Featured Image Credit: Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
Topics: Netflix, Social Media, TV And Film, True Crime, Ed Gein
Rhiannon Ingle
Topics: Netflix, Social Media, TV And Film, True Crime, Ed Gein
Ryan Murphy's eagerly anticipated latest instalment of his Monsters series dropped just last week and it's safe to say it's sent the internet into quite the spiral.
Fans of the Monsters series, which dramatises true crime cases from the past, including those of Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, were treated to eight episodes all about the story of Wisconsin killer and grave robber, Ed Gein, who is played by Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam.
As the series unfolds, the stories inspired by Gein’s crimes begin to bleed through into the main narrative. This inclusion of characters like Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) is critical to the story Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan attempt to tell.
But, despite the graphic imagery, unsettling real-life events the show is based on and truly creepy music - it's Hunman's interpretation of Gein's voice which has caught the attention of most Netflix viewers online.
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But what did the heinous murderer's voice actually sound like?
Reacting to the voice, which was extremely high-pitched, soft and mumbly, one X user penned: "Please the voice he uses for Ed Gein has me WEAK ASF."
"The person who plays Ed Gein, the voice threw me the f*ck off," hit out a second, while a third chimed in: "Charlie Hunnam's voice as Ed Gein is disturbing."
Another social media user quipped: "Why did the actor do that weird little voice, Ed Gein sounded nothing like that."
Someone else pointed out: "He didn't sound like that in real life. Watch the documentary The Tapes of Ed Gein."
And a final critic questioned: "Nah I have a question about this Ed Gein story on Netflix, did this man really talk like this? What's with this weird high-low tone of voice?"
Now, Monster: The Ed Gein Story seeks to tackle every facet of Gein’s life: his mother Augusta Gein's (Laurie Metcalf) abuse, his apparent fascination with Nazi war criminals, his horrific crimes against the women of Plainfield, as well as his incarceration and diagnosis.
And, even Gein’s voice felt inspired by the formative relationship with his mum.
"It was an affectation, it was what Ed thought that his mother wanted him to be," Hunnam explained to Tudum. "It wasn’t an authentic voice that lived in him. It was this persona, it was this character that he was playing because his mother desperately wanted a daughter, and she was given a son.
"In her more hostile, vile moments, she would tell him, 'I should have castrated you at birth.'"
According to Tudum, the voice Hunnam chose for his interpretation was inspired by an obscure source: an audio tape of Gein himself upon his arrest, which only Hunnam was able to listen to.
"The tape has never been released because they didn’t read Ed’s Miranda rights before they conducted this interview," the actor noted. "So it was always thought that that tape would be inadmissible."
Hunnam was able to help track down the tape, which served as a valuable source of inspiration for his mumbling, shuffling interpretation of Gein.
In an interview with Variety, Hunnam shared that he took inspiration from some unlikely sources when coming up with Gein's tone.
He said that he and the show’s creative team knew going into the series that Gein’s 'voice needed to be really specific', even if none of them initially 'had an idea of what that was'.
After managing to get his hands on the rare recording of Gein's voice, which director Max Winkler said was inspired partly by Michael Jackson and Mark Rylance’s performance in the play Jerusalem, and convincing the producer of another project about the killer to give him access to a recording of a 70-minute with Gein, Hunnam said he 'started to see him through a series of affectations to please his mother'.
"That’s where the voice came from," he added.
Gein, who was also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul, killed and desecrated the bodies of multiple women in the 1950s and inspired numerous horror films for decades to come, including The Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
He confessed to murdering two women, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. Though suspected in other deaths, including that of his brother, no further crimes were proven.
Declared legally insane, he was institutionalised instead of imprisoned, spending the rest of his life in mental hospitals until his death from lung cancer in 1984.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story is currently available to stream on Netflix.