Netflix has dropped the first full trailer for ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’, the third instalment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Emmy-nominated anthology series, and it promises a deeply unsettling ride when it lands this October.
The new season takes audiences back to the frozen fields of 1950s rural Wisconsin, where Ed Gein’s quiet, reclusive life hid unspeakable horrors. His crimes didn’t just shock his local community. They rippled outward through pop culture, becoming the inspiration for some of cinema’s most iconic villains. Without Gein, there may have been no Norman Bates, no Leatherface, and no Buffalo Bill. This season of Monster looks to dig into not only the gruesome details of his acts, but also the cultural obsession with why we can’t look away.
At the centre is Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy, Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire, Crimson Peak) in a role unlike anything we’ve seen from him before. The trailer shows Hunnam disappearing into Gein’s unsettling frame, complete with a physical transformation that saw him drop nearly 30 pounds. “Ed was incredibly lithe,” he explains, adding that part of the performance meant learning how to shrink his presence, to not take up space, to come across as timid and deferential, even while hiding nightmarish impulses.
Hunnam also crafted a falsetto-tinged voice for Gein, inspired by the killer’s twisted relationship with his mother, Augusta, played in the series by Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird, JFK, Desperately Seeking Susan). One chilling still shows Gein lying by his mother’s grave, a reminder that her suffocating presence shaped everything about his adult life. “It was what Ed thought his mother wanted him to be,” Hunnam notes. “As she was really his only human contact in the world, he developed this thing to try and make her love him.”
The series brings in a strong supporting cast to explore the web around Gein. Suzanna Son (Red Rocket, The Idol) appears as Adeline, his only friend. Tom Hollander (Pride and Prejudice, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans) takes on the role of Alfred Hitchcock, underscoring just how much Gein’s legacy seeped into Hollywood. And the trailer reveals Addison Rae (He’s All That, Thanksgiving) as Evelyn, a young babysitter whose fate lies among Gein’s alleged victims.
For Murphy and Brennan, Gein was the logical next subject after Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. His influence is everywhere, and Brennan himself says that once they recognised just how much of modern horror has Gein’s fingerprints on it, they knew they had a show. “It’s really mind-blowing how influential one strange man in the middle of Wisconsin in a barn can be. He lit this fuse that just continued popping off and set in motion this continuous topping of really intense, bizarre, strange imagery.”
The trailer makes it clear this will not be a sanitised retelling. It is uncomfortable, atmospheric, and deliberately hard to watch, much like the horror films Gein inspired. In one particularly unnerving moment, Hunnam’s Gein stares directly into the camera to snarl: “You’re the one who can’t look away.” It is a line that doubles as both a taunt and a truth, daring viewers to confront why stories like these still pull us in decades later.
‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Season 3 premieres Friday, 3rd October 2025 on Netflix.
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