The True Story of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ Isn’t Like ‘the Ed Gein Story’

Netflix’s “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” appears to have taken some creative liberties when depicting the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

Ryan Murphy’s twisted anthology series, which focuses on different infamous killers each season like Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, turns to the granddaddy of them all for season 3: Ed Gein, the 1950s-era serial killer who inspired horror classics like “Psycho” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

A majority of episode two of “The Ed Gein Story” focuses on a series of events that suggest Gein’s crimes inspired Hitchcock. The legendary filmmaker, played by Tom Hollander on the show, is shown having meetings with “Psycho” author Robert Bloch and even walking his star Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari) through a replica of Gein’s house on the “Psycho” set to get him in the right mindset to play Norman Bates.

But according to Tony Lee Moral, who has written several books on Alfred Hitchcock and his movies, many of the details of this episode are a Ryan Murphy fantasy.

In one scene, Perkins believes he’s having rehearsals with his costar Janet Leigh, but Hitchcock surprises the actor by bringing him to the “Psycho” set and showing him a replica of the Gein house as it was found when the police arrested him. Along with the disheveled house having shrunken heads in the living room and a skull bowl in the sink, Hitchcock has Perkins open the freezer to find female genitalia.

Perkins is in shock that Hitchcock would show him this, and the director tells him that he chose him for the role because, like Gein, he knows Perkins lives with a secret. (At the time of making “Psycho,” Perkins was a closeted gay man). Perkins then exits the house and vomits on the studio lot.

“There is no historical record of Hitchcock ever reconstructing Ed Gein’s house or walking Anthony Perkins through it,” Moral told Business Insider. “This sequence in Ryan Murphy’s series is best understood as dramatic license, not history.”

Although Hitchcock’s “Psycho” is based on Bloch’s book of the same name, and Bloch’s mother-loving serial killer is loosely inspired by Gein, in reality, the filmmaker drew even less inspiration from Gein to create his classic horror movie.

In “The Ed Gein Story,” Hitchcock is depicted as a man captivated by Bloch’s tales of Gein’s antics. But in truth, the director left most of the story structure to “Psycho” screenwriter Joseph Stefano.

“He left me pretty much on my own,” Stefano is quoted as saying in “The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.”

Instead, Stefano leaned more into how the master of suspense made his movies than digging into Gein research.

“He wanted to talk about almost anything else but the job at hand,” Stefano said of working with Hitchcock. “And I felt that if it was going to be done the way he wanted, I’d have to see his films, so I asked to have a number of them screened for me.”

The fact that the “Psycho” production would have had enough budget to create a detailed replica of Ed Gein’s house — despite the fact that the set would never appear in the movie — is unfounded.

“‘Psycho’ was made under a shoestring budget of $800,000 and filmed with Hitchcock’s television crew,” said Moral, referring to the crew Hitchcock already had for his TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” “The Bates house and motel were built by his design team as fictional constructs, not replicas of the Gein farmhouse.”

Moral also points out how unlikely it is that Hitchcock would go to these kinds of lengths for one of his actors, given that the director once famously described actors as cattle.

“Hitchcock largely avoided discussing character motivations with his actors and deplored method acting,” Moral said. “It’s also very unlikely that Hitchcock told Perkins that he cast him for his hidden homosexuality. Perkins was likely cast because he was known for playing boy-next-door types, and Hitchcock loved to subvert the audience’s expectations and shock them with contrast, which is why he killed Janet Leigh, the major star, less than halfway through the movie.”

Netflix and a rep for Ryan Murphy did not respond to requests for comment.

Though “The Ed Gein Story” depicts Perkins puking his guts out, in actuality, he was fond of working on “Psycho” and even starred in its three sequels.

“I enjoyed making ‘Psycho,'” Perkins said in “The Dark Side of Genius.” “In fact, I accepted the film before I’d even read the script. [Hitchcock and I] got on very well, and he let me make several changes and suggestions. It was my idea that I should eat candy throughout the film. I thought it would be more interesting if the killer were a compulsive candy-eater.”

The Hitchcock/Perkins subplot concludes in episode three, with Perkins coming to terms with the fact that he’ll be linked to the Norman Bates character for the rest of his life and Hitchcock realizing that the success of “Psycho” has unlocked moviegoers’ insatiable appetite for horror.

“The audience has changed and I’m the one who changed them,” Hitchcock tells his wife Alma at the end of the episode. “They’ll want more and more and more. Like hogs who’ve tasted blood, there’s no going back.”

“Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is now streaming on Netflix.