Original subtitles

The end of the 1950s,

that's a time that we generally associate

with this kind of perfect ideal of the American suburb.

2.5 children, the picket fence, the husband going off to work,

the woman staying at home and tending the family.

What's new, Hasbro?

Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head,

with their own cars and trailers.

That's what's new.

Was that in reality, what was actually happening

the entire time?

Of course not. Of course not.

In 1957, this small-town Wisconsin horror story

was being exposed to the world.

The shock and the fear that suddenly gripped them

when the grisly tale of Ed Gein became public.

When you listen to the tape of Ed Gein,

you almost anticipate hearing somebody act like a monster.

There seems to be a real disconnect

between this meek, quiet, solitary person

and the gruesome things that they've discovered at his house.

There's a number of questions when you analyze the Gein case.

Did he have sexual relations with the bodies?

Could he have eaten some of the victims?

There's very little that Gein is not capable of.

Ed Gein's story is just so gruesome.

Most people can't imagine what it would be like

to excavate a corpse from the ground

and then take the head and the skull

and then create objects out of the parts

that you take from a rotten corpse.

I'm looking at additional records,

maybe a little deeper into the records

based on his initial examination and evaluation

at Central State Hospital.

Edward Gein talks about constructing masks

out of the skin from the skulls of some of the people he dug up.

And then putting these masks on his own face.

One could conjecture that in doing so,

that is to say, putting these masks on,

is this a way of transforming himself

or being a different person for a moment?

Is this a way of relating to the corpses

and becoming intimate with them?

He doesn't really talk about being sickened by the behavior.

So clearly this had meaning for him

and this was important to him.

We know that he had these face masks.

Some of which he hung on his wall as trophies.

You know, this is where Tobe Hooper

got the whole Leatherface idea from.

I remember watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre

for the first time when I was in high school.

The thing that always stood out to me

was the grittiness of how it was shot.

And the fact that it seemed almost in parts

like a snuff video.

The fact that Leatherface, the character was loosely

based on Ed Gein and because of the kind of things that he was

doing with people's skin.

The house that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is modeled upon...

...was the home of Ed Gein.

The word that people used over and over again

after they discovered the house was "revolting."

There's something about his home to me

is very indicative of who he was, too.

There's just something about serial killers

and kind of like what their homes come to represent to them.

Like there's a house out there where there shouldn't be.

And there's also a bunch of fucked up stuff

happening inside of that house where it shouldn't be.

I love this shot where Pamela

is walking up to the house for the first time.

It's shot almost at ground level.

We have lots of camera movement as she's walking in,

and now she's about to enter this really, really awful room,

the room that is, of course, drawing in large part

on what Ed Gein's house would have looked like.

There is so much about Texas Chainsaw Massacre

that just feels so gritty, so grimy,

and like you are stuck in this house

with this entire horrifying family and you can't get out.

That to me was so much of what made it so scary.

It felt completely immersive because it felt so urgent,

so real.

The other reason that it's so urgent,

it's so visceral, it's so upsetting

is because not only is it based on a real moment,

but the house that Tobe Hooper and the crew

used to shoot Texas Chainsaw Massacre,

well, they had filled it with all of these animal parts,

and these animal parts were sitting there for days.

She's really experiencing

what it's like to be in a room with all of those dead animals,

all of those bits of rotting animals.

And of course, she's trying to get away

from all of these horrors, this is, of course, the moment

when Leatherface comes out.

He's called Leatherface because he has a collection of masks

that he has made out of human skin.

That's the thing that really sticks out to me

in terms of Ed Gein.

It's the fact that he repurposed people's bodies.

And that's what's so upsetting about him.

What makes Gein stand out is what he did

with the bodies.

If you look at a group of sexual murderers,

only about 6% have engaged in necrophilia.

Police say these two young men have committed an act

that is so unthinkable there isn't even a law against it.

The men allegedly sexually assaulted two female corpses.

Webster's Dictionary describes necrophilia

as "an erotic attraction to corpses."

Necrophilia is a paraphilia.

It's an abnormal sexual arousal pattern.

There's many different types of paraphilias.

Pedophilia is a paraphilia.

Fetishism, sexual arousal to non-living objects

is a paraphilia.

Voyeurism.

Necrophilia is another paraphilia.

Historically, law enforcers here in Florida charged

necrophiliacs with sexual battery.

That is until a few years ago when a circuit court

in South Florida ruled that consent is no longer

an issue if a person is dead.

We understand the psychopathology of sexual murder

and all these other sorts of bizarre paraphilias

much better today than they did in the 1950s.

Every mental illness has its causes associated

with a patient's character, his upbringing,

and the joys and sorrows he has gone through.

The motivation for the vast majority of

necrophiliacs is that a dead body is not threatening.

Because these are people internally that feel weak

and inadequate.

The vast majority of offenders kill the person,

then for some reason, they're stimulated by the dead body

and penetrate the body.

In that case, the body is basically still warm.

Not every case involving necrophilia

involves sexual murder.

I had a case of a guy

who was a histology technician in a hospital,

went to the morgue where they kept the slides

because it was cool.

When security left, he took out the corpse,

the refrigerated corpse of a 91-year-old woman,

penetrated her sexually using a latex glove as a condom.

He didn't kill anybody.

But you go where your psychology leads you.

With respect to Ed Gein,

this was not a spontaneous act where he killed somebody

and then he penetrated the person.

No, he was highly motivated to get corpses.

Gein, he's creating items from, most of its genitals

and vaginas and nipples

and these sorts of things, in addition to skin.

In Gein's case, he was wearing human skin,

getting into human skin, this type of thing.

You have to remember that this this guy, Ed,

grew up with more rage probably than anyone could ever imagine.

And even though he couldn't readily

express it, when you're that angry,

you either directed outward or you direct it inward.

You become a murderer, or you become sadistic,

or you become perversely involved

in the kinds of activities

that he found himself involved in.

It's is perverse and bizarre as it can possibly be.

No.

No. Well, as I said, there is a very rare delusion

involving skin.

I did have a case where a person thought

that his brother was wearing a skin suit

and he was an imposter and wound up killing him.

But I've never had a case where a person wanted to wear

somebody else's skin.

I don't think I ever heard of a case

like that in the annals of crime.

Shortly after Augusta died, Ed Gein closed off her room.

And, you know, it was the only room

in the house that he never entered.

He made it into a kind of little shrine.

You don't have to go much further than look at his home.

The place was total disarray, cluttered, dirt,

garbage, smelled of rotting flesh and all the rest.

And then look at his mother's room.

It was completely preserved, neat, the way she left it.

That's what's so, so unsettling about

watching Psycho.

Here in Psycho, we have it linked up with the possibility

of it actually being a real story.

And that makes it really, really scary.

Mrs. Bates?

Norman Bates' motivation to kill is that he has this

long-term obsession with his mother

that's so much in keeping with Hitchcock's more raw approach.

You can love your parents.

But still, a healthy person strives,

in a sense to be able to formulate

some kind of critique of what, you know, you like

or didn't like about the way they raised you.

I don't think he was able to do that in any conscious way.

So there's a kind of closeness that's pathologic.

Could not separate himself emotionally,

psychologically from his mother.

This is all in his mind.

One of the most infamous aspects of

the Gein case, it's the one that Thomas Harris employed in

Silence of the Lambs, was Gein making a skin suit.

He flayed the legs from a corpse.

He flayed the upper torso,

including the breasts from a corpse.

He dried them.

He apparently attached some kind of strings,

and he would put on this skin suit.

The skin suit, I think, has an entirely different

meaning for him than anything else that he did

with these bodies.

I think the skin suit was the real project.

It raises a couple of possibilities.

Is this his way of becoming more intimate with Mother?

If not literally his mother.

I think that with what we know about his attachment

to his mother, that that is a much more

kind of compelling example of him role playing

and desperately just trying to feel her presence again,

even if it means just stepping into this suit that he's made.

My understanding of the case is the reason he couldn't

disinter his mother is I think there was cement

around the coffin itself, which often happens

in some cemeteries for erosion reasons and so on.

I think that was his problem.

I think Ed was far too scared of his mother

to ever even attempt to to dig her up,

because I think it had to be her choice.

It had to be something that she wanted.

He was never going to make her do anything

that she didn't want to do, and she was only going to

come out of that grave if she wanted to come out.

All men should respect women so much.

- Sure. - Yeah.

That's great.

Because he can't bring his mother's corpse back

to the home where he wants to have his mother,

the skin suit becomes a type of role play

where he can step into the skin of his mother,

even though it's not the skin of his mother.

You can step into some object that represents his mother,

and for whatever period of time, he can kind of resuscitate her

and play as if he is her.

My hobby is stuffing things, you know, taxidermy.

So clearly,

both Norman Bates and Ed Gein

are a little bit obsessed with their mothers.

A man should have a hobby.

Well, it's...

It's more than a hobby.

In the scene, we start

to learn a little bit more about Norman Bates' mother.

We're also learning that he's very into taxidermy.

We'll learn later, at the end of the film, that Norman Bates

has been keeping his mother taxidermied in his house.

It speaks to this idea of the 1950s American family ideal,

where you should respect your mother,

you should adore your mother,

and then how easily that gets kind of twisted

into absolute obsession and absolute darkness.

I think this is a real moment

where we see horror as a genre developing this notion.

Look, Mama.

I brought you a visitor.

That's what bothers me,

because you're not very big, are you?

In terms of the skin suit he made,

a lot of what Gein did had to do with resurrecting his mother.

But the other part of it is, you know,

Gein's fantasy about becoming a woman.

We know that he avidly read stories about this ex G.I.

who went to Sweden

and had a sex-change operation.

And came back as Christine Jorgensen.

Christine Jorgensen, who made world headlines

when she was transformed from a former G.I. into a woman,

is now a Woman of the Year, a title bestowed upon her

by the Scandinavian Societies of Greater New York.

There was a lot of publicity about

Christine Jorgensen, and Ed followed that case very closely.

I am deeply honored and most sincerely touched.

Ed Gein was also obsessed with

the Christine Jorgensen case.

When he was interviewed by psychiatrist later on,

he did say that when he was a little boy,

he did often wonder what it would be like

to be a little girl.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's weird because the entire thing

is filtered through the lens of Ed Gein.

You know, it's still filtered through this like,

demented lens.

But he definitely was looking

for a sense of self, though, right?

He's trying to figure out who he is.

- Surely. And what is he doing

in Plainfield, Wisconsin?

What's the point of life?

And I guess it just led to him making a skin suit.

If you're inclined or sensitive to or vulnerable

to input from magazines or movies you see

or stuff you read,

you know, it may find its way into your imagination

and then start to incorporate that into your own fantasy life.

You know, I think about things like sexual identity

and sort of, who was this guy sexually?

And I don't know if he knew,

but it would seem as though he never had sex.

Seem as though his mother cautioned him

that you shouldn't have sex unless you marry a woman.

So, was there something sexually gratifying about this?

Necrophiliacs disinter bodies for the purpose

of having sex with the corpse.

That's why they're doing it.

In Gein's case, it could have been

that he wanted to have sex with his mother.

There's certainly a lot of Oedipal dynamics

that psychologists and psychiatrists

talk about all the time.

He may have been to the point

where his years of wallowing in this very bizarre lifestyle

just wasn't doing the trick for him anymore.

It might be satisfying on some level for him

for many years to defile dead bodies.

But there's nothing more powerful than killing someone.

Mary Hogan, there are all kinds of rumors about her background.

She was a plain-spoken woman,

apparently with somewhat of a profane tongue,

who ran this little roadhouse tavern that Eddie

sometimes patronized.

Mrs. Hogan, that was the little tavern up there

north of where our farm was.

It was probably four miles up there.

Mary Hogan, Ed Gein sort of saw her

as this dark shadow side of his mother.

You know, where his mother was a saintly figure,

Mary Hogan was the embodiment of all that was most corrupt.

Some customer came in, saw evidence that there had been

some kind of commotion in the tavern.

Mary Hogan was gone.

There were some overturned chairs.

There were bullet casings and some bloodstains.

It was clear that something dire had happened.

I would have been, what, 13, 14 years old?

Mary Hogan was missing,

and I suppose they had found some blood.

Nobody knew who did it.

Ed Gein is confronted with the gravity of what he's done

and is unable to own up to it and accept responsibility.

The funny thing was that after that it happened,

the threshing crew, they were talking about it

with Eddie, and Eddie says, "Oh, I got her down to my place."

And they said, "Eddie, you fool,

you haven't got her down to your place."

And he said, "Yes, I do."

And everybody laughed and joked about it,

and that was the extent of it.

He was telling the truth.

He did have her down to his place.

Wisconsin people have a great sense of humor.

- They really do. - And it is kind of funny.

That one is strange to me.

What's interesting about the Mary Hogan accusation

is that it he denied killing Mary Hogan for so long.

It wasn't until they had to tell him,

like, "We found her head inside your house."

Once investigators

were going through Gein's farmhouse,

one of them found a paper bag and just reached inside it

and pulled out this head

that he immediately recognized as Mary Hogan.

I went with

Arnie Fritz and the sheriff

out to Ed Gein's house.

I searched the kitchen

and found in the stove

where there had been some human bones burnt.

Shoebox had the face mask of a woman.

And by that time, the sheriff from

Portage County was there.

And when they lifted up that face mask,

he immediately recognized it as Mary Hogan's.

When you say face mask, what are you talking about?

Well, he took the skin, cut it up in the back and there

and just peeled it off the face, the skin.

The hair and everything was on the masks.

Basically the head, it was rigged up so it could be worn.

In terms of his necrophiliac urges,

you know, it's like he ran out of bodies.

You know, there wasn't any suitable body

in the graveyard at that point, so he decided to create his own.

Ed Gein was devastatingly curious about the female form.

- Yes. The only female form

that he knew was his mother's.

And he actually developed a form of sexual attraction

to his mother.

No one knows what's going on in his interior life.

He has not said a single one of these thoughts

to another human being.

And there's a curiosity that's been building inside of you.

So it's like it's a further of like just like weirdly

just being obsessed with the female form

and just wanting to see it.

It's such an intimate act, murder,

especially when it's close.

He wasn't getting enough out of the dead bodies emotionally.

The next place to go would be,

well, let me take someone's life.

Ed Gein says in the tapes several times

that he can't remember.

This is an individual who does not have

the emotional social development of an adult being confronted

with the gruesome crimes that he's committed

and trying to find a way to soften his responsibility.

This is a way to kind of distance himself

from the heinous crimes that he's committed

by feigning that he has amnesia,

that he can't remember, that he goes into a haze,

that he becomes this other person.

At one point, after multiple rounds of this,

where he says that he can't remember,

he says that if they can show that it was my gun

that went off, then I guess it was me.

He's describing an object

that is of his possession,

committing the crime as if it has agency

or autonomy in the world,

when in fact, he is the one committing this violence.

When you look carefully at everything

that they asked Gein about what he did,

he just said, "I don't remember.

If the police said I did it, I must have done it.

But I don't remember this, I don't remember that."

He doesn't implicate himself in the more bizarre things.

I thought that was important.

That's called malingered amnesia.

That's very, very typical in criminal defendants in general.

I want you to understand what happened.

It was like coming out of some kind of

horrible trance or dream,

to wake up in the morning and realize what I had done

and with a clear mind.

It occurs mainly for two reasons.

One, the criminal defendant believes

it's to his legal advantage to say that they don't remember.

And two, they don't want

to remember and discuss what they had done.

Apparently, I had beaten him to death with my fists.

- And you have no memory? I have no memory of it.

So I just -- I can't explain it.

I think I have a good memory,

and it's almost like I blacked out.

Keep in mind, also, there is no memory disorder

or neurocognitive disorder

that is selective for criminal behavior.

So Gein doesn't have a memory problem.

The only thing he can't remember are the perverse acts

and the illegal acts and the extraordinary acts

that he's being accused of.

There's a part of him that is seeking to erase his past.

He's grown up in this isolated existence,

cut off from basically everyone except for his mother, right?

And so there's this immense amount of attachment

to this one person who is also responsible

for a lot of your misery.

Part of him is exorcizing these demons from his life

that his mother has created, and he's seeking out victims

who at least ostensibly remind him of his mother.

It seems so unimaginable that one would murder a woman

that you'd known for years and years,

liked enough, you know, to ask out on a date.

We know that he had brought some .22 caliber shells with him.

Worden's Hardware stocked a lot of the supplies

for people who were doing farming and so on.

It also stocked rifles.

Ed Gein took one of the rifles.

When her back was turned, he loaded the rifle.

We're on Main Street, Plainfield, Wisconsin.

This is the main drag.

This would have been all dirt roads back in the day.

Okay, this is the hardware store.

It's a little different than it was back in 1957.

Actually, the spot where they kept the guns

was in the back of the store.

Bernice Worden was actually looking out the window

across the street where the gas station was

when she got shot in the back of the head.

Ed Gein walked back in a store and wanted to see a .22 rifle

that was in the back of the store.

So Bernice got that for him.

Then she went up front by the counter

to look out the window, out at the gas station.

Ed Gein pulled a bullet out of his front pocket,

loaded it inside the gun,

and shot her in the back of the head.

Now, the back of the store has changed a little bit.

This part sticking out was not there.

It's totally flush.

Now, right about where these glass doors was,

is actually an overhead garage.

And inside that was where

the Worden's hardware truck was parked.

It was a pickup truck.

Ed put Bernice in the back of that pickup truck.

When you go inside, you kind of feel a heaviness on you.

Like this is an historical spot to me.

Welcome to Plainfield.

After executing Bernice Worden,

Gein dragged her body out the back of the store,

loaded it into her truck.

Ed Gein drove to his farmhouse,

dragged her corpse into his woodshed,

and then walked back into town, a distance of about six miles,

I think, and got in his own car.

We're currently at Ed Gein's land,

on the corner of 2nd and Archer.

And this is where Ed would have drove his car in

when he had Bernice Worden in the back.

Exciting standing here.

This is the freaking property, man.

This is where it all happened.

I love it.

The floor was dirt, and basically she was hanging

from the rafters on a hoist,

and she was basically totally gutted

by like a deer, and no head.

On the tapes, you hear the judge say multiple times,

"You gutted her like a deer."

It's a community where people are used to hunting.

Used to working with their hands.

They're familiar with knives.

And the practices that you would use to skin and kill animals

is something that could be transferable to humans.

He had no empathy or no ability to connect

emotionally or psychologically to her.

I guess he wanted to clean her up,

get her as clean as possible by bleeding her.

You know, like a deer or like an animal,

so that he could get on with the business

of what he wanted to do, which is probably to skin her.

It is just not even possible for any "normal person"

to, you know, imagine that kind of mentality.

Committing these atrocities on female bodies,

you know, was just -- was just part of his life.

After Ed was caught,

townspeople started telling stories about

Ed having come to their house

and offered them venison from the deer he had killed.

By his own admission, Ed had never hunted deer.

So the point of those stories was that...

...they now realized...

...that the meat that Gein was offering them...

...was actually human flesh.