All language subtitles for Psycho The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein S01 E03_track3_[eng]

Bernice Worden
had been murdered.

They'd caught Eddie because
he was the one that had done it.

I knew Bernice well.

She'd been gutted out
like a deer.

It was very hard to visualize
somebody doing that to a human.

But we didn't know
the peculiar thoughts

that went through
Eddie's mind at that time.

What time was that?
Do you remember?

Eddie is such
a mythic figure.

Hearing this
actual human voice...

I can't even
remember that.

It just makes these crimes
that much more real.

Well, we've been
debating for years

what did Ed Gein sound like?

I have been playing
Ed Gein in my brain for so long.

He sounds just as bewildered
as I always expected him to.

- Sure.
Always wondering,

"Why did I do this?

What possibly could have
driven me to dig up these women,

to make these, you know,
costumes, to do all of this?"

Like, he's still --
He's marveled.

My first reaction
to him talking

is he's actually a lot more
canny than I thought he was.

As I'm listening to him react,

he knows there are things
he can't tell the police.

It's almost like
he's already known

that this has been
going on for so long

and he's surprised
that they're shocked.

Yeah.

He's almost ignorant of his
own macabre ways. It's crazy.

That's what people said

again and again
during his confessions,

people who spoke to him,

is that people would start off
a little bit hard towards him

and then they would
become sympathetic

because the way they described
him was as a little boy,

a demented little boy,
but a little boy nonetheless.

Oh, you're bright,
you know, aren't you?

Well, now, will you
let me do this after?

Ed Gein had the emotional social
maturity of a small child

who was, on all accounts,
very dependent on his mom.

When I listened to the tapes,
he seems very suggestible.

He's somebody
who seems very passive.

He didn't go through
the kinds of stages

and the maturation that
a person would go through

if they, you know,
were allowed to socialize

and have friendships
outside of the home

and lived in a place where
he had that kind of support.

He had never really developed
into a full-fledged self.

This is the front of
the Waushara County jail

as it looked in 1957.

This is where the Ed Gein tapes
were actually made.

And in the back of the building

was actually
where Ed Gein was held.

Everything inside the building
is still original to 1957.

He actually came out of this
door to go to the courthouse.

First night he got here,
they put him in a drunk tank

to protect him from all
the people of Plainfield.

Thought they'd be coming
to get him.

Then after that, they moved him
into his regular cell.

Ed Gein's cell is directly
behind that second window.

He was here for three days
and two nights.

This is a small town
in Wisconsin.

Where they just know
that train's coming.

They know it's coming.
And if you're law enforcement,

this is not what you want.

You do not want this stain
on your community.

People are humble,

but they have a lot of pride
in -- in being good people.

Also, it happened
under your nose.

- Under your nose.
- You know, like,

you did not know
that this ghoul was operating

right next to you.

The relics of
Hollywood representations

of serial killers is that
they're kind of like geniuses

who are plotting and scheming
the perfect murder

and building a whole kind of,
like, structure

around getting away with it.

He's an example of somebody
who was not doing that.

He was acting in plain sight.

But I told them
I can't understand it.

No one knew
of the existence of this tape.

Till now, everyone,
and myself included,

believed that his first
confession came much later

than this when he was taken
to the crime lab.

The fact that he was interviewed
in the jail cell

immediately after he was
taken into custody

changes our view of
the whole timeline

and sheds very different
light on the case.

When Sheriff Schley discovered
Bernice Worden's naked corpse

strung up by her heels,

Gein is actually not at home,

but he is at a neighbor's house
having dinner.

One of the -- the sons
suddenly comes in

and -- and says he's heard that
Bernice Worden has gone missing

and there's a big commotion
in town.

And, you know,
he wants to go into town

and see what's going on.

And -- And Ed volunteers
to go with him.

Ed makes some kind of
weird remark at the time,

almost indicating that he knows
something dreadful has happened.

But before the two of them
could leave,

the two deputies who had been
dispatched to the Hills' house

show up,
and they take Gein into custody.

The search of his house
was actually going on

at the time this interview
was taking place.

So the full extent
of Gein's horrors

had not even come to light yet.

Here's this socially isolated,

clearly disturbed individual.

He finds himself being
questioned by the authorities.

But the people
who are interrogating him,

and I guess
they were trying hard

not to be overly judgmental,

they weren't being
harsh with him

or they weren't threatening him.

But, I mean, he was really
in a kind of odd spot.

All of a sudden, you know,
the truth is revealed.

Much more
would be discovered

in the coming hours and days

as investigators excavated

this archeological dig in hell,

coming upon
all of these horrors.

Gein had spent years fashioning
these incredibly grotesque

household objects
out of human body parts.

Investigators see objects
and artifacts

that they couldn't
even comprehend.

Would be in that time period
a series of entirely unexpected,

very peculiar,
very bizarre, shocking behavior.

Actually, the dialogue
was relatively placid

and civilized,

given what you imagine
could have happened

back at the police station.

One of the sheriffs
that spent just six hours

in that house went back

and physically attacked Ed Gein
in his jail cell

because he was so disturbed
by what he'd seen

and so disturbed
by what Ed Gein's actions

did to him personally.

Schley shows up
and bursts into the cell,

grabs Eddie,

immediately begins
to manhandle him.

Schley was in this
uncontrollable blind rage.

Schley immediately wants to know
who else Gein has killed

and really has to be
pulled off of Gein.

Ed Gein
seems like a quiet,

sort of unremarkable person.

And yet when you compare
the image of him

to the stuff that police
found at his house,

it's almost so jarring.

And there -- there seems to be
a real disconnect

between his appearance

and the gruesome things that
they discovered at his house.

I can't imagine
what it must have been like.

You did not know that this ghoul
was operating right next to you

and he was insinuated
in all of your lives.

And he did all of these things.

They almost probably,

almost equal to Ed don't
want people to know about this.

"Let's not get
into too many details, Ed."

If it's true
that there's a ghoul

in Plainfield, Wisconsin,

then it's also an indictment
on the police.

It's an indictment on everybody.

No, my, uh --
The way I remember,

I think it was two --
either a day or two after that.

My dad was Art Schley,

County Sheriff
of Waushara County.

We lived in the jail
at the time.

It was no different than
living in a home somewhere.

That was our home,
let's put it that way.

This is a picture of us
in the jail.

It is my mom and myself
and my dad.

And it's in the office.

My bedroom,

if you were to cut
a hole in the wall,

I would have been upstairs
by the bullpen.

When my dad was voted in
as sheriff,

it would have been probably
the summer of '57.

And this case broke

the last part of
November of '57.

He had never had
any law enforcement training

before this.

And so when this
big case came about,

he really didn't have
a lot of experience

or a lot of knowledge on how
to handle something this big.

On the night Ed Gein
was arrested,

I would have been
probably 11 years old.

I was in the sixth grade.

All these men
were sitting in the stairway

and I couldn't
get up to bed.

And I said, "Why?"

And that's when I was told
what had happened.

I can't imagine someone being
as normal as he seemed

and yet could do
such horrible things.

Ed was just in the lower level
of the jail.

I can remember Judge Boyd Clark.

He was a very nice-looking,
very nice-appearing man,

had a young family,

and I probably was
at his house at one point.

I actually had a crush
on his son, Nelson Clark.

I remember Ed Kileen.

He lived right across
the road from us.

People had said my dad
roughed up Ed Gein a little bit.

I heard he grabbed him
by the front of the shirt

and pushed him up against
the -- the wall.

My dad was a friend
of Frank Worden

because Frank Worden
was a deputy of his.

And this was his mother.

I guess my dad probably was
just upset to think

one human being could do
something so horrific

to another human being.

I just think maybe it was
a normal reaction as why

or how could you
do something like that?

You would imagine there
would be an outcry.

"We want to know if Mom
is in her grave or not.

Did this ghoul take her
from her grave?"

Families would raise a fuss.

It is odd that
he could just tell them,

"Well, it's this --
this number,"

and they go,
"Okay, we'll -- we'll check two.

We'll accept that --
that everything is accurate

and valid."

So that seems kind of sloppy
and a little weird.

The phone rang.

We were just finishing up supper

before we went out
to milk the cows.

We found out that Eddie
had been picked up

for killing Mrs. Worden.

It was shocking.

There hadn't been a whole lot
of murders around, you know?

You just wait for the news
to develop, and --

and it did.
It didn't take long.

I went in to supper.

My sister-in-law, she said,

"Did you know Eddie Gein's
killed Mrs. Worden?"

And I said, "Do you know

that's the biggest damn lie
I ever heard?"

That's just the very words
I said.

How long had you known Mr. Gein?

- Seven years.
- Seven years.

What kind of a man
did you know him as?

Well, a man -- a nice man,

just like anybody else.

The only difference
I'd say in the man,

he seems to be little odd.

Think about this also -- 1957,

having an actual news reporter

have to say the words
"human skin suit

made from local man's
mother's body."

Like, this -- They didn't want
to cover, like,

that there were Black people
in the Olympics.

Like, what are
they going to --

Now you have this thing.
They're going to literally,

like, blow your mind
with this piece of information.

The term "serial killer"
doesn't come out for another

20, 30 years
after Ed Gein was caught.

So Ed Gein's arrest
must have been a massive shock

to the American psyche
and to the world.

I don't remember
when I realized

what was really going on.

Probably it had to do
with all the newspaper men,

all the media that was there.

They were
this small farming community,

perfectly happy
with being isolated

and not being known
by the rest of the world.

All of a sudden, they're going
to have to deal with

people like us
driving into their town,

looking around,
going to the graveyard

for the rest
of the town's existence.

Plainfield, Wisconsin,
for as long as America exists,

will be the hometown of Ed Gein,
no matter what.

It was just crazy.

After a while, there was
so much media there.

They'd be sitting on the steps
and we'd have to say,

"Excuse me, can I get upstairs?"

And they'd have to get up
and get out of the way

so we could go upstairs.

And, I mean, they weren't
just sitting one or two of them.

The stairs were full of media.

What kind of a man
did you know of Ed Gein as?

Well, rather simple-minded,

but he always --

I always figured
he was just perfectly harmless.

You could be a serial killer
or just kind of gay

and they would be in Wisconsin,
be like,

"He's just a little different.
He's just a little different."

I'd say he was more or less
a pleasant man

who would be nice man
to talk to

or somebody
would like to have around.

Seems to be a harmless fella,
you know.

Plainfield --
It's the home of Ed Gein.

It's not on the sign.
But -- But it's -- it's known.

There are -- There are hints
throughout the town.

On one hand,

we're horrified
by what happened.

Like footage of, like,
a car accident

or, like, an earthquake is,

on one hand,
just horrifying and scary.

But there's something also
morbidly exciting about that.

And we don't want to look,

but we can't look away
at the same time

because of the nature
of the crimes.

It's been years
since I've been to Plainfield,

but even when I was
researching my book,

it was a sore subject
with a lot of people.

There were people
who had family members

whose bodies had been
exhumed by Gein.

You kind of begin
to think about it.

People are talking about it.

That sucker, he's really
kind of a sick devil.

You've heard of people
killing people,

but you don't hear them taking
them in and gutting them out

and all that kind of stuff
that Eddie did.

He was in a box by himself
when it come to his murders.

If you drive
around the country,

there are all these small towns
that take civic pride

in being home to whatever.

Plainfield was suddenly like,

"This is the town where Ed Gein
committed his crimes."

Here's a picture of
my grandpa and grandma's car

that my dad would use
at times to take Ed Gein

to different appointments
or something

when he thought maybe he'd be
followed or something like that.

Okay. My dad is opening
the door for Ed Gein.

Yes.

Yeah.

Ed's covering his face.

Ed was always
a very polite man.

My mother made the meals
and done the laundry,

and we would help
take the meals down.

And when we take
the food tray in to him,

he'd always thank us
for bringing it.

I don't know
what to say about him.

Saying the man is a nice man
when he done what he done --

It's a terrible thing for him.

It's a terrible thing
for the people involved.

And it was a terrible thing

for the -- for the whole
community of Plainfield.

After Ed's arrest,

he was declared
mentally incompetent

and consigned
to a mental institution.

Competency is not
the same thing as insanity.

Competency is really
can you understand

the meaning of your charges.

Can you participate in a knowing
manner with your attorney

and your own defense?

Are you fit to proceed to trial?

It's no shock that he'd wind up
in a hospital.

The crimes are too weird.
They're too violent.

They're peculiar.

Had it been something like
a sexual assault or a murder,

the commission of a --
a robbery,

they would have just
thrown him in prison.

But this stuff that he did
was just too unthinkable

and too weird.

And, you know, my rule of thumb
is if it scares a jury,

you're going to the hospital.

I'm looking at
Edward Gein's records

from Central State Hospital,

and this reflects his intake.

What is interesting and
consistent with his interview

at the police station is that
he was found to be coherent.

The records
are very descriptive,

but also in some respects
contradictory.

I mean, on one hand, they talk
about his train of thought

as coherent and relevant,
but sometimes illogical.

Now, I don't know
what that means.

That seems to be
an implicit contradiction.

They also say
that he experiences visual

and auditory hallucinations,

and yet they then go on
to say it's uncertain

if these should be designated
as overt hallucinations.

Well, I don't know
what you would call them.

There's only two questions
you can ask.

Is it real or is it not real?

They even are curious
about whether or not

he found the bodies
sexually stimulating.

And there's some speculation
about that.

But I don't see anything
where he says

that he found the bodies
sexually stimulating.

Though he's not providing
much of an explanation

for his own conduct
as to what motivates him.

It's my sense that
they don't have, like,

a really great idea
about who this guy is

and what would have motivated
him to do what he does.

They're hedging their bets.

They're not really
sure themselves

and they probably never saw
anything like this.

I was
a consulting psychologist

at Central State Hospital

where, in the early 1970s,
I had an encounter with Ed Gein.

And I must say it was memorable.

I was there working hard
in this office.

I was writing away at the desk.

I heard this noise behind me.

I just kept on working because
I was used to distractions.

But then I got thirsty,
and so I went out in the hall.

I saw Dr. Schubert.

And he said to me,
"Did you meet Mr. Gein?"

And I turned around.

There was Mr. Gein.

He wasn't very tall, white hair,

and he had these tools,
a hammer and saw.

He'd been trying to put up
a partition behind me.

I just about fainted.

Dr. Schubert goes,

"I guess he was taking
your measure."

He was referring to the idea

that Gein had skinned
various women and made,

you know, like,
lampshades out of them.

I was really upset that
Dr. Schubert would do this.

I complained to the other people
that worked there

and they said,
"Oh, Gein's harmless."

And there wasn't
anything malicious in his eyes.

It was only some confusion
and concern.

People in general felt
kind of sorry for him.

It was an odd contrast
in terms of this little old man

that evoked pity
and such sensational crimes.

I later asked Dr. Schubert
why Gein had done these things.

He said that as far
as he could figure,

that Gein was trying
to reconstitute his dead mother.

Now, how he would do that,
I don't know.

But of course,
the man was crazy.

This is my copy
of the novel Psycho.

It's a first edition.

Very happy to have a chance

to read the first edition
as it came out.

This is before
the film came out.

This is as it appeared

before all the fame
and -- and the hoopla.

Robert Bloch is perhaps the best
known writer of horror fiction

through the middle part
of the 20th century.

There's a quote
by Stephen King saying,

"There was nobody better
than Bloch,

nobody more prolific,

nobody more profoundly
influential."

And when I graduated
from high school in 1934,

I sat down and started to write
professionally.

Sold my first story
six weeks later.

I was 17 then and I didn't
have enough sense to quit.

One of the great
contributions that Bloch made

to the horror genre

was that he realized
that what is between the ears

can be much more horrible

than what's out there
rustling in the night.

Bloch idolized H. P. Lovecraft,
who was 27 years his senior

and who would die
at a young age.

Bloch started off writing
that kind of supernatural horror

that H. P. Lovecraft
is so well-known for.

But there was a change
for Bloch.

He started reading
psychology textbooks,

books by psychologists
about the craft of psychology.

And so he made a shift,
late '40s, early '50s,

into writing
psychological horror,

as we see exemplified in Psycho.

We have
this morass of things happening

at the end of the 1950s

alongside interest
in psychology,

interest in psychoanalysis,

interest in theories
around trauma,

interest in what does
the family structure mean?

And that, I think,
makes it a perfect,

perfect moment for Psycho

to really take
the country by storm.

Bloch himself was in
small-town Wisconsin

when this small-town
Wisconsin horror story

was being exposed to the world.

That was the reason
for the book.

When I heard of the Gein case,

I didn't hear anything
about the details,

but I did hear about
an apparently ordinary man

living an ordinary life
in a very small town

where he had been observed
by his neighbors for many years

and never suspected
of his crimes.

And I said, "That's the story."

He was a nice man,
just like anybody else.

Perfectly harmless.

I'm going to write
a story about

a man in a similar situation.
Point out to people

that they don't necessarily
know their neighbors

or the people that
they come in contact with.

And that, to me,
is truly horrifying.

For Bloch, the idea
that this could be happening

in a small town
in the middle of Wisconsin

where everybody knows
everybody's business

just absolutely fascinated him.

It fit in really well with his
ideas of psychological horror

that the person
you should be afraid of

is not the werewolf
howling at the moon

or some sort of
supernatural monster

that will come at you
in the night.

It's the guy sitting a couple
seats behind you on the bus.

And why is he coming after you?

Maybe there's no reason.

Maybe he's just
coming after you.

The life of a pulp fiction
writer during this era,

the idea wasn't necessarily to
create great art all the time.

It was to sell your story,
get the small payday,

sell another story,
get the small payday.

Bloch reported that
it took him seven weeks

from start to finish
with Psycho,

which is an amazingly
kind of brief period of time

if you've ever tried
to write a novel.

But he was also
of the generation

for whom being prolific
was the way to sleep indoors

and eat every once in a while.

It is primarily a story
of a girl with a secret.

She's just stolen $40,000
from her employer.

And it's about a young man

who leads a tortured secret life

so secret that he himself
is not aware of it.

And it is about the buried and
exhumed secrets of his mother.

Norman Bates, on the surface,

he seems sweet,
he seems vulnerable.

But underneath the surface,

there's all kinds
of things roiling.

There's all kinds
of dark psychology

that's all wrapped up in,

of course, his obsessive
relationship to his dead mother.

Bloch considered
many titles for the novel.

He was inspired by words
like psychology

and psychoanalysis.

It's about being
a psychotic, right?

It's about somebody
being a psychopath.

And that is really different
from just saying

"This monster is outlandish.

This monster can never happen."

Here we have a monster
who is defined

by the inner workings
of his brain.

Today, organizations
of specialists

in mental medicine

like the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute,

have helped to gain
general medical acceptance

for such doctrines,
considered a radical departure

when first advanced
by Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna

some 50 years ago.

It gets us toward
a variety of mental illnesses,

including some pretty violent
and gruesome ones

that perhaps the Ed Gein story
brought up in Bloch's mind.

Psycho didn't sell
particularly in any way

that was different
from his previous work,

but it did attract the --
the attention of

a film production company.

They didn't accept the first
offer from this film company

that they had never heard of.

They accepted the second offer,
which was for $9,500,

and Bloch's cut was about $6,000
for that,

which is a nice payday
for a writer of pulp fiction.

Bloch was fairly convinced
that it was unfilmable,

partly the way that the
narrative is kind of structured.

We have this main character
in the novel.

She dies, and you're less
than halfway through the novel.

And so the idea that --
that this could be filmable

successfully,
given a Hollywood formula,

Bloch was just really
kind of doubtful about that.

And then he found out
that the film company

was actually Alfred Hitchcock,

who was looking
for his next film.

Hitchcock started in England.

He was a British director.

Eventually he comes over to
the States to make movies here,

and that's really
where he experiences

the vast majority
of his success.

And when he makes Psycho
in 1960,

he really hadn't made
a straight-up horror movie.

That was really the first time
that he had done something

in that extreme horror genre.

Hitchcock was on
a tremendous roll at that point.

This is just
after North by Northwest.

Maybe the --
the rights conversation

would have been
a little different

had Bloch's agent
done a bit more homework

before signing away the rights.

The power of cinema
in its purest form is so vast

because it can go over the
whole world on a given night.

A film could play in Tokyo,
West Berlin, London, New York.

And the same audience
is responding emotionally

to the same things.

And no other medium can do this.

- Dirty night.
- Do you have a vacancy?

Oh, we have 12 vacancies.

Psycho the novel
bears a tremendous resemblance

to Psycho the film.

But one of the interesting
changes that happened

between the novel

and Hitchcock's
interpretation of the novel

was that Norman Bates
changed subtly.

In the novel,
he's probably 20 years older.

He doesn't look like
the young Hollywood

leading man of Anthony Perkins,
that's for sure.

He's described as balding
and overweight

with an alcohol problem.

Do you go out with friends?

Well, a -- a boy's best friend
is his mother.

Norman Bates

can never be separated
from Tony Perkins,

who, of course, plays him
and plays him so beautifully

as this kind
of vulnerable character

who also houses
significant darkness.

But then that also was in some
parts influenced by Ed Gein.

Ed Gein had
a little round face.

He always would wear,
like, a baseball hat.

He'd always thank us or,
you know, always say something,

greet us in some way, usually.

Just a nice little
old man, really.

He really was, just like
all the people said.

You couldn't believe that he
would do anything that gruesome.

I don't know if he snapped
or why he would do what he did,

but I don't know.

The very, very famous
shower scene,

which occurs on page 39
out of 180 pages

in this edition of the novel,

it comes and goes very quickly.

The economy of language
is stunning in this.

You read the novel and you look
at that shower scene,

the shower scene is
very, very, very brief.

And it ends a section

and it's just a series
of very short sentences,

declarative sentences,

and it comes and goes
so quickly.

But it's shocking.

It's the economy of language

that creates the horror
for Bloch in that scene.

The last four lines
of this chapter,

"Mary started to scream,

the curtains parted further,

and a hand appeared,
holding a butcher knife.

It was the knife that, a moment
later, cut off her scream.

And her head."

And that's the end
of the chapter.