Brennan on Ed Gein: The Killer Who Made Modern Horror
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- Ed Gein was arrested on November 16, 1957, at his Wisconsin farm, where police found a human heart cooking on the stove, a headless body hanging in the barn, hollowed-out skulls, and a female skin suit made from grave-robbed body parts, with one officer turning out to be the son of a victim.
- Gein's crimes directly inspired Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, Hitchcock's film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which swept that year's 'big five' Oscars.
- 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story' is an eight-part series written solo by Ian Brennan — his first Monster entry without co-creator Ryan Murphy — starring Charlie Hunnam as Gein, Laurie Metcalf as his mother Augusta, and Suzanna Son as confidante Adeline Watkins.
- The series earned seven Emmy nominations after mixed reviews 'mostly on grounds of taste': five for technical categories including makeup and costume, and two for its stars Hunnam and Metcalf.
- Brennan says he anchored Gein's psychology in two external shocks — newsreels of Nazi war criminal Ilsa Koch and the Holocaust, and the story of pioneering transsexual Christine Jorgensen — using a Hitchcock quote as the thesis: 'Before Auschwitz, [the monster] was Dracula or the Mummy, and now it's us.'
- The Ed Gein concept originated during Dahmer research, when writers discovered Jeffrey Dahmer wore yellow contact lenses inspired by The Exorcist III's Gemini Killer to frame himself as 'demonic,' with Ed Gein surfacing as a 'macabre on macabre' framing device.
- Gein died in 1984, decades after inspiring the horror genre — a delay Brennan says he had not fully accounted for, noting Gein became 'less and less reliable as a source' in later institutional interviews and 'couldn't remember a lot of it.'
Why it matters: The seven Emmy nods reframe the conversation around a series that drew taste-based criticism but clearly registered with TV Academy voters across technical and acting categories. Brennan's reframing — locating modern horror's origin not in Dracula but in post-Auschwitz monstrosity, and tracing that shift through a single Wisconsin farmer — gives the franchise a thesis its previous *Monster* entries arguably lacked.
