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Ed Gein, the man whose story prompted Psycho.
It all began with Ed Gein.
Without Gein there would have been no Psycho, no Leatherface and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb and Silence of the Lambs. At least, that is the premise of the four-part documentary Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein on MGM+.
Gein’s life and times are probed in this documentary, with something unavailable to previous exposes – recently unearthed jailhouse interviews with Gein by Waushara County Judge Boyd Clark and District Attorney Earl Killeen, conducted while police investigators were still unearthing the horrors in Gein’s home.
The people of 1957 were horrified to hear the story of the 51-year-old Plainfield, Wisconsin, bachelor who robbed graves, killed at least two women and possibly his own brother, fashioned a female skin suit for himself, and probably cannibalized his victims.
His last victim, 58-year-old hardware store owner Bernice Worden was found by authorities, hanging nude, gutted and headless at Gein’s farm. Since it was deer hunting season, a deputy first thought her body was a deer carcass.
Just 40 miles away in Weyauwega, 40-year-old sci-fi/pulp fiction writer Robert Bloch lived with his wife and young daughter. He heard about the Gein case and got the idea to write a book based on “the notion that the man next door may be a monster, unsuspected even in the gossip-ridden microcosm of small-town life.”
Bloch called his new novel Psycho, and it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1959.
An anonymous buyer purchased film rights to the book for $9,500. Even though Bloch was at this point a well-established writer (not every pulp writer made his way to a publisher as prestigious as Simon & Schuster), this was his first Hollywood offer. After publisher and agent fees, Bloch ended up with $6,000 before taxes. He never received another cent for being the source of Psycho. Scriptwriter Joseph Stefano made three times that for his work on the script.
Made on a tight budget of $800,000 and financed by the director himself after Paramount, his home studio of record at the time, offered no financing, just a distribution deal that took 40 percent of the cut. It was shot in black & white because he used his TV crew and that’s what they knew.
Anthony Perkins must have studied the above photo of Gein for this still of Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho.
Hitchcock, who had just made the Cary Grant vehicle North By Northwest, was the most recognized director in America, largely through the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which had been airing since 1955 (the best part of which was Hitchcock himself delivering biting intros and outros, all 359 of which were written by his ghostwriter, sitcom writer James B. Allardice).
Now 60, Hitchcock felt he had something to prove. Psycho was it.
The Gein documentary explores all of this while traveling the well-trod territory of Gein’s pathetic existence. Alcoholic father who dies young. Domineering religious zealot of a mother, scratching out a meager existence in the town of Plainfield, Wis., so unlike the nuclear family America projected in its media of the time.
A variety of folks serve as analysts of the Ed Gein story – psychologists, Plainfield residents, a trio of podcasters who seem delighted to talk Gein, several people who have produced films or books about him, medical personnel who knew Gein when he lived out his life at the Mendota Mental Health Institution.
But the big hook is supposed to be the “lost tapes.” The story is that Judge Clark, who led the interview with Gein right after his arrest, put the tapes in his safe and then into a safety deposit box. The judge died of a stroke at age 50 in 1978. It wasn’t until 2019 that his family decided to make the Gein tapes public.
That set Gein fanboys into a spin – the only known recordings of the Butcher of Plainfield’s voice!
The film is interspersed with segments of the interview.
I think I know why the judge never made them public – he and the DA are inept interrogators. They ask questions, and while the slow Gein begins formulating a response, they interrupt with an interpretation of what he might say or what he might have been thinking during his gruesome deeds. They don’t seem eager to pursue leads Gein gives them.
Gein comes across as a bewildered bumpkin, admitting to robbing graves and taking body parts, but always in a haze. He denies having sex with the bodies, saying they smelled too bad. He also said he did not eat humans, but police found a human heart in a pan on the stove, along with many other horrors that are well documented in The Lost Tapes.
While there are some interesting perspectives offered on the Ed Gein story, there really is nothing new revealed in this documentary. Still, it’s a must-see for putting Mr. Gein into cultural perspective.
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