Netflix has unveiled a tense teaser trailer for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology that previously gave us The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. In the spotlight this time is Edward Theodore Gein, aka “the Butcher of Plainfield”, with Charlie Hunnam in the role. Watch the teaser trailer above and read on for the essentials.
The teaser
The tense teaser sees police looking through Gein’s farmhouse, their torches illuminating some of the horrors. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (played by Tom Hollander) narrates: “What shocks you most about him? What was his childhood like?” Gein loosely inspired the character of Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. In fact, a number of memorable serial killers in film have been inspired by Gein, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Leatherface, The Silence of the Lambs‘ Buffalo Bill, and Con Air‘s Garland Greene.
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More unsettling slices of footage follow until the killer talks to his mother, Augusta Gein (played by Laurie Metcalf), whose voice we only hear. “You’re working too fast!” she yells. “I’m sorry, mother,” he replies, working a needle and thread. The trailer ends with a nightmarish image: Gein wearing a woman’s face.
How Hunnam landed it (and built it)
Hunnam says the role found him in an unexpected meeting with Murphy: “Ryan arrived at our meeting and told me that he had just been caught up in a creative tailwind,” he tells Tudum. “And that segued into us having this really deep, emotional, fascinating conversation about Ed Gein, who he had been writing about for the last three or four days.” Hunnam remembers thinking, “Goodness, I can’t wait to see this show. This sounds wonderful.” Murphy’s reply: “So, do you want to play him?”
Murphy says the spark to cast Hunnam came from a candid snap: “I saw a paparazzi photograph of [Charlie] somewhere and I was like, ‘Oh, he seems haunted.’ … There was something very Ed about him on that day.” Hunnam deadpans: “I must have been having a bad day.”
On tackling the role, Hunnam says he read every book that’s been written on Ed Gein, but didn’t find many of them very useful. “They were all sort of grossly sensationalist — these grotesque, impossibly bleak pieces of writing.” So he turned to a rare primary source: “I was able to get access to the only known recording of Ed Gein, which was made two days after he was arrested. It’s about an hour-and-10-minute interview with him, while he’s in custody. A lot of the musicality, and his inflection, and his choice of words, and where his energy sat, I was able to extract from it.”
As for what we can expect: “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.”
The cast, team, and release date
The cast also includes, among others, Olivia Williams as screenwriter and film editor Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife; Addison Rae as Evelyn Hartley, a teen who disappeared; Suzanna Son as Adeline Watkins; Vicky Krieps as Ilse Koch; and Joey Pollari as Psycho actor Anthony Perkins.
Executive producers include Murphy, Brennan, Max Winkler, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson, Nissa Diederich, Louise Shore, Carl Franklin and Hunnam. Brennan directs alongside Max Winkler and wrote every episode.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres on Netflix on October 3.
