Charlie Hunnam is going full-monster in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology on Netflix.
With the full trailer now available, the season’s October 3 release promises an even darker dive into true crime, especially given that its subject, Ed Gein, hailed from rural Wisconsin, and part of the production was filmed in Chicago.
Gein’s crimes in the 1950s around Plainfield, Wisconsin, where he exhumed bodies, created macabre keepsakes, and murdered at least two women, became a lurid blueprint for horror classics like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.
Filming Midwestern Soil + Hollywood Horror
While production officially kicked off on October 31, 2024, in Los Angeles, Netflix and the Monster team ensured a return to the Midwest. In early 2025, parts of the series were shot in and around Chicago for roughly 20 days. This decision roots the show not just in Gein’s psychological darkness, but in the cold landscapes, small-town isolation, and cultural backdrop he lived in.
In addition, the season reflects Gein’s Wisconsin origins: born in La Crosse, raised in Plainfield, his life was shaped by rural hardship, rigid beliefs, and familial isolation.
Trailer Teases Unrelenting Horror & Psychological Drop
The trailer doesn’t hold back. Hunnam’s transformation into Gein is chilling, from his voice and movements to the horrifying imagery of murder, body-snatching, and Gein literally wearing victims’ skins. Laurie Metcalf plays Gein’s mother, Augusta, whose relationship with her son is central to the season’s emotional core.
Murphy and Brennan also weave in Gein’s influence on pop culture, including characters inspired by his crimes, and even portray Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) as he works on Psycho. It’s not just about the horror of Gein’s actions, it’s about how that horror shaped the imaginative fabric of modern cinema. Watch below:
A Monster Made. Not Born.
Hunnam describes his approach as one of intense research: reading books, digging through sensationalist material and criticism, and finding rare primary sources, such as the only known audio recording made right after Gein’s arrest, to capture mannerisms and inflections. His collaboration with Metcalf—dissecting the mother-son relationship, gives the show its emotional center.
For fans of the anthology, Monster: The Ed Gein Story arrives as more than another true-crime retelling, it’s a challenge. It asks whether terror comes from monsters themselves, or what’s made in the shadows: isolation, obsession, grief.
With its Oct. 3 premiere, Netflix is tapping into Gein’s roots – Wisconsin farms, Midwestern quiet, Midwest filming – to build a horror story that is as much about place as it is about murder. For Hunnam and the creative team, sinking into that darkness means doing it rooted in reality, and in the soil of the Midwest that shaped the story.
