‘Monster’ creator ‘struggles to call’ Charlie Hunnam’s Ed Gein a serial killer

Ian Brennan is getting candid on the third season of the crime drama anthology series “Monster.”

The new season, titled “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” hits Netflix on Oct. 3 and features Charlie Hunnam as the twisted killer.

“I struggle to call him a serial killer,” he exclusively told The Post at the streaming platform’s series premiere. “He’s just a weirdo, you know? He’s different and that’s precisely why he was so interesting.”

“Like he’s just…it’s almost like a category, he’s in the wrong category,” he added. 

Gein, nicknamed the Butcher of Plainfield, was a murderer and body snatcher whose crimes have continued to horrify and fascinate generations. 

After his arrest in 1957, authorities discovered that he had killed at least two women and exhumed corpses from graveyards to create keepsakes from their bones and body parts.

The gruesome finds included human skin covering chairs, bowls made of skulls, a wastebasket made of skin, a belt made from female nipples, and vulvas in a box.

After his mother died, Gein fashioned a “woman suit,” so he could become his mother and literally crawl inside her skin.

Gein was found unfit to stand trial and was sectioned in a mental health facility. He died in 1984 at the age of 77.

Gein’s story has had a lasting effect on popular culture, serving as the inspiration for Norman Bates in “Psycho,” Leatherface in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Brennan says he and his “Monster” collaborator Ryan Murphy heard about Gein many years ago when they were working on “Glee,” but it was when they were working on the first “Monster” installment centered around Jeffrey Dahmer that they really became interested.

“Jeff Dahmer was obsessed with Gein,” Brennan explained.

Oddly, they were both from Wisconsin, separated by a generation and “probably only 20 miles.”

Brennan noted that Gein was obsessed with the infamous Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch. 

Koch was married to the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp and is alleged to have selected tattooed prisoners for death to use their skins for lampshades. 

“This is what drove Gein crazy,” Brennan said. “And I think actually, what happened in the Holocaust, (to) all of humanity. That’s when what a villain was, what a monster was shifted.”

“It really, I think, broke the world’s collective brain that we are that evil. And it stuck with him. He got kind of obsessed with it,” he added.

Besides Hunnam, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” stars Laurie Metcalf, Suzanna Son and Tom Hollander.

Season 3 is currently available to stream on Netflix.