(NewsNation) — Netflix’s latest series, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” started streaming last week and spotlights the godfather of all serial killers.
The series follows the story of Ed Gein, a man who killed and desecrated the bodies of multiple women in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Gein’s crimes went on to inspire multiple classic horror films, including “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Psycho,” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
Asked by NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield why Ed Gein isn’t a bigger name among those who study violence, forensic psychologist Kris Mohandie says his killings came at the very beginning of the phenomenon being examined.
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“Obviously, there were serial killers before this,” he said. “But in terms of the first wave of those that were studied, particularly by the FBI’s profiling unit, people like John Douglas, he was the first and represented the pattern that we see in these people, which is one of violent fantasy, often trying out that violent fantasy in different ways before moving to living human beings.”
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The eight-part series unmasks Gein’s life as he was driven by isolation, psychosis, and an all-consuming obsession with his mother, which led him to become a monster.
“I think he’s a classic serial killer who has a variety of perversions and paraphilias, which are disturbing fixations on acting out against a non-consensual partner,” Mohandie added. “So this patterning is disturbing, but it is pretty straightforward.”
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“It’s a lot of violent fantasy in an individual who lives in his violent fantasy life, who creates all these things that were in his house to relive those fantasies, have himself surrounded by what’s stimulating to him, and then eventually kind of morphs into what he really wants to do, which is take lives,” Mohandie acknowledged.
Actor playing Ed Gein speaks of series’ authenticity
The actor portraying Gein, Charlie Hunnam, stated he wanted to be as authentic to the killer as possible to do him justice.
“This is going to be the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did — but who he was being at the center of it, rather than what he did,” he said.
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