The latest installment of Netflix‘s true-crime series Monster focuses on serial killer Ed Gein. Monster: The Ed Gein Story is already making people talk, with some detractors saying that the series does what it did previously with the Menendez Brothers and Jeffrey Dahmer: sensationalizing crime. Naturally, not everyone agrees with this — especially star Charlie Hunnam and co-creator Ian Brennan, who have come out to defend their work.
Brennan, who wrote the entire season and directed a few episodes, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter recently and addressed some of the reactions that the show has triggered since it premiered. As he sees it, he focused the story on the killer’s mental health: “Ed Gein had a different brain, and he wasn’t able to have the perspective to look at something and put it away in a compartment. He saw images and was obsessed with that.” Gein went through a trial in the late ’60s, but he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. His acts were the inspiration behind horror movies such as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.
Brennan talked about the show and the accusations that it glamorizes murder for entertainment, saying he believes it’s impossible to tell the whole story without showing some of the graphic details, and Monster primarily aims at the portrayal of a “mentally ill” man:
“This show is always trying to not be exploitative. It’s trying to actually show that you can pull back too much when you’re telling a macabre story. It’s important that you tell the whole story even with the parts that are hard to watch.
“I don’t think this season’s sensational at all. I think it’s sensationally good, but it’s a real deep dive into a very strange and important touchstone of the 20th century. It just happened to be this very lonely, strange, mentally ill man in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin who had this enormous cultural footprint that changed pop culture.”
Hunnam, on the other hand, said, “If people are compelled to talk about it and think about it, hopefully they’ll actually be compelled to watch the show. What I would hope and feel really confident in is that it was a very sincere exploration of the human condition and why this boy did what he did.”
‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Is a Complete Turnaround for Charlie Hunnam
Hunnam is mostly known for his roles in Sons of Anarchy and the Guillermo del Toro monster feature Pacific Rim. His horror credits are scarce, with Crimson Peak being his most notable participation in the genre. This distance from horror is not a coincidence, as he doesn’t “like the horror genre.” Nevertheless, it was the unique approach to Gein that convinced him he could enter the killer’s dark world. Well, that and the presence of Ryan Murphy as a producer:
“Once I said yes to this, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. I started researching it, reading all the books about Ed Gein, and I fell into a full panic. I just thought there might be no coming back from this. This is so dark, to inhabit this character.
“There was sort of a breakthrough when I started reading the scripts and realizing that we were not going to be focusing on what he did and doing a deep dive on that, we’re really going to be focusing on why he did what he did and trying to find the human being behind the monster. I just found myself saying yes. Based, I would say like 99 percent of it, on just how much I liked Ryan.”