If the sight of Charlie Hunnam dancing around a room wearing a woman’s skin strikes you with a sort of queasy familiarity, that’s precisely the point. The new trailer for Monster: The Ed Gein Story has plenty of original (and sickening) images conjured from somewhere in the depths of creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s brains, but they’re interspersed with moments viewers are supposed to recognize. “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,” the season’s synopsis reads, in part. “From Psycho to The Texas Chain Saw 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.”
Gein was also a very real man who committed a number of very real—and very distressing—crimes. Murphy’s fascination with exploring the lives of real life murderers, as he did with both Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers in previous seasons, has earned him a great deal of backlash (even from Erik Menendez himself.) Murphy has always stood by his work and doesn’t seem to be shying away from any of the more gruesome details here. We’ll let you experience it for yourself, but if a skin-drying station doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, you might want to think twice before hitting play.
Hunnam was on hand at the Emmys red carpet last night, where he spoke to Entertainment Tonightabout his initial trepidation around playing such an “impossibly dark” character. “Then we found our way in. We found the human being in the center of the monster,” he continued. “It’s not to say that he’s not a despicable man, but we managed to make him a human and maybe a little more relatable than I had anticipated initially.”
It doesn’t seem like the Sons Of Anarchy actor will be running away from all that darkness any time soon. Earlier this month, Variety reported that Hunnam was nearing a deal to star in Murphy’s next Monster season, focused on Lizzie Borden. (Hunnam would play Borden’s father.) For now, Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres on Netflix October 3.
