About halfway through the new season of “Monsters,” Ryan Murphy’s anthology series about people who do really bad things, Kitty Menendez (Chloë Sevigny) explains why she hates children — not just her children, the parricidal Lyle and Erik Menendez, but all children.

“They take the calcium out of your bones as it grows inside you,” she tells her therapist. “They destroy your body as they eat you alive.”

Is it a particularly gruesome description of what it feels like to carry a child? Of course it is. For Murphy, whose stamp often seems to be on every other television work, entertainment is a series of baroque monstrosities, human and otherwise.

“Monsters” arrived on Netflix only about a week before the first two episodes of the new series “Grotesquerie” on FX and Hulu arrived. That’s a hefty dose of Murphy, who co-created both projects with elements familiar to fans of his oeuvre, including “American Horror Story,” “Feud” — the most recent installment of which focused on the crash-and-burn Truman Capote’s relationship with ladies of New York high society – and ‘Ratched’, a macabre and admirably vivid prequel to ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. Large amounts of camp and melodrama produce creepy tales of creepy behavior. Beneath the brooding surface there generally lies a plea for social tolerance. And gross. Lots of blood.

When we meet Lyle and Erik Menendez (Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch), they are sitting in a limo listening to Milli Vanilli as Lyle raves about the new chicken wing franchise he wants to launch. They’re on their way to their parents’ funeral, and unless you’ve lived in a cave for the last thirty years, you know they shotgunned those parents to the next world, in their own home. The series shows us the heinous act multiple times, in different possible iterations, as it seems to weigh different questions. Were the brothers traumatized victims of abuse who had finally had enough, or spoiled sociopaths (or both)? Is there any possible way that Kitty and Jose (Javier Bardem), and not Lyle and Erik, were the real monsters? And could we possibly see that graphic carnage again?

Murphy has explained that he was pursuing a kind of Rashomon effect, telling the Menendez story from different angles and refusing to insist on a definitive version of the truth. The approach produces some strange results, including an over-reliance on Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane), who covered the case for Vanity Fair and apparently hosted a lot of gossip dinners (at these times we seem to be back in the land of the Capote and “feud”). Dunne’s daughter, Dominique, was murdered several years ago, and in “Monsters” he harbors deep animosity toward heartthrob attorneys like Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor), who represents and fawns over Erik. Although even she can’t cover up the fact that the Beverly Hills brothers went shopping after killing their parents. ‘Monsters’ is, among other things, a vicious parody of affluenza.

‘Monsters’ starts from the premise that Jose repeatedly raped both of his sons, and as he explains his desire to transform his children into young Romans, hardened in a spirit of manly pain and love, it’s hard not to wince a little . Bardem, as always, understands the brief, and his Jose, sadistic and instinctively autocratic, deserves a place in the actor’s gallery of evil, alongside Anton Chigurh of ‘No Country for Old Men’ and Raoul Silva of ‘Skyfall’. If there is any justice, he will one day decide to take on Richard III.

Niecy Nash-Betts stars as Det. Lois Tryon in FX’s ‘Grotesquerie’.

(Prashant Gupta/FX)

A measure of Murphy’s appeal is the number of great actors lined up to occupy his world, including Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, Tom Hollander, Naomi Watts, Angela Bassett and John Carroll Lynch. That list also includes Niecy Nash-Betts, a supporting player in Season 1 of “Monster” (singular, focused on Jeffrey Dahmer), who plays the weary police Det. Lois Tryon in “Grotesquerie.” The title could be applied to most of Murphy’s work, but he ups the Grand Guignol ante in the opening minutes of the new series, when Tryon walks into a murder scene in which a family is apparently forced to eat part of their father familias (and you thought shotguns were bad). Things continue from there, with ritually staged murders, blood draining and even an elaborate (and actually quite impressive) tableau of The Last Supper, with homeless people killed.

Where the monsters of ‘Monsters’ are all recognizably human, ‘Grotesquerie’ suggests something more cosmic is at work, like a darkness conjured up in a tale by horror master HP Lovecraft, or at least ‘Se7en’. Like that David Fincher film, “Grotesquerie” wraps its ailments in a grimy, nocturnal film and covers them with a crown of thorns. The hard-drinking Tryon, whose daughter (Raven Goodwin) seems determined to eat herself to an early grave and whose philosophy professor husband (Courtney B. Vance) is in a coma, accepts the help of a bird-like nun/journalist. Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), who helps decipher the not-very-subtle Biblical implications of this massacre. “To understand this monster,” she tells Tryon, “you must reach the ecstatic.”

We’ve come a long way from the welfare exploitation of “Monsters,” but hardly less exaggerated: After discussing the theological dimensions of the massacre with Sister Megan, young Father Charlie (Chavez, doing double Murphy duty here) masturbates. vigorously and then flagellates its back into a bloody pulp. Let he who is without sin wave the first cat of nine tails.

That same masochistic priest reveals to Sister Megan that his all-time favorite serial killer is Ed Gein, the real-life grave-robbing psychopath from Wisconsin who inspired “Psycho” (Robert Bloch’s novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s film), “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. ‘ – and the next episode of ‘Monster’, starring Charlie Hunnam, has already been announced. Murphy World can feel like an echo chamber, similar in scope if not tone, or subject to Taylor Sheridan’s tales of the West, headlined “Yellowstone.”

The constant is monstrosity, or grotesquerie, presented with a nod and a wink that doesn’t diminish the viewer’s subsequent urge to shower. There are other flavors of horror on TV, including the Lovecraftian works of Mike Flanagan (“Midnight Mass,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”), which balance sensationalism with a more literary bent. But Murphy seems more tailor-made for the times. Early in “Grotesquerie,” Tryon speculates about the kinds of stories her new journalist friend’s readership is looking for: “the more gruesome, the better.” To which Murphy might add: glory hallelujah.