Monster: The Ed Gein Story Reveals What Became of the Butcher of Plainfield

Netflix is back with another Monster season, and this one dives into the real-life nightmare of Ed Gein — yes, the 'Butcher of Plainfield.' It dropped October 3, 2025, and it is absolutely not light viewing. The season follows the facts, the fallout, and the very weird ways this story seeped into pop culture.

Where this fits in the Monster universe

This is season three of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's anthology, following Dahmer and The Menendez Brothers. The Gein chapter zeroes in on how his crimes rattled the country and later fed into horror staples like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Inside baseball alert: a lot of the genre's most infamous imagery traces back to this case.

The real case, in plain English

• Ed Gein was officially tied to two murders: Mary Hogan in 1954 and Bernice Worden in 1957. He confessed to those killings and to a string of grave robberies.
• He was arrested in 1957 after police searched his Wisconsin farm during the investigation into Worden's disappearance. Inside, they found her decapitated body — and a receipt that connected him to the scene — along with a stash of human remains.
• The home was a horror show: skulls repurposed as bowls, masks made from human faces, and evidence of bodies exhumed from local graveyards.
• He was declared unfit to stand trial in 1957 and committed to a mental institution. In 1968, doctors said he could finally face trial.
• Here is the strange part: he was reportedly tried for only one murder because pursuing more counts would have been too expensive.
• The verdict split the difference you hear about in true-crime cases: guilty of Bernice Worden's murder, but legally insane, so he was recommitted to the hospital instead of prison.
• Gein died in 1984 at age 77 from respiratory failure at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Wisconsin.

Charlie Hunnam goes full transformation

Charlie Hunnam plays Gein at the center of the series, and he does not phone it in. He reportedly dropped more than 30 pounds to get there, and he told Netflix's Tudum that the role demanded a lot because the gap between who he is and who Gein was is, obviously, massive. He also worked up Gein's thin, high-pitched voice — not as a quirk, but as a tell.

'It was what Ed thought his mother wanted him to be. It wasn’t an authentic voice that lived in him. It was this persona.'

That choice tracks with the show’s angle: not sympathy, but a look at a deeply isolated, damaged man whose trauma warped into something monstrous. Hunnam is joined by Laurie Metcalf, Tom Hollander, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, and Addison Rae.

The essentials

The season is titled Monster: The Ed Gein Story, created by Ryan Murphy, and it streams on Netflix (US). It aims to separate the myth from the messy, documented reality without softening how disturbing the truth actually is. And yes, that odd detail about him being tried for just one murder because of cost? The show does not shy away from it.