of winter, and nobody saw what he was doing.
There’s a way to think of what he did as largely victimless. Obviously, he did — squarely — murder two women. But in the meantime, mostly what he was doing was just this morbid curiosity of besmirching and desecrating graves. He wasn’t like John Wayne Gacy, which is just a different level of being a sadist or psychopath. What he did was so strange. The element of necrophilia is just so strange and so repulsive to a normal brain. I happen to find it fascinating, but it’s mysterious to me as well why he’s had the cultural purchase he’s had. It’s still as much of an open question for me as it was before researching him.
DEADLINE: Did you ever censor yourself, because you do go pretty far? You go further than I was expecting a TV show to go.
BRENNAN: No, same. No, and I know to which you’re referring. Because the whole thing with this show is, you’re sort of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. This series has to walk a line of what is entertainment and what is exploitative. Are we exploiting these stories? But you also want to tell the story in a way that, if you’re going to deal with these issues, you really have to deal with them. It’s likely he had sexual contact with the bodies he dug up. I feel like it’s more exploitative if you let him off the hook for that. It’s almost the opposite. It’s like, “Well, if he did this, we’re showing who he is — that’s part of it, and it’s a really important part of it.” I think I’m more cognizant of not letting these characters, and these very uncomfortable facts about them, off the hook.
We may have cut this scene from Dahmer, it may have seemed like a step too far, but Jeffrey Dahmer one time got a job as a phlebotomist because he wanted to be near blood. One time he just took a pint of blood and just drank it and then vomited because it was gross. That is just irresistible to me if you’re being asked to — or you’re asking yourself — to really try to plumb the depths of what a human being, particularly an atypical and very lonely usually male one, is capable of. That just seems to be part of it.
There is obviously a line of what you would and would not want to show. But, somehow, some things seem to pass that muster and others don’t. I’m uncomfortable with sadism. That’s just not interesting to me. I was actually more uncomfortable with the moments where we tilted at Ed being sadistic — the bleeding back of Tobe Hooper’s rendition of him as a sort of brainless sadistic monster. It’s the scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which I just find so disturbing, where one of the girls is beaten to death in the kitchen with a hammer. I was more uncomfortable that we suggested that Ed did something like that, which I know he didn’t, but it was part of the aesthetic of how we were telling this story and what he did do. I was like, “Oh, I understand why we’re doing this.” But that was the thing I was most squeamish about, as it turns out. Which it was surprising even to me.
DEADLINE: Did you have any problems with using these existing properties: Psycho, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs?
BRENNAN: No, not from a legal standpoint. None that I’m aware of. No, it was more of an aesthetic challenge to try to, for example, capture the way Alfred Hitchcock filmed things. What did he like looking at, image-wise? That was more of the challenge; how to make it feel a little Hitchcock-y without just ripping off his style. And then how does that change? A lot of it was just color palette and color timing for the middle section, where we get into the 1970s and get into Tobe Hooper’s mind. Then, in the latter half, we dig a little bit more into The Silence of the Lambs and the gender dysphoria, et cetera. But, no, I don’t recall any legal challenges.
DEADLINE: The Silence of the Lambs brings its own baggage…
BRENNAN: People are either fascinated by it, or titillated by it, or can’t get out of their heads. It’s always walked that line, which we did in our own versions of it. That middle section, I actually happened to direct those scenes. And there were some images of Charlie doing the Silence of the Lambs dance, or putting on the mask, that were just so hauntingly strange, I couldn’t call cut. I was just like, “Well, this is gold. I’m just going to get as much of this as possible. This is so interesting and funny and edgy, and just haunting and beautiful to watch.” It was really strange. Jonathan Demme invented shots in that movie, the looking-straight-down-the-barrel as a way to get inside of characters. He invented, or certainly pioneered or re-pioneered, that technique, which we tried to do as well. I found myself doing a lot of that while we were in that block of episodes.
It’s such an iconic movie. I hadn’t watched it in a while either. It was nice to re-watch it. And then, later on, we move into a cheeky send-up/homage of Mindhunter. We do a slight embellishment in that chapter, because I believe one of the profilers had interviewed Ed Gein and was just like, “This guy’s gone. He’s just not there.” He was one of the most disorganized minds he’d ever seen. That he was so ill and so old and so feeble at that point that he was like, “There’s not much to do. We don’t need to interview this guy anymore.”
DEADLINE: Mindhunter was a very interesting way to go, because I was wondering how you’d get to the end of his life from Silence of the Lambs.
BRENNAN: Well, that’s also the challenge of this show: Every penultimate episode actually feels like the show’s already over, and then we always toy with just ending it there. I think it’s a fear of, how do you end these things? They’re quite difficult to do it. But in all three cases so far, touch wood, I think we’ve been able to find something that seems both like you’re ending one story, but telling it in an unexpected way, and that’s what that ended up being.
I just wish there had been a third season of Mindhunter. The whole thing was leading towards [the serial killer known as] BTK. I really wish [David Fincher] and Netflix could come to terms and do another season of that. I just found that show completely hypnotic. I haven’t re-watched it, but I remember at the time I was just like, “Well, this is just incredible.”
DEADLINE: I really like the framing of the ending as some kind of hall of fame event, with Ed Gein getting his honorary Oscar. Ted Bundy, Richard Speck and Ed Kemper all show up along the way. Was BTK ever in there?
BRENNAN: No. I don’t think there was any research that pointed him towards having any connection to Ed. There is a thin line between Ed and those others, so that’s sort of what determined it. I’d forgotten about the Richard Speck thing, and I had not been aware, prior, of any connection between them, but it was such a hoot to write. That performance, when I saw the dailies, I was like, “Oh wow!” I’m from Illinois, but it was a little bit before my time, that scandal. But that’s how he was living. It was actually a huge indictment of the prison system that he was living his best life, essentially running a sex trade in the Illinois prison system, with ample amounts of drugs. He was completely high as a kite the whole time. I had not been aware of until we researched this. It was quite bracing to find that out!
BRENNAN: The next season is about Lizzie Borden, the famous Victorian Boston, Massachusetts axe murderer, which is great. Like I said, it’s really tricky. Every season, we go back and forth, back and forth. I mean, a lot of my writing is just first attempts at a new subject. And then we were about two-thirds through an entirely different subject, and it was just really hard. It just was a slog. And then I usually get a pit-of-the-stomach feeling as I’m struggling with it. I’m like, “We’re going to pivot off this. This is too tricky.”
And then I came into work the next day, and Ryan was like, “What about Lizzie Borden? I’ve always been fascinated by that. It’s a peculiar story. It’s a peculiar time period. People don’t really know actually how it ended.” I was like, “Yeah, I know what she’s alleged to have done, but I don’t know whether she did it or not. I don’t know whether she got away with it or not.” I didn’t know anything about it. And then the second we just started talking about it, it just came flying out. So, I was like, “Oh, well, that’s what we’re doing.”
It’s Ella Beatty, Vicky Krieps again, Charlie Hunnam again, Rebecca Hall, just a really, really amazing cast and a really rich period. It just looks great. We’ve been so over-indexed on men. We were just like, “Oh, let’s do a woman’s story here.” It just seemed like the timing was right, so it’s good. I haven’t seen a cut of the final episode yet. I find it very fun — funny and strange — and it kind of feels like a fever dream. It moves really quickly. I don’t remember writing a lot of it. There’s the story of Elizabeth Bathory in it, and then Aileen Wuornos comes in, so it ends up being this strange triptych of troubled, trapped women. It became this little maze, at the end of which, I was like, “Oh wow, I can’t believe that that’s the story we ended up telling.” It was really, really good.
DEADLINE: The media seems to be a character in all the Monster series. Is that the case here? I have no idea whether she did it or not.
BRENNAN: Well, yes, she did, and it played significantly in her trial. And then after her trial as well, she ended up being actually quite exposed to, and then quite deft with, the media at the time. It was a huge aspect. I was really surprised by that. As a matter of fact, it was sort of a similar period of unregulated yellow journalism back then. It has echoes to our moment now, where it’s more about volume — what’s the loudest message rather than what’s the truest message? The thing that’s stickiest in people’s minds, rather than what actually happened, becomes an interesting element that I had no expectation of when we first dove in.
DEADLINE: Do you take each project as they come, or is there a master plan?
BRENNAN: There is, but I can’t say them out loud, just because if I say them out loud, we’ll switch off of them. I’ve actually found that every time I go home and tell my wife, ‘Oh, this next season is going to be about blank,” that guarantees that we switch off of it. I don’t know. There’s something really ephemeral about it. Ryan is a supreme talent at about five or six separate completely discreet things, but one of them is just having this sense of smell as to what is the right moment. That often drives us if we’re onto a subject and then move off of it. But we both want to do 10 seasons of this show, if we get the chance to.
There’s just too many [subjects]. Some are really hard lifts. There is this obligation. As fanciful as we sometimes get with stuff, it does end up being a significant amount of research, and that is fairly time-consuming. we do need a lot of runway. We do them pretty quickly. We do them about once a year, so we can’t spend too much time making the sausage or deciding what sausages we’re going to make. But I hope we get to do it a lot. There’s four that I really want to do, and then there’s two we’ve started and gone off that I think we should go back and do as well. We’ve still got a lot to tell. Like I said, they’re tricky to find. Most murders, and most murderers, are just not interesting. They’re just sad and violent and ruin the lives of everybody close to them, so they really have to have some strange other thing that makes them fascinating. But if they have that, they’re really tricky to shake.
I don’t mean to speak for Charlie [Hunnam], but he tells this story. He was in an Uber somewhere, and he got to talking to the driver. It was before he’d said yes to the show. He mentioned Ed Gein, and the guy almost ran off the road. He’s like, “Oh, I’m obsessed with Ed Gein. Please, please, please do that. Do that show. No one has told that story.” On the drive back, Charlie was like, “Bye, thanks so much for the ride.” The driver got out of the car, he went up to him, and said, “Just remember, Ed Gein was a man who couldn’t get over losing his mom.” And it just stuck with me. I was like that’s just such a strange anecdote that some random driver out there has been walking around with that in his brain. There’s just something peculiar and sticky about Ed Gein. It stuck with me as well. It’s a very troubling story to come back and keep thinking about, but it is really something I do keep coming back and thinking about.
DEADLINE: If you do the rest, will they all be eight episodes, or is that flexible?
BRENNA: The next one is seven. Dahmer was 10, the Menendez brothers was nine, this was eight, next one is seven, but the following one will not be six. I think there’s a limit to how short you can go. I think it might be eight. That’s sort of ideal. I think that really ends up working. It’s still bingeable but still has the feeling of a very long feature film that you break up, which I think is the real strength of a limited series as a medium. It doesn’t feel episodic. It feels like you’re telling one long, really detailed, satisfying story. That’s why I like it. I prefer it, actually.
DEADLINE: How did you feel about Ed Gein getting seven Emmy nominations?
BRENNAN: It was great. I was really excited, particularly for Charlie and Laurie [Metcalf]. The design of the show was amazing. We’re asked to keep the budget contained. Each season of the show actually costs less to make, but each one looks like it costs more, which is a real feat. And a lot of our artisans and craftspeople and department heads really do spectacular work, and it makes me look more talented than I probably am. But the two tent-pole performances of the show being nominated was really satisfying. It’s the toughest category now. It’s the most stacked, so anything you can get in there is great.
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