Ryan Murphy goes back to the 1950s for Monster: The Ed Gein Story to tell the horrific story of the true-life serial killer who inspired Psycho‘s Norman Bates, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Leatherface, and Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill.
In a macabre cinematic touch, the new trailer for the Netflix series seems to be narrated by Alfred Hitchcock — who is played by Tom Hollander in the show. This is the third season of Monster, following Season 1, The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and Season 2, The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.
Social media scolds objected to Murphy glamorizing those killers by casting handsome young actors to play them — Evan Peters played Dahmer, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch as Lyle and Erik Menendez, respectively. Except those criticisms to continue with the casting of Sons of Anarchy sex symbol Charlie Hunnam as Gein.
“Hail Sexy Gein!” is already the title of a Reddit thread.
The real Gein was decidedly unsexy: a murderer and grave robber, he was known for exhuming bodies from local cemeteries and fashioning keepsakes from their bones and skin. Authorities who searched his Plainfield, Wisconsin home in 1957 found hideous keepsakes including a belt made from human flesh, a lampshade made from a human face, and numerous other body parts.
He confessed to killing two women, Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, but was suspected of more deaths. He was ruled “not guilty by reason of insanity” in 1968 and committed to a mental hospital for the rest of his life, and died in 1984 at the age of 77.
Even before his conviction, details about his tortured relationship with his mother inspired a similar dynamic in Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. Gein’s grotesque fixation with his victim’s body parts — and his uses for them — inspired Leatherface in 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and 1991’s Silence of the Lambs.
Netflix promises the new season of Monster, created by Murphy and Ian Brennan, will be the “darkest yet,” which doesn’t seem like a stretch, given the source material.
Murphy told Netflix’s Tudum that “the thesis statement of every season is: are monsters born or are they made? I think in Ed’s case, it’s probably a little of both.”
“I think this is the best season of the three, and I think it’s going to blow people’s socks off,” added Brennan, who wrote every episode of the new season and is the show’s executive producer.
Hunnam adds: “This is going to be the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did. But who he was being at the center of it, rather than what he did.”
Main image: Charlie Hunnam in Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Netflix.