The third season of Netflix’s true crime anthology series “Monster” will star Charlie Hunnam as the notorious 1950s grave robber, murderer and suspected serial killer Ed Gein.
Production on the season begins in October, Netflix announced Monday night. Further details will be announced at a later date. “Monster” co-creator Ryan Murphy announced the news at a promotional event for “Monster” Season 2, which focuses on the Menendez Brothers.
Ed Gein, born in 1906, became nationally infamous in 1957 after he was arrested in his Wisconsin home town for the murder and postmortem mutilation of a local shopkeeper. When police searched his home, they discovered that for at least a decade he had been exhuming bodies in nearby graveyards and stealing various body parts, which he then used to create household decorations, items of clothing, jewelry and other grisly trophies.
Gein admitted he was attempting to create a “woman suit” out stolen body parts, and he confessed to another murder he committed in 1954. He was suspected of at least 4 other unsolved local murders, though evidence was never conclusive. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and deemed to be mentally incompetent, and spent the rest of his life in a hospital for the criminally insane. He died in 1984.
Gein’s crimes were shocking even by modern standards, and he influenced multiple works of crime fiction and horror, most notably service as the inspiration for Norman Bates in “Psycho” and Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
The second installment in Murphy and Ian Brennan’s “Monster” anthology series follows the Menéndez brothers in the moments before they killed their parents and the trial that followed.
It’s the successor to “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” which premiered in 2022 and became a major Netflix hit, scoring over 115.6 million views in its first 91 days.