In this week’s Serial Killer Celluloid, we’re going to cheat— just a little. Ed Gein isn’t classified as a serial killer. The man was a proper ghoul, having robbed and desecrated graves for some time, including that of his own mother, Augusta Gein. He only killed two women, Mary Hogan in 1954 and Bernice Worden in 1957. So how exactly did Gein wind up synonymous with the images and stories of American serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Jeffrey Dahmer, and others?
The answer is: movies.
The screenplays for Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the classic proto-slasher Psycho (1960) from Alfred Hitchcock, and Ted Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) each have roots in the macabre tale of Gein and his crimes. Another movie from the same year as Hooper’s – Deranged (1974) – was more closely moulded after the real events, only with changed names. It’s more compelling to look at the differences between the real life Gein and how he was portrayed on the big screen as the inspiration for various cinematic killers. Any writer can transpose actual crimes from reality to paper. It takes a crafty storyteller to weave the real stories of killers into whole new fictional creations. All the more fascinating when those fictional killers go on to affect the face of horror cinema forever.
It all starts with the life and crimes of Gein. The root of his problems was the relationship with his mother, particularly after Ed and Augusta were left together as the only two in the house following two tragic family deaths. First, his father George died at age sixty-six from a heart condition brought on by years of alcoholism. Only four years later, Ed’s brother Henry died suspiciously after they were burning vegetation in a marsh close to their home and the fire got out of control. Henry went missing initially, and was later found dead. At first it was assumed Henry died of heart failure, but later it was determined he died of asphyxiation. Authorities briefly wondered if Ed had something to do with it. Ultimately there were no formal charges brought against him.
But for a year until Augusta died she and Ed lived alone. She previously wielded her fierce Lutheran faith over his head, and even nearing the end she continued referring to unwedded women as harlots. She persistently told her son all women – aside from herself, of course – were prostitutes, which had a profound and damaging effect on Ed. These effects were most noticeable after Augusta died only a couple days before New Year’s Eve in 1945. When Gein was finally arrested he admitted that between 1947 and 1952 he made dozens of nightly visits to local graveyards where he dug up as many as nine graves.
His intention was to make a suit, made up of parts of the women he exhumed.
Does the story sound familiar so far? Naturally, as it’s the amalgamation of Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, and Leatherface, only they’re the fictional stories built on the foundation of Gein and his all too real, all too gruesome crimes. This is where it’s especially interesting to note all the ways in which Gein was adapted into some of the most chilling, classic horror movies in existence.
Starting chronologically, Psycho was the first of these three movies to adapt Gein to the screen. Originally, it was a novel from author Robert Bloch. He is on record as saying that it wasn’t until he nearly finished writing the book before he heard about Gein’s crimes, which occurred two years before Psycho would be published. He put in a reference to the murderer, recognising the similarities between Gein and his fictional character Norman Bates. Whether intentional or not, there are many more similarities than a sole reference between Ed and Norman. What the Hitchcock movie does so well – and what the novel did before it – is focus on the mother-son relationship of Norman and his mother. This is why Norman is the strongest parallel to Gein as a counterpart character. On top of that, Bates is found out to have dug up the corpse of his dead mother, and he wears her clothes while killing in order to dissociate from his crimes. There’s a queasy Gothic romance about Gein, whose love was for nobody else but his mother— she actually forbade him to make new friends at school, and when he did she would punish him for it, wanting him to rely on her as his only form of social sustenance. As a ghoulish grave robber Gein never engaged in necrophilia, instead he wanted to transform himself into a woman because he believed it would allow him to become his mother. There’s a sickly love that existed beyond the grave between a son and his mother. That influence is overt in the scene where Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) tells Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh): “A son is a poor substitute for a lover.” Despite all the ghastly crimes Gein committed, on top of the murders, Hitchcock focuses mainly on the psychological aspects, apart from the infamous shower scene.
The gruesome aspects were left for other movies to tackle.
In 1974, Tobe Hooper changed indie and horror movies forever with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and his unforgettable villain Leatherface, whose inspiration again was Ed. This character and movie weren’t as concerned with the headspace of Gein, so much as with the morbid nature of his grave robbing habits. Young characters in a van come across the Hitchhiker (portrayed by Edwin Neal) early on. The screenplay tells us this man is the grave robber whose work opens the movie, when Hooper gives his audience quick camera flashes of desecrated graves with skeletons posed in hideous positions. From the opening frames of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the Gein connection is obvious, and it only gets stronger.
When the police came upon the Gein house initially they catalogued all the nasty crafts Ed made out of the parts of the corpses he stole from the graveyards, which included the following: a wastebasket constructed of human skin; a few chairs upholstered with skin; bedposts adorned with skulls; bowls made out of sawed human skulls; a corset fashioned from a female torso that was skinned from shoulders to waist; leggings made from real leg skin; masks pieced together from the skin off dead women’s heads; his victim Mary Hogan’s face skinned as a mask and kept in a paper bag, while her skull was kept in a box; victim Bernice Worden’s whole head was stuffed in a burlap sack and her heart was in a plastic bag by the stove; nine vulvae were stored in a shoe box; a belt made of women’s nipples; a pair of lips attached to a window dressing; and finally, a lampshade of skin from a human face.
The literal house of horrors Gein lived in isn’t a far cry from the house in Hooper’s movie where Leatherface lives with his twisted family. Before we ever meet Leatherface himself, the creepy house and its surrounding areas are littered with bones made into sculptures and shrines. The young people see piles of animal feathers, bones strung up like wind chimes, and a variety of other eerie homemade decorations consisting of mostly bones. Then, after the horrific introduction of Leatherface – one of horror cinema’s biggest enduring frights – the skin masks and other human skin arts and crafts are revealed, deepening a connection to Gein. Although Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel didn’t opt to dive into the psychopathy and mental health of Leatherface, they chose to keep the suit of skin, and even the woman suit— one of Leather’s masks is a decidedly feminine creation, complete with some blush, lipstick, and eyeshadow. The screenplay removes the story of isolation between Ed and Augusta – the majority of which influenced Psycho – and instead puts an entire family around Leatherface, not just a mother, and the isolation is much less personal, more so geographical as they’re ensconced in the deep backwoods of Texas. This difference between Hitchcock and Hooper doesn’t make for a change in quality— many horror fans, such as myself, will put these two up in the ranks not far from one another. The fact Hooper and Henkel tell a story about the visceral horrors of Gein’s life through fiction rather than the emotional terror of his mental state just offers a different way to enjoy what is, essentially, the same story.
However, the adaptation of Gein from reality to the screen doesn’t end there.
One of horror’s shining joys is The Silence of the Lambs, for representing the genre so well at the Academy Awards in 1992, taking home five Oscars including Best Picture. While Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) has his own real life influences, the second killer in the screenplay – Buffalo Bill (a career defining performance from Ted Levine) – was primarily shaped by Gein, and specifically his desire to stitch together a suit made of women’s skin.
Similar to Ed, Bill is obsessed with literally becoming a woman, though not in a healthy way like someone who’s transgender. Rather, they want to embody a woman through leaving their skin entirely and entering the skin of another person. This is one way in which Buffalo Bill is entirely separated from Norman Bates, who shares his Gein-inspired DNA. Bill wants to transform into a woman, whereas Norman is simply attached to his mother so deeply he assumes her identity so that he can dissociate from his murderous impulses. And certainly they’re both in contrast to Leatherface, whose motivations aren’t fully known – at least not in the first movie of the series.
One of the best elements to Bill’s creation as a character is that he has parts of Gein, his major influence, but also of another infamous killer, Ted Bundy. The storytelling used to introduce Bill in his first scene is impressive, as Gein and Bundy are merged into one briefly. Bill lures Catherine Martin (played by Brooke Smith) by having a cast on his arm, appearing wounded, and trying to pull a couch into his van, which is a tactic straight out of Bundy’s assault playbook. Simultaneously, the first thing Bill does after knocking Catherine unconscious is check the size on her clothes, to make sure she’s a perfect fit for the woman suit he’s building. Writer Ted Tally expertly combines two killers to make one, seamlessly joining their crimes into a single criminal. Gein’s inspiration is never far, though. Bill is a psychologically wounded character, not unlike Gein except for the relationship with his mother. There’s no mother figure, as is the case with Norman in Psycho, but the fact Bill makes his suit out of women’s skin ties reality and fiction together pretty tightly, and there obviously still exists a fraught relationship to women more significantly than is presented with Leatherface’s character.
Ed Gein becomes scattered across cinema history. From Norman Bates to Leatherface to Buffalo Bill, Gein’s fictional representations are all impressively unsettling in their own respects. There are plenty of real life serial killers who’ve been represented on screen as themselves, as well as in fictional forms. It’s awful hard to come up with another killer – moreover one who isn’t even a serial killer in terms of his victim tally – who has inspired such a disparate array of fictional characters in the horror genre, and most likely impossible to name one aside from Gein whose crimes have crafted more iconic villains in the horror genre.
There are a million ways to tell a story. Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs illustrate this with their screenplays— three different directions, all joined by the same connective tissue of one horrible life. In the real world, Gein may have only killed two women. Through the power of cinema – by way of Norman, Leatherface, and Bill’s idiosyncrasies – Gein has killed dozens of people, and he lives on as one of horror’s greatest, most awful gifts. When many people describe him they use the words ‘serial killer.’ This is likely due to his crimes inspiring so much important horror. If so, it’s an ominous case of real life influencing the storytelling of movies, and in turn the influence storytelling in movies can have on real life.
