WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT
Back in 1998, I watched my first actual horror movie I had always had a secret love of terror and an unaccepted fascination with horrors, but hid them from public until that night I slipped the DVD of the classic: Psycho into the DVD player and was mesmerized for the entire 109 minutes Watching Norman Bates changed my life I delved into everything I could get my hands on I knew that I had a lot of catching up to do for missed years of macabre immersion I watched Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses and other horror movies Imagine my absolute cryptic delight when I realized that one man, one real-life man, served as the inspiration for all of these villains.
Ed Gein One of the truest, most horrific villains ever to stain ground red with blood One of two sons born to a religiously fanatic mother and an abusive, leather-tanning father, Ed grew up in a petri dish that fostered sociopath and violent characteristics Gein hid these for a long time and was known as a quiet – if not mentally slow – handyman who would take odd jobs around his home of La Cross County, Wisconsin to earn money.
For unknown reasons, Ed was obsessively attached to his mother (Norman Bates, anyone?) and spiraled into terrifying insanity after she died in 1945. He remained living alone in his family home. He sealed up his mother’s. The downfall of Gein started with grave robbing so that he could lop off body parts with surgical precision and save them as trophies. This soon turned to murder, necrophilia, and human taxidermy. Upon investigation, police found horrific items, including:
- Whole human bones and fragments
- A wastebasket made of human skin
- Human skin covering several chair seats
- Skulls on his bedposts
- Female skulls, some with the tops sawn off
- Bowls made from human skulls
- A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist
- Leggings made from human leg skin
- Masks made from the skin of females
- Mary Hogan’s face is a paper bag
- Mary Hogan’s skull
- Bernice W. Worden’s head was in a burlap sack
- Nine vulvae in a shoe box
- A young ggirl’sdress
- The vulvas of two females were judged to have been about fifteen years old.
- A belt made from human nipples
- Four noses
- A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring
- A lampshade made from the human skin of a face
- Fingernails from female fingers
- A female body suit made from the skin of his victims
Gein died in 1984 due to cancer complications while serving a life sentence in a mental hospital His legacy of terror and disgust endures in some of the greatest horror icons to have ever graced the screen Still, oddly enough (other than a couple of films that are wildly inaccurate and dreadfully made), the man remains as aloof from the dogma of horror as he did from the emotions of his crimes as he followed his “”ompulsion to” “o [them].”
