Even if you don’t know his name, you know the macabre legacy of Ed Gein. In 1957, the reclusive farmer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, was unmasked as the most crazed and disturbing serial killer America had ever seen—and arguably has ever seen since. So gruesome and grotesque were the crimes of the so-called Butcher of Plainfield, Plainfield Ghoul, or Grandfather of Gore that more than 65 years of filmmaking haven’t yet imagined much worse.
“You can understand why moviemakers gravitate toward Gein,” says Christopher Berry-Dee, author of Serial Killers at the Movies. “He’s unique, creative, enterprising, and imaginative. We don’t get many killers like Ed anymore.” As yet another version of Gein rears its ugly head into the zeitgeist—this time on Ryan Murphy’s new season of Monster, starring Charlie Hunnam as Gein and Laurie Metcalf as his overbearing mother—here’s a look back at Hollywood’s long and lurid history of borrowing from Gein for the big screen.
Psycho, 1960: “A boy’s best friend is his mother”
Alfred Hitchcock based Psycho on the eponymous 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, who lived just about 35 miles from Gein’s infamous Plainfield farm. According to Ed Gein: Psycho! author Paul Anthony Woods, Bloch penned his novel in a feverish seven weeks, and he was surrounded by sensational press (one headline from The Milwaukee Journal: “Obsessive Love for His Mother Drove Gein to Slay, Rob Graves”), but Bloch always denied his murderous neighbor was the inspiration for Norman Bates.
But viewers couldn’t ignore their parallel psychologies. Edward Theodore Gein (rhymes with “bean”) was born in 1906 to Augusta Gein, a fervently religious mother who taught her boys that modern women were evil seductresses. Augusta favored her second son, Ed—who became, according to Woods, “a mama’s boy from day one.” An avid reader who might have excelled, young Ed dropped out after the eighth grade after being bullied for his speech impediment and lazy eye. Gein lived on their 275-acre farm and did odd jobs for locals—including babysitting—who considered him strange but mild-mannered and nonthreatening.
In five short years, Gein’s father, brother, and mother all died, leaving the then 39-year-old bereft (if only for his mother’s loss) and isolated. Like Norman Bates, Gein kept rooms that his mother used to frequent untouched, boarding up their windows and doors. Gein’s rooms, meanwhile, grew increasingly squalid and crowded, and featured the results of both Bates’s and Gein’s preferred hobby: taxidermy.
Three on a Meathook, 1972: “I ain’t havin’ no trash in your ma’s home”
While Norman Bates is proprietor of the Bates Motel, young moviemaker William Girdler relocated his Gein-like killer to the backwoods fields of Girdler’s own hometown in Louisville, Kentucky. In Three on a Meathook, handsome farmboy Billy Townsend brings oft-topless young women home to his secluded farm, where they meet their gruesome fate at the hands of his fanatically religious father.
Meathook deploys flashbacks to show Billy’s first alleged murder—his mother, naturally. It’s not so clear, however, who Gein’s first victim was. Some suspect that he was connected to the disappearances of a local eight-year-old in 1947, and/or a 15-year-old in 1953—but Gein passed lie detector tests related to both disappearances. These victims also didn’t match his MO; all of Gein’s known victims looked like or reminded him of his mother.
Deranged, 1974: “If you need the head…just take the head”
In 1947, a year and a half after his mother’s death, Gein began creeping into local cemeteries to dig in darkness. He later described being driven by visions during a “daze-like” state not unlike Norman Bates’s murderous blackouts, or the episode in which Deranged murderer Ezra Cobb hears his dead mother’s voice: “If you miss me so much, why don’t you come and bring me home?”
Where the fictional Cobb does indeed dig up his mother’s body and bring her home for a dinner party, the real Gein was unable to dig up his mother’s corpse—contrary to still-lingering rumors that he’d stolen and shrunken her head. “He tried, but wasn’t able to get to her since she was buried in a concrete vault,” says Deviant author Harold Schechter. Without access to arguably the only body he really wanted, Gein began scouting the local newspaper for obituaries of middle-aged women, according to Deviant.
The documentary-style Deranged describes a “murderer, grave robber, necrophiliac perhaps”—alluding heavily to the latter depraved act without ever portraying it onscreen, for perhaps obvious reasons. Though his crimes still fall within the necrophilia umbrella, the real-life Gein staunchly denied he ever officially partook in the act. “If you take his word,” writes Woods, “a virgin he remained till the day he died.”
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974: “My family’s always been in meat”
Tobe Hooper’s horror classic began when relatives from Wisconsin told a five-year-old Hooper the story of Ed Gein. “They didn’t mention his name, but to me he was like a real boogeyman,” recalled Hooper, who reimagined a Gein-type character as Leatherface, the youngest brother of the cannibalistic Sawyer family—who lure passersby to their dilapidated farmhouse to be slaughtered and eaten.
Though it may make for juicy television, the actual Gein denied engaging in cannibalism. A small consolation, perhaps, in light of the Butcher of Plainfield’s other uses for human flesh. Leatherface wears a mask of human skin, something that would have fit right into Ed Gein’s ghastly accessory collection. According to Berry-Dee’s Serial Killers at the Movies, Gein’s assemblage included four noses, a belt made of nipples, and leggings of skin. He decorated his home with skulls on bedposts and a lampshade made of human flesh. “Ed wasn’t a sexual sadist—he just wanted the bodies for leather. He was a homicidal craftsman,” says Berry-Dee.
Graveyard scavenger hunts usually provided the materials he needed. But when they didn’t, Gein was forced to look elsewhere. In 1954, Gein murdered 51-year-old Mary Hogan, a gregarious tavern owner who was friendly to him. He said he liked her too.
The Silence of the Lambs, 1991: “Billy is not a real transexual. But he thinks he is”
Just as he created Hannibal Lector, author Thomas Harris based Jame Gumb, a.k.a. serial killer Buffalo Bill, on a handful of real-life murderers: Ted Bundy, for the arm-in-a-sling ruse he used to lure women; Gary Heidnik, from whom Harris borrowed the basement pit; and Ed Gein, who was said to have made a garment similar to the so-called woman suit that the fictional Buffalo Bill makes.
“Among Gein’s artifacts, they found a ‘mammary vest’ with strings attached so he could wear it, apparently,” says Schechter. Experts don’t consider Gein to be transgender, though both he and Silence of the Lambs’ depiction of Gumb have contributed to the widespread “deranged cross-dressing killer” trope. (Norman Bates also wears his mother’s dress, and even Leatherface dons a frock with his “old lady mask.”)
Three years after Mary Hogan’s then unsolved disappearance, Gein shot and killed his last victim: Bernice Worden, the 58-year-old owner of Plainfield’s hardware store, whose son reported her missing to authorities. They found the last receipt of the day made out to Eddie Gein and headed to his farmhouse.
Ed and His Dead Mother, 1993: “Oh my God, she’s in pieces!”
With ever-likeable Steve Buscemi in the lead role, Ed and His Dead Mother is a little-known film that tried its best to find humor in Gein’s macabre legacy. Buscemi’s Ed pays $1,000 to “reanimate” his beloved deceased mother, who returns to life as an insatiable cannibal. (Writers wisely axed the grave-robbing and skin-suit subplots.)
Though he ultimately decapitates his mother, Buscemi’s Ed Chilton remains a sympathetic protagonist. Is the same true of Ed Gein? “I think so, as far as serial killers go,” says Schechter. “Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy—all derive sick sexual pleasure from abduction and torture. Yes, [Gein] killed two women, but he did it very swiftly so they didn’t suffer. It wasn’t about power.”
Moreover, when investigators arrived at the grisly Gein farm, the reclusive killer mostly cooperated with police officers and confessed his crimes about 30 hours after being detained. Unlike Bundy (who maintained his innocence) or Henry Lee Lucas (who falsely claimed 600 murders), a polite but remorseless Gein testified honestly and completely at his trial for the murder of Worden. “I think he was a lonely guy who was happy to chat,” says Berry-Dee of Gein’s confession.
Gein was ultimately found “not guilty by reason of insanity,” and he spent his remaining years in various psychiatric hospitals. Woods describes a “complete model patient” whom “institutional living agreed with.” He did his chores, enjoyed hobbies like sewing and weaving, read nearly every book in the prison library, and gained weight, since he enjoyed the food. Ed Gein died at 77 in 1984 from respiratory failure due to lung cancer; he’s buried beside his mother.
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