Who Is Ed Gein? Charlie Hunnam's Monster Season 3 Character, Explained

America's fascination with serial killers has been an exploitable cultural phenomenon since long before the term was coined in the 1970s. People read books, wrote plays, and followed newspaper coverage of notorious murderers like Jack the Ripper, Charles Starkweather, and Richard Speck. A cold-blooded murder in any capacity is baffling enough to normal or normal-ish people; going on a wanton killing spree for kicks or because the lunar cycle is in the proper alignment is just bananas. How and why do minds break like this?

When a (one-time) master novelist like Thomas Harris or a naturalist like John McNaughton is asking these questions, there can be great value in examining the minds of monsters. When Jonathan Demme is adapting the former, there is also the opportunity to make a rewatchable, Oscar-winning classic of a film. When Ryan Murphy is at the helm, you're going to wind up with a lot of great actors (and sometimes directors, like "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress" filmmaker Carl Franklin) wasting their time and talent crafting something stylish, yet frustratingly simplistic. And he's going to spend a load of Netflix's money telling these stories at a mind-numbingly glacial pace.

It was one thing for Murphy to use his "American Crime Story" brand to retell the sordid tales of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky, if only because those miniseries had lots of colorful characters and moving narrative pieces. With "Dahmer: Monster – The Jeffrey Dahmer Story" and now "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," he's asking viewers to spend time with a lot of deeply unpleasant people — abusers, murderers, and, inexplicably, worse. Evidently, Netflix subscribers can't get enough of these lurid yarns, so Murphy has, unsurprisingly, opted to keep "Monsters" going.

His next subject: Ed Gein (to be played by Charlie Hunnam). If the name isn't familiar, trust me, you've heard this story before, and it's impossible to imagine Murphy telling it better. Let me explain.

"Monster: The Ed Gein Story" will focus on the so-called "Butcher of Plainfield." Gein confessed to killing two Wisconsin women: bar owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957. He is a suspect in several other unsolved Wisconsin murders, but he died in 1994, so those cases will likely remain cold.

Gein initially got away with Hogan's murder. It wasn't until police arrested him for killing Worden and searched his house that they found Hogan's skull and face (he used human skulls as soup bowls). They found much more of Worden, including her heart, which Gein had stuffed into a plastic bag. They also discovered that Gein was a graverobber and necrophiliac (i.e. he had sex with dead bodies).

There was also the issue of his mother, who may have been the original monster in the Gein family. This part of the story is going to sound very familiar.

Ed's parents were George and Augusta Gein. George was a milquetoast alcoholic who left the parenting to Augusta, a religious nut determined to steer Ed and his brother, Henry, away from impure thoughts and fornication. Ed was fanatically devoted to his mother, to the point that, when she died, he kept her room in immaculate shape, just as she'd left it, while the rest of the house fell into disrepair. He did not, however, keep her mummified body; that's one of the few elements Robert Bloch had to invent for his 1959 novel "Psycho," which Alfred Hitchcock turned into one of the greatest horror films ever made.

That's not the only horror classic Gein inspired. His penchant for fashioning furniture and clothing out of human skin and bones was used by Tobe Hooper and Thomas Harris for, respectively, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Silence of the Lambs." Numerous non-classics have directly mined the Gein story for smash-and-grab money, which, again, leaves me wondering why Murphy is bothering. Hunnam is a very good actor, but he'll never top Anthony Perkins, nor will Murphy get anywhere in the same ballpark as Hitchcock, Hooper, and Demme.

Call me crazy (not Gein crazy necessarily), but it's starting to feel like Murphy isn't all that concerned about quality. Perhaps he'll prove us all wrong whenever "Monster: The Ed Gein Story" premieres on Netflix (it hasn't started shooting yet, so it's unclear as to when it will be ready to stream).