Right up front, Goldberg let the nightmare-inducing cat out of the bag, saying they "named the character Ed after Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer," dropping a name you were probably familiar with, even if you didn't know it.
Since his 1957 arrest, Edward Theodore Gein has been a reliable well of depravity for writers looking to make a monster. The basics go like this: in November of 1957, a Plainfield, Wisconsin hardware store owner's disappearance led authorities to Gein's house, where they found human bones, body parts, and an assortment of macabre craft projects — bowls made out of people's skulls, furniture upholstered with skin, and clothing made out of body parts. He confessed to two murders, and to having dug up the graves of recently buried women who reminded him of his mother, hoping to construct a suit made out of female skin in order to "become" his mom.
If all of that sounds passingly familiar, there's a good reason. Gein's bleak recreational activities inspired Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, Norman Bates in Psycho, and others. He died in custody in 1984. No word on whether anyone thought to double tap him to make sure he wouldn't reanimate.
