There are competing serial killer mini-series on streaming right now. Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which is available with a Netflix subscription, is dark and moody and very much like a horror movie. Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, which you can watch with a Peacock subscription, is even better, and that’s saying a lot. It’s not as much a horror movie, and that’s what makes it as scary but even more disturbing.
John Wayne Gacy Is One Of The Most Terrifying Killers Ever
While Ed Gein has been the inspiration for fictional killers like Norman Bates and Leatherface, what makes John Wayne Gacy so scary is how normal he was in the rest of his life. I’m not going to get into the psychology of either murderer too much, but Gein was disturbed in almost every way. As Charlie Hunnam plays Gein in Monster, he was antisocial and mentally stunted by his domineering mother and screwed up upbringing.
Gacy, who murdered at least 33 young men and boys, was also clearly mentally disturbed, but he was gregarious, outgoing, and somewhat successful in his “normal” life. He was a local politician, he ran his own company, and, most famously, he worked as a clown at children’s parties. On the surface, Gacy was a “regular” guy. He wasn’t a “weirdo” like Gein (for lack of a better word).
Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy Is Disturbing, Because It’s So ‘Real’
Like Hunnam as Gein in Monster, Severance star Michael Chernus is chilling and scary as Gacy in Devil in Disguise. His ability to play both the menacing, disturbing aspects of Gacy and his convivial nature, too. Chernus transforms back and forth with a terrifying ease, much like Gacy was able to do in real life. While Gein’s actions were so disturbing it’s almost hard to believe, Gacy was so disturbing because his murders are so easy to believe.
Gacy is exactly the kind of serial killer that scares us the most because he is the “guy next door.” His life was lived in public, while Gein’s was mostly in solitude. Devil in Disguise, with its back and forth between Gacy in 1978 after his arrest and flashbacks to the lives of his victims before they met the Killer Clown, shows just how “normal” it all was. The Chicago suburbs in the 1970s are a lot more like most of our lives today than rural Wisconsin in the 1940s.
Both mini-series on the 2025 TV schedule are really well done. They are both scary as hell, and they reflect both the killers and the time periods perfectly. The acting is fantastic by everyone involved, and both stories play into the reputations of the murderers exactly as they should. That said, I’m clearly partial to Devil in Disguise because Gacy is scarier to me. In fact, he’s about the most frightening murderer of the 20th century.