Ed Gein was responsible for committing crimes so haunting that they influenced the horror genre for decades to come. But as Netflix’s “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” explores, many of those crimes stemmed from Gein’s complicated relationship with his strict mother, Augusta Gein.
George and Augusta Gein were the parents of two children, Henry and Edward. In a Time article from 1957, Augusta was described as “domineering” and deeply religious. She was particularly obsessed with promiscuity and would rebuke women who had sex outside of wedlock as well as her sons’ interest in women. It was well known that Ed was her favorite son, and many recounted that he was fiercely devoted to his mother. As for his father, George was known to be a violent alcoholic who would take his aggression out on his sons. The four member family lived on the Gein family farm, a frame house with no electricity or plumbing in Plainville.
George Gein was the first member of the small Wisconsin family to die. In 1940 he died of heart failure at the age of 66. Four years later, Henry followed. A marsh fire on the property got out of control. When the flames died down, Henry’s body was found, and he was declared a casualty in the fire. However, Henry’s official cause of death was asphyxiation, and he had bruises on his head and no burn marks. Even more suspicious, Ed seemed to know exactly where to find his brother’s body.
Soon after Henry’s death Augusta had a paralyzing stroke, which required Ed to become his mother’s caretaker. She died in December of 1945 after her second stroke, which reportedly happened while she was calling a woman living with a neighbor a harlot. That’s when Ed Gein started to mentally unravel.
Gein committed his crimes, which included murdering Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden as well as exhuming at least nine graves, in the years after his mother’s death. He targeted older women who were roughly his late mother’s age and made objects like lampshades and a wastebasket out of their skin. Gein later said he was trying to make a suit made of women’s skin that he could wear himself.
Psychiatrists at the time pointed to Augusta Gein’s frequent and religiously motivated denouncements of female promiscuity as a major reason for Gein’s crimes. They said Gein grappled with both a deep love and secret hatred of his mother as well as a deep hatred and secret hatred of other women. That coupled with his mental instability led to these history-making crimes. Psychiatrists also said that cutting up the bodies of women who reminded him of his mother let Gein fulfill two contradictory urges: destroying his mother and attempting to bring her back to life.
Ultimately, Gein’s complicated relationship with Augusta came to inspire one of the most seminal works in horror history: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Though Hitchcock’s Oscar-nominated movie was an adaptation of Robert Bloch’s 1959 suspense novel of the same name, Bloch’s work was inspired by the Gein case.
