Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024)

The miniseries Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story reconstructs the infamous case of the brothers who murdered their parents in 1990, focusing on allegations of sexual and incestuous abuse by the father. Ryan Murphy directs this production with his signature style: visual sensationalism and ambiguous morality. The scenes of the double parricide are repeated in hyper-graphic flashbacks, showing point-blank shotgun blasts, blood splatters, and prolonged agony of the victims, generating a disturbing visceral impact. Sex is equally explicit: representations of incest between the brothers, father-child abuse, and homosexual encounters with full nudity and visible penetration, treated not as absolute horrors but as traumatic responses. Foul language is constant, with insults and vulgarities in everyday dialogues. At its core, the work relativizes the crime by humanizing the murderers as eternal victims, presenting their act as understandable revenge without a clear moral judgment. This invites questioning personal responsibility and justice, but under a lens of victimhood that blurs ethical boundaries. Although it explores family chaos, it implicitly celebrates rupture as liberation, ignoring basic human dignity. For parents, it is mature content that demands discernment: it shows evil without fully condemning it, leaving the viewer with confusion instead of clarity.