Editing the Murder at the Center of ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’
Mark Peikert
The first episode of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” needs to accomplish a lot. There’s setting the scene (Beverly Hills, early 1990s), introducing the Menendez family (beyond dysfunctional), and portraying a brutal real-life slaying of José and Kitty by their sons, Lyle and Erik. Oh, and then show the funeral, complete with a somber Milli Vanilli needle drop. (Which really happened.) That’s a lot of tone, but the anchor of the episode and of the season itself is the central murder.
“From the get-go, one of the things that Ryan [Murphy] said was that he wanted you to feel how awful that moment is, to remember that they’re murderers,” Episode 1 editor Peggy Tachdjian told Indiewire. “Because it sets up the whole season. He was like, ‘I want everyone to always remember that the murder was brutal.”
The sequence is remarkable in its unflinching recreation of the violence but also of the cold bloodness. In the middle of shooting their parents, Lyle left to reload and then returned to shoot his mother dead. And all of the blood and gore was done in VFX, leaving the actors to react to nothing. (Go back and watch the scene again, knowing that.)
“Chloe Sevigny, I mean, she’s an amazing actress,” Tachdjian said. “Just the noises she was making and the look of desperation. I felt for her every time I was watching it. I get shivers now thinking about watching that raw footage. You actually felt like she was getting hurt, struggling for her life.”
Because the murder was integral to the rest of the show, it was painstakingly storyboarded and rehearsed until it became choreography, which meant that the final edit was very close to what was initially scripted — although Tachdjian added that there were “a million” different VFX cuts as they tried to recreate the crime scene photos as accurately as possible. “Everything in that room is exactly as it was in the crime scene photos, down to the bowls of ice cream on the table [and] a weird massage table in the back. It was important to portray that specific moment as accurately as possible so that the viewers all remember that this moment was really, really rough.”
Where the edit changed most significantly was in her initial editor’s cut, which veered more towards seriousness and less towards the comedy. The episode’s director, Carl Franklin, asked her to take another pass at it and lean more into the humor.
“You don’t want to make fun of any of it,” Tachdjian said. “But because of their inherent like wealth and entitlement, there’s just comedy there. Things that they say like, ‘Oh, we had to do it on a Sunday because that’s the maid’s day off.’ So my first pass was a little bit more serious. There was definitely funny in it because you turn on Milli Vanilli in the funeral scene and you’re gonna laugh because it’s so ridiculous, but guess what? It’s real! That’s what they did in the actual funeral. They played ‘Girl I’m Gonna Miss You.'”
In her first edit, Tachdjian cut the song down until Franklin suggested they lean into how awkward the moment was for the mourners. So Tachdjian went back and elongated the pauses, leaving more space for the viewers to appreciate how uncomfortable everyone is. “It’s just so good because it’s real,” she said.
