Ed Gein has been dead since 1984, but Hollywood cannot stop digging him up.
This month, two separate projects about the Plainfield, Wisconsin handyman are competing for your attention, and true-crime fans are already picking sides.
Charlie Hunnam leads "Ed Gein: The Original Monster," a film that began streaming on Paramount+ with a cast that also includes Vicky Krieps and Tom Hollander.
Meanwhile, Ryan Murphy's "Monster" anthology is reportedly building its next season around Gein, following the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein's fellow Wisconsin figure Jeffrey Dahmer.
If the timing feels grim, that's because it is.
Gein confessed to killing two women in the 1950s, but his notoriety comes mostly from what investigators found in his farmhouse: furniture and clothing fashioned from human remains.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent his final years in psychiatric institutions.
The real question is why audiences keep returning to him.
The answer is simpler than most people admit.
Gein's story directly inspired "Psycho," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and "The Silence of the Lambs," which makes him the unlikely godfather of modern horror.
That connection is also what makes the new wave of Gein content so tricky.
Critics argue that turning a real killer into a franchise character flattens the victims into set dressing.
Supporters counter that these stories examine how mental illness, isolation, and rural poverty went ignored until it was far too late.
Plainfield residents have spent decades watching outsiders treat their town as a haunted house.
Locals have pushed back against Gein-themed tours, merchandise, and anniversary coverage, arguing that the families affected never asked to be part of anyone's Halloween.
Murphy's involvement raises the temperature further.
His "Monster" seasons tend to dominate Netflix's top ten and generate weeks of discourse about who gets to play whom and whether the show is exploitative or empathetic.
Casting news alone will likely break the internet.
Hunnam's transformation has already sparked early Oscars chatter, and actors love a true-crime role the way they love a biopic about a troubled genius.
If the movie lands, expect a very uncomfortable red carpet season.
Streaming numbers will tell part of the story, but the more revealing metric is what people say afterward.
Do viewers walk away thinking about the victims, or do they walk away thinking about the performance?
That distinction has haunted this genre since "Dahmer" became a hit.
What makes Gein different from most true-crime subjects is that his cultural footprint is bigger than his actual body count.
He is remembered less for what he did than for what filmmakers imagined he did.
Every new adaptation adds another layer of fiction on top of a man who was, by most accounts, deeply unwell and largely forgotten by the systems meant to help him.
Our take: there's nothing wrong with horror borrowing from history, but there's a difference between examining a tragedy and merchandising it.
Two Gein projects in one year suggests the industry has stopped asking whether it should.
Final Thoughts
At some point, the scariest thing in the room isn't the killer.