Bauman Lands Emmy Nod for Netflix Ed Gein Series
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- Michael Bauman earned an Emmy nomination for cinematography on the "Buxom Bird" episode of Netflix's "Monster: The Ed Gein Story," the third installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's anthology series following "Dahmer" and the Menendez story.
- Bauman grew up in Wisconsin where neighbors and relatives shared local Ed Gein stories, and he drew on personal memories of brutal Midwestern winters to inform the show's atmosphere and lighting.
- Production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson and Bauman used kerosene lamps and other pre-electricity light sources to reflect Gein's rural Plainfield home, which was "a little late to the game in terms of electricity."
- Bauman worked with Panavision on vintage lenses and a 58mm Petzval lens with swirly bokeh to isolate Charlie Hunnam's performance, letting depth of field grow shallower and shallower around Ed Gein in the frame.
- Production shot California interiors months before Illinois exteriors, gambled on snow, and got lucky when a real Illinois snowstorm matched their stage work — though later in the shoot they needed 80 tons of shredded ice to sustain winter conditions.
- The scripts incorporate Alfred Hitchcock and Tobe Hooper as characters, explicitly threading Gein's influence on "Psycho," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "The Silence of the Lambs" into the narrative itself.
Why it matters: The Emmy nomination validates Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's anthology strategy of using prestige-level cinematography to differentiate true-crime dramatizations in a saturated market. Bauman's period-specific technical choices — kerosene lamps, vintage Petzval lenses, and frames-within-frames narrowing the widescreen — give Netflix a visually distinctive entry, while the decision to cast Hitchcock and Hooper as on-screen characters reframes the show from crime procedural into an essay on horror's genealogy.
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