Are monsters born or are they made?
“Who was the monster? This poor boy who was abused his whole life then left in total isolation, suffering from undiagnosed mental illness?” Hunnam asks Tudum. “Or the legion of people who sensationalized his life for entertainment and arguably darkened the American psyche and the global psyche in the process?”
Ed Gein’s life: his abuse at the hands of his mother, Augusta Gein, his fascination with Nazi war criminals, his grisly crimes against the women of Plainfield, Wisconsin, and finally his incarceration and diagnosis.
Gein’s first victim comes early in his life, when he hits his brother Henry over the head, killing him accidentally. He covers his tracks to avoid blame, but Henry’s death breaks his mother’s heart and damages her already rocky relationship with Ed.
Augusta’s resentment forms a lingering rift that defines nearly everything about Ed. “He was this bizarre guy that lived in his own world, in his own reality, in total isolation with only one other point of contact,” “And so everything in his life was sort of made up, was a work of his own creation.”
Even Gein’s voice felt inspired by this formative relationship. “It was an affectation, it was what Ed thought that his mother wanted him to be,” “It wasn’t an authentic voice that lived in him. It was this persona, it was this character that he was playing because his mother desperately wanted a daughter, and she was given a son. In her more hostile, vile moments, she would tell him, ‘I should have castrated you at birth.’
After his brother’s death , Ed is soon left alone for good when his mother succumbs to illness and passes away. Missing his mother, Ed tries to dig her up — but settles for another corpse. Gein’s grave robbery was far more prolific than his killing; he used dried skin to create furniture, lamps, and more. A drawer of dried vulvas is one of the most disturbing
the sordid fantasies that would come to dominate his life, including his fascination with Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” Koch inspires Ed to skin his victims and use them for furniture.
He is probably one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and yet people don’t know that much about him,” “He influenced the Boogeyman and Psycho. Norman Bates was based on him. He influenced The Silence of the Lambs. He influenced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He influenced American Psycho.
Psycho specifically as a turning point for the horror genre. “Prior to Psycho coming out, monsters in movies were werewolves and Dracula and Frankenstein,” “They weren’t your next-door neighbor. They weren’t the person working in a hotel that might have a key to your room, to come in at night. It was a complete reimagining of the horror genre
Ed begins a romance with local shopkeeper Bernice . Bernice is open to exploring Ed’s quirks and her own sexual kinks, but Ed soon finds himself hallucinating Augusta, and he kills Bernice as well. It’s this final crime that brings law enforcement to his door: Bernice’s son is the local deputy.
Ed’s state of mind may have kept him off death row.
Ed didn’t know what he was thinking when he was doing those things. It was just in a manic state.”
The judge in Ed’s trial agrees and sends him to a mental institution rather than prison. There, Ed lives out his days in relative peace — albeit with a few remaining fantasies. Via a ham radio, he imagines himself communicating with Ilse Koch, the woman who, from a distance, helped start Ed down the road toward monstrosity.
“He makes sense as a person and a subject matter only in the context of the Holocaust really,” . “It was those images that got stuck in his head that he couldn’t unsee.”
Ed’s ham radio also allows him to “get in touch” with another long-standing fascination of his: Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby), the first widely known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery in the United States. Ed has become convinced he himself is transgender, wearing the skin of his female victims just as Buffalo Bill would in The Silence of the Lambs. But, as Jorgensen tells him, Ed is not transgender but instead is gynephilic — a man who’s so aroused by the female body that he wants to be inside it.
While in isolation in the mental hospital, Ed is finally diagnosed with schizophrenia, which gives him much-needed insight into why he committed the crimes and why he doesn’t remember committing them.
If he had gotten the right treatment sooner, [the question becomes] if he would’ve ever done the things that he did.
He really lived in that world, and the parameters and fantasies of that world were as real to him as anything else,” “It was just his reality. Those manic episodes were the experience he was having, just like anything else.”
Ed was the perfect person to talk about that because when he was apprehended, he was very quickly diagnosed, and he was given great care by a society. He was taken to different hospitals. He was treated well. He was given the correct medications
