- 7 weeks ago
The true story of Ed Gein shocked the world… and inspired countless horror films. 👹
In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, actors brought this chilling case to life. But how close do they really look to the real people?
👉 Side-by-side Cast vs Real People
👉 Shocking resemblance and differences
👉 True crime history meets Hollywood 🎬
Perfect for true crime lovers, horror fans, and movie buffs!
In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, actors brought this chilling case to life. But how close do they really look to the real people?
👉 Side-by-side Cast vs Real People
👉 Shocking resemblance and differences
👉 True crime history meets Hollywood 🎬
Perfect for true crime lovers, horror fans, and movie buffs!
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00So I ask you, would a monster do something like that?
00:05Well, probably yes.
00:06Welcome to WatchMojo.
00:08And today, we're breaking down the differences between the actors in Netflix's monster,
00:13the Ed Gein story, and the real-life people they portrayed.
00:19Joey Polari vs. Anthony Perkins.
00:22It's before the movie, Tab.
00:26I'm trying to get into character for Psycho.
00:28It's part of the biggest shot of my career.
00:32Yeah, that's hard to forget when it's all you ever talk about, darling.
00:36The guy's a cross-dresser, so I need to understand how you feel, how you move different.
00:41Yeah, okay.
00:42Well, don't let me get in your way.
00:44Polari captures Perkins' porcelain poise, shy smile, and nervy precision.
00:49An actor hiding knives beneath good manners.
00:52Historically, Perkins built Norman Bates under Hitchcock's tight direction,
00:57Joseph Stefano's script, not by studying Gein.
01:00His high, gentle voice, bird-like movements, and sudden flashes of anger defined the role,
01:06which shadowed his career for decades.
01:09Perkins was a respected stage and screen actor before and after Psycho,
01:13but Bates became inescapable.
01:16The rain didn't last long, did it?
01:19You know what I think?
01:21I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them,
01:30and none of us can ever get out.
01:33We scratch and claw, but only at the ear.
01:38If the series pairs Perkins with crime scene research or Gein's biography, that's shorthand.
01:43The character was adapted from Robert Bloch's novel and refined on set.
01:48Polari's rendering of Bates-era stiffness and boyish unease feels authentic.
01:54Any back channel with Gein is invention, not method.
01:58It's been years, Gary.
02:00All I get offered are Norman Bates types.
02:02I'm as frustrated as you are, Tony.
02:05But really, you're a victim of your own success.
02:07Really?
02:08Because nothing about this feels like success.
02:12Will Brill vs. Toby Hooper
02:15So that's where you got the idea?
02:17Yeah, it was Christmas time at Montgomery Ward and I thought, well, here's one way to make the line go faster.
02:25It's far out, man.
02:26But also, you know, his boogeyman, Ed Gein.
02:31Who?
02:32Ed Gein.
02:33I told you about him, the guy in Wisconsin.
02:35Brill plays Hooper, a disillusioned hippie turning folklore and headlines into nightmare.
02:41Historically, Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a low-budget shocker partly inspired by Ed Gein's grave robbing and skin mask lore, filtered through Texas anxieties about isolation and industry.
02:54Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel built a composite villain, not a biopic.
02:59Leatherface's chainsaw, family dinner, and slaughterhouse metaphors are inventions.
03:05Hooper wanted a documentary feel and existential dread, not splatter.
03:10I don't consider my films to be slasher-type creatures.
03:14I don't know, I'm not one for a lot of bloodletting.
03:20I actually have had criticism sent my way that my film's not bloody enough or gory enough.
03:27Any scenes implying Hooper studied Gein's files closely are embellishments.
03:32The real director scavenged ideas from urban legends, news clippings, and cultural rots.
03:37Brill's unfiltered passion matches interviews.
03:41Methodical and wry, an engineer of sustained panic.
03:46Ed Gein couldn't get over the pictures he saw of World War II.
03:51World War II drove him literally insane, those images.
03:56Elliot Gold vs. Weegee
04:07Why did you write me so much?
04:09I never had so many letters.
04:11Last week I got three in one day.
04:13Well, I'm sorry, I just love your work so much.
04:18I guess I have a fascination with death.
04:23And your photos, for whatever reason, they remind me that we're all gonna die.
04:28Oscar nominee Gold leaned into the gravel-voiced ghoul of New York Nights.
04:33Cigar, trench coat, speed graphic at the ready.
04:37Historically, Weegee, born Arthur Fellig, was a freelance press photographer who tailed police
04:42radios in the 1930s and 40s, producing stark flash images of crime, fire, and street life.
04:49All my life, on all the streets, I know them all because I drive all night long.
04:55I know every block, every signpost, every cop, every beggar, everything.
05:00His photos, blunt lighting, close range, and gallows wit, made him famous.
05:05He later published books and dabbled in cinema, even consulting for Stanley Kubrick.
05:10However, there's no evidence to suggest that Adeline Watkins pursued a working partnership with him.
05:16Nevertheless, Gold's world-weary charm rings true.
05:20Historical evidence suggests that Weegee was an opportunist artist, not a moralist.
05:26And he prized access over sermonizing.
05:29Oh, actually, I think your images have made me braver and more bold and just more myself.
05:38And I want to be your assistant.
05:40I don't want an assistant.
05:41I had a kid helping me out one time.
05:44A woman jumped off the Flatiron building.
05:47Her head exploded.
05:49The kid puked the moment he saw it.
05:52Susanna Sun vs. Adeline Watkins
05:55You're never gonna believe what came.
05:58You're the only person I can show this to.
06:00Why is that?
06:04Because you're the only one in this town who's like me.
06:07What are we like?
06:09Weird.
06:11The series positions Watkins as Gein's would-be partner, a wary small-town romantic drawn to his quiet charm.
06:18Historically, Adeline Watkins was a real Plainfield woman who, in later interviews, briefly claimed she and Gein nearly married two years before his 1957 arrest.
06:29Then recanted, stressing they were not close.
06:32Eddie Gein was, at one time, an acquaintance of mine.
06:36I would exchange pleasantries with him from time to time at the soda counter.
06:41And on one occasion, I accompanied him roller skating.
06:44That was the extent of our relationship.
06:48She said she never entered his house and described him as polite, not threatening.
06:53There is no evidence she aided his crimes or knew about the trophies inside the farmhouse.
06:58Thus, any depiction of intimacy, complicity, or detailed foreknowledge is dramatization.
07:04Sun's performance, nervous, repelled, then a morbidly curious enabler, captures the plausibility of small-town acquaintance with a hidden monster.
07:14Tom Hollander vs. Alfred Hitchcock
07:37Tom Hollander vs. Alfred Hitchcock
07:39Gein was schizophrenic, was he not?
07:43Yes, they are often triggered in early adulthood.
07:46And for Eddie, it really seemed like the trigger was these photographs of Nazi atrocities.
07:51And had he not seen them, might have stayed a small-town simpleton.
07:57Such is the power of the photographed image.
08:02Hollander gives Hitchcock a clipped, mischievous intelligence and monastic control on sets.
08:08Not unlike the legendary filmmaker's IRL persona.
08:11Hitchcock never met Gein, but he mined the case for Psycho alongside Robert Bloch's novel.
08:17Then shaped Norman Bates through meticulous blocking, storyboards, and tense direction.
08:22If the series suggests a direct pipeline from Gein's farmhouse to Hitchcock's camera, that's taking the fast round.
08:28Mr. Hitchcock, why do you always make mystery films?
08:32Well, life is a big mystery, isn't it?
08:36It always has been.
08:38I think people are intrigued by mystery to find out about things they don't know anything about.
08:46Monster does address the things that inspired Psycho in composite.
08:50Bloch's fiction, a reticence to shed light on such a depraved story, and Hitchcock's obsessions with voyeurism and repression.
08:58Hollander's reserved menace and sly asides, though obscured by occasionally distracting prosthetics, make his Hitchcock feel real.
09:07She's right, of course.
09:09This is not cinema that anyone will recognize.
09:13It is entirely new.
09:15But she's dead wrong to say people won't want to watch it.
09:19Our audience lives in a world in which God has been banished.
09:25Vicky Creeps vs. Ilse Koch
09:28The Luxembourgish-German Creeps plays Koch as a chilling emblem of cruelty, whose alleged human skin souvenirs echo Gein's later horrors.
09:46Historically, Ilse was the wife of Buchenwald Commandant Karl Otto Koch and was notorious for her sadism towards Jewish prisoners.
09:55The lurid legend that she commissioned items from tattooed skin was never proven in court, though survivors swore by it.
10:22She was convicted for war crimes, released on appeal, then retried in West Germany and given life.
10:29She died by her own hand in 1967.
10:32Gein was indeed inspired by Koch's disturbing actions during the Holocaust,
10:37accurately reflected on the show through his near-obsessive fandom and admiration toward her.
10:43Why do you want to talk to me?
10:46I'm a big admirer of yours.
10:48I'm just a small-town fella myself, simple like, but...
10:51No.
10:52Mr. Gein?
10:53I read about you.
10:55I know who you are.
10:56Well, in that case, maybe you know that...
10:59Well, you and I kinda share the same hobby.
11:02Laurie Metcalfe vs. Augusta Gein.
11:05You will never be involved with a Jezebel.
11:08I don't fancy a Jezebel, mother.
11:11Oh, so you are seeing some...
11:13I know who you got eyes for, that girl in town, that Pandora.
11:16Her name's not Pandora, mother.
11:19It's Adeline.
11:21I know her name is Pandora.
11:24Oscar nominee Metcalfe channels a hard, puritanical matriarch whose scripture-laden scolding shapes
11:31Ed's pathology.
11:32Augusta was a controlling, intensely religious Lutheran who preached women's wickedness
11:37and isolated her sons on a Wisconsin farm.
11:40Accounts describe relentless moralizing, temper, and disgust with sexuality.
11:45She loathed Ed's few attempts at friendship and idolized purity.
11:49All I wanted was a girl.
11:51Mmm.
11:52Prayed and prayed to the good Lord for it, but it was not His will, so I must abide by that.
11:59No matter how much it pained me to lay with your father.
12:03Oh, they only let him defile me twice.
12:06You know that.
12:07I told you that.
12:08After the family left town center, Augusta's world shrank to church chores and condemnation
12:14until her death in 1945, a loss Ed never recovered from.
12:18The series' rigid posture, clipped reprimands, and claustrophobia align with biographies.
12:24Augusta's abuse was psychological control, reinforced by deprivation, shame, and fixation on female sin.
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12:56Charlie Hunnam vs. Ed Gein
12:58Charlie Hunnam vs. Ed Gein
13:02Charlie Hunnam vs. Ed Gein
13:12Charlie Hunnam vs. Ed Gein
13:14He's a loneer, this man.
13:24When you're alone too much, your thoughts can make you want to do things.
13:30I spent too much time alone in that house of the mother died."
13:36Hunnam plays Gein as a soft-spoken, fidgety loner whose politeness curdles into ritual horror.
13:42That tracks with the record. The Plainfield Handyman was arrested in 1957 after Bernice
13:48Warden's body was found on his farm, and he admitted to grave robbing and two murders,
13:53including Mary Hogan's.
13:54He fixated on his devout, domineering mother and kept a cluttered house while appearing mild in town.
14:21Where it stretches reality is charisma and scope.
14:25Gein was awkward, reclusive, and sharply denied accusations of necrophilia.
14:30Investigators confirmed macabre trophies, but not violation.
14:34He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric custody, dying in 1984.
14:39"...Deputy, I tell you, the folks that lock up here nowadays, they're getting crazier and crazier."
14:48Yeah, well, it's no surprise to me. You see what I see out here every day,
14:52you think it's just as crazy out there.
14:55Which performance on Monster was your favorite? Be sure to let us know in the comments.
15:00But once, you're finally誤 ав피
15:15and a little help, it's not just this anxiety comes out.
15:18But when you are До...
15:20Where do we get?",
15:22force was made you cry,
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