Laurie Metcalf, Tom Hollander & Olivia Williams Join Charlie Hunnam in the Next Installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s “Monster” Anthology Series

Laurie Metcalf as Ed Gein’s mother; Tom Hollander as Alfred Hitchcock; Olivia Williams as Alma Hitchcock, join Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein in the next installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series.

Ed Gein, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul, was an American murderer, suspected serial killer, and body snatcher. Gein’s crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned keepsakes from their bones and skin. He also confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957.

Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. By 1968, he was judged competent to stand trial; he was found guilty of the murder of Worden, but he was found legally insane and was remanded to a psychiatric institution. Gein died at Mendota Mental Health Institute from respiratory failure resulting from lung cancer, on July 26, 1984, aged 77. He is buried next to his family in the Plainfield Cemetery, in a now-unmarked grave.

Gein’s story has had a lasting effect on American popular culture as evidenced by its numerous appearances in film, music, and literature. The tale first came to widespread public attention in the fictionalized version presented by Robert Bloch in his 1959 suspense novel Psycho. In addition to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film of Bloch’s novel, Psycho, Gein’s story was loosely adapted into numerous films, including Deranged (1974), In the Light of the Moon (2000) (released in the United States and Australia as Ed Gein (2001)), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), Ed Gein, the Musical (2010), and the Rob Zombie films House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil’s Rejects. Gein served as the inspiration for myriad fictional serial killers, most notably Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) Garland Greene (Con Air) and the character Dr. Oliver Thredson in the TV series American Horror Story: Asylum.