Netflix has dropped its first look at Charlie Hunnam as notorious serial killer Ed Gein—and he’s every bit as terrifying as fans had hoped.
On Thursday morning, the streaming giant shared a new photo and the first teaser trailer for the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series, this one titled Monster: The Ed Gein Story. It’s the follow-up to the Emmy-winning Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and last year’s Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story, which will compete for 11 Emmys later this month—and helped renew interest in the 1989 murders of José and Kitty Menendez at the hands of their sons.
For the upcoming season of Monster, which Netflix is describing as the “most harrowing installment yet,” Murphy is taking viewers back to the 1950s, to the rural town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, where Gein’s, a.k.a. the Butcher of Plainfield, ghastly deeds—including murder, grave robbing, and turning body parts into home decor items—made him one of the most notorious serial killers in history.
“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,” Murphy, the series’ co-creator and executive producer, told Tudum.
Murphy’s co-creator and fellow executive producer Ian Brennan, who also wrote every episode of the new season, took his praise even one step further by boldly proclaiming: “I think this is the best season of the three, and I think it’s going to blow people’s socks off.”
The nearly 90-second trailer provides a lot of scene-setting, with a much darker and grittier style that is reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacreand The Silence of the Lambs. That may very well be intentional, given that Gein was the inspiration for the killers at the centers of those movies, along with Psycho’s Norman Bates.
Hunnam, who is best known for his role as Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, is barely recognizable in the footage—when his face isn’t covered by a mask made of flesh. But the actor promises that the show will delve into the psychological and emotional aspects of Gein versus the gore of it all.
“This is going to be the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did,” Hunnam says. “But who he was being at the center of it, rather than what he did.”
Ed Gein Was Infamous Killer Linked to At Least Two Murders
Though Ed Gein only ever confessed to two murders—that of tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957—police long believed that his actual number of victims is higher than that. Regardless, he remains one of the most notorious serial killers in history because of his seeming obsession with death and the depraved way in which he treated dead bodies.
In the cases of his two known victims, Hogan and Worden, authorities discovered the decapitated heads of both women adorning Gein’s home, which turned out to be a literal house of horrors. In addition to his own victims, Gein was a notorious grave robber and admitted to stealing from a total of nine graves.
While Gein was known as a friendly and mild-mannered individual to those who knew him, it wasn’t until 1957—following the disappearance of Worden—that his true nature, and the long history of his crimes, was discovered.
Gein, who grew up on a rural 155-acre farm, had been extremely close to his fervently religious mother, Augusta—to a degree that concerned Ed’s older brother, Henry. When Henry was found dead on the Geins’ farm in 1944 (four years after their father died), it was initially suspected to be due to heart failure, though it has long been theorized that he was killed by Ed.
With his brother gone, Ed became even more obsessed with their mother—a feeling that only intensified following her death on December 29, 1945.
Following Augusta’s death, Gein told police that “a force built up in” him. In order to replace the mother he was missing, he dug up fresh graves so that he could create a “woman suit” of skin in order to recreate his mom. “He wanted to crawl into her skin,” forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman told A&E True Crime. “The body parts he had collected weren’t sufficient, so he had to kill these [two] women, according to his confession.”
Gein found additional uses for the bodies he stole. When police searched his property following Worden’s death, they discovered dozens of highly disturbing body parts being used as decor, including a trash can and lampshades made of human skin and human skulls being used as bowls.
“Driven by isolation, psychosis, and an all-consuming obsession with his mother, Gein’s perverse crimes birthed a new kind of monster that would haunt Hollywood for decades,” says Netflix. “From Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Silence of the Lambs, Gein’s macabre legacy gave birth to fictional monsters born in his image and ignited a cultural obsession with the criminally deviant. Ed Gein didn’t just influence a genre—he became the blueprint for modern horror.”
Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres on Netflix on October 3.
