Original subtitles

I was doing emergency coverage

at Mendota Mental Health Institute.

I was on the ward,

and one of the nurses said, "Have you met Ed Gein?"

I said, "No, I haven't."

She said, "Well, let me introduce you."

I knew that he had murdered two people...

...in this tiny town in the middle of Wisconsin.

Then I learned all the other things that he had done.

Make lampshades out of human skin,

take skulls and make soup bowls out of them,

and had a tremendous number of things that he did

that were kind of macabre.

He knew that they had made a movie.

The comparison between the two of them was so right on

that it was very, very scary.

But I was interested.

I've always been curious.

That's been my downfall.

You know, over the years,

when these movies would come out about Ed Gein,

I never was really interested because we lived the fact.

It's a terrible thing for Ed Gein,

it's a terrible thing for the people involved,

and it was a terrible thing

for the whole community of Plainfield.

Why Ed Gein done what he done, I don't know.

It's just too bad that the whole thing happened.

Don't know what to call him.

I don't know if he was deranged or if he was insane.

I'm not proud to connect my dad with Ed Gein.

But I'm proud of the way he handled the case

and that things were handled the way they were handled.

I once made a movie,

rather tongue-in-cheek, called Psycho.

A lot of people looked at this thing and said,

"What a dreadful thing to do," "How awful," and so forth.

But, of course, to me,

it had great elements of the cinema in it.

Psycho originally appealed

to one of Hitchcock's assistants,

who placed the novel in front of Hitchcock and said,

"Let's do this next, boss."

We all enjoy, shall we say,

putting our toe in the cold water of fear.

Hitchcock had just made North by Northwest.

And what came after this was The Birds.

Psycho is a kind of outlier for Hitchcock in many ways.

First of all, of course, it's much more of a horror film

compared to the suspense that he typically is associated with.

Possibly what drew Hitchcock to Psycho

was the idea that this was an American

small-town horror story.

I think he was so attracted

to this material in general

because he was interested in what makes a character tick

and how we can understand a character

via that character's psychology.

The name of Ed Gein means return of memories,

memories that many have been trying to forget.

Hitchcock attempted to get financing

through his studio for this,

and the studio pushed it away, rejected it, and said,

"You can't make this film. This is not what we want."

And so what Hitchcock did

was enforce the terms of his contract,

which gave him creative control over even big questions like,

"Okay. What film are we doing next?"

You have to remember that this process of frightening

is done by means of a given medium,

the medium of pure cinema.

Hitchcock used his TV crew,

not his film crew, to make this.

And that's part of the reason

why the film's in black and white

when his previous films had been in color.

He was using the tools that his TV crew knew best

to make this film.

That's one really interesting thing about Psycho.

Of course, at that time, black and white

is still a little bit more associated with realism

than color film, right?

Because color has this long history

of being used as something of fantasy.

Think about The Wizard of Oz.

When Dorothy goes to Oz,

all of a sudden, everything's in color.

We still kind of have those associations

with black and white versus color by 1960.

We don't think of Psycho as, like, a realism,

realistic kind of movie.

But the use of that particular kind of film stock

actually places it much more in the realm of lived experience

and of the world.

The assembly of pieces of film to create fright

is the essential part of my job,

just as much as a painter would,

by putting certain colors together,

create evil on canvas.

Well, I-I run the office

and, uh, tend the cabins and grounds and --

and do little, uh, errands for my mother.

I think the first time I saw Psycho, I was a teenager.

I think I was about 15.

And it scared the living daylights out of me.

I was absolutely terrified.

I mean, it was just absolute terror.

The movie signals something about this interest in violence,

this interest in the kind of perversions

underneath the placid surface.

Sometimes when she talks to me like that,

I feel I'd like to go up there.

This is a shot that is so famous,

and many people turn to this shot

when they're talking about Psycho.

And that's because this is a really, really great

low angle here where we see Norman Bates.

Something's very, very wrong.

Something's wrong in Norman's psychology.

All is not what it seems.

And this is the scene where Norman says something equivalent

to, "A boy's best friend is his mother."

One of the things that we can see

as Hitchcock's career progresses is that he really uses

a lot of these kind of psychoanalytic approaches

and approaches to character psychology.

And that was part of what made it such a raging success.

Psycho was released just over two years

after Ed Gein's crimes were discovered.

I've suggested that Psycho be seen

from the beginning.

In fact, this is more than a suggestion.

It is required.

This was the very first time

that audiences were not allowed to enter the film

after the movie had started.

So if you wanted to buy a ticket and go see Psycho,

you had to get there when it started,

because Hitchcock didn't want anybody to give away the twist.

No one but no one will be admitted to the theater

after the start of each performance of Psycho.

Audiences loved the film.

It was amazingly popular.

But reviewers, less so.

And in many of the reviews,

Hitchcock was getting a lot of credit for, like...

"And, wow, Hitchcock had the courage

to kill off the main character so early."

This film had a horrible scene at the beginning

of a girl being murdered in a shower.

Well, I deliberately made that pretty rough,

but as the film developed,

I put less and less physical horror into it.

I was transferring it from film into their minds.

So towards the end, I had no violence at all.

But the audience, by this time, was screaming in agony.

Psycho was a lot more raw than earlier Hitchcock films.

And I don't want to make it sound

that Hitchcock wasn't interested in psychology before,

but here in Psycho, we have it linked up

with it actually being a real story,

and that makes it really, really scary.

It's in the title.

It's about somebody being a psychotic.

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.

And that's what I think makes it such a different horror film.

I grew up in the 1950s, baby boomer,

and going to the movies all the time.

All the monsters --

All the monsters in movies back then...

...were alien in some way.

What Hitchcock did with Psycho

was he created the first, like, all-American cinematic monster.

And it was, of course, directly inspired by Gein.

I was doing emergency coverage

at Mendota Mental Health Institute.

I was on the ward,

and one of the nurses said, "Have you met Ed Gein?"

I said, "No, I haven't."

She said, "Well, let me introduce you."

I was interested.

I've always been curious.

That's been my downfall.

I saw the movie Psycho when I was in high school.

And I was terrified by it.

I remember I was with a girlfriend of mine.

We had gone to see the movie.

When we left the movie,

we walked down the middle of the street

'cause we weren't going to be near anybody

who could do anything to us.

When you saw the rocker, the rocking chair...

and you saw the mother.

...and you saw him,

you could see that Ed Gein was the prototype for the character.

The first meeting of him,

he was in what we called the day room.

And I went up to talk to him.

We would talk about the weather.

We would talk about some of the things he remembered

about his life.

He was aware that he had been very much written about

and talked about.

Nice man. Just like anybody else.

Seems to be harmless fella, you know?

I knew his dad more than 40 years ago,

when he used to haul potatoes in town.

He was very soft spoken.

My sister-in-law -- she's in a home now --

She said, "Did you know Eddie Gein killed Mrs. Worden?"

He knew that they had made a movie

in which he was the prototype for the character.

Oh.

We have 12 vacancies -- 12 cabins, 12 vacancies.

Ed Gein was Norman Bates, and Norman Bates was Ed Gein --

mild-mannered, attractive, nice to people around him.

But very much hidden were all of the crazy things that he did.

Some people had made movies or some characters after him,

but that didn't make him any better.

He was just very bland about everything.

He never seemed to show much emotion.

But that's so common in serial murderers.

But he didn't like to talk about his crimes.

He didn't want to glorify it.

Psycho was such a powerful movie.

He had so many people after him.

He was hounded by everybody.

There will be an auction here Palm Sunday.

But this house and the personal belongings of Ed Gein

will be conspicuously absent.

Call it an act of God or whatever you will.

The main attraction will be missing,

reduced to a mass of rubble by a mysterious fire.

All we knew is that one morning we got up

and Eddie Gein's house had burnt down.

The farm where at Gein lived

and where much of the grisly evidence has been found

has been leveled.

It burned down one night. No one knows why.

But since then, the ground has been bulldozed over

and trees planted there, trying, apparently,

to wipe out every vestige of the grisly tragedy.

We had heard that it took a long time

for the fire department to get there.

I'm sure it was arson, and I think there was proof of that,

but everybody was glad.

We'd heard they were gonna make a museum out of it,

and that would be the last thing that the community needed.

After it burnt, everybody was glad that it had burnt

rather than having a museum of a sick man's home.

The people of Plainfield and the area hope that 10 years --

Oh, stop. There's... Stop a minute.

But a period of 10 years isn't enough for people to forget.

The farmers and people of Plainfield

hope they won't have to return to the agony,

the notoriety that accompanied the Ed Gein case

just 10 years ago.

He was found incompetent for many years.

And I think the reason was because what he did

was just so outrageous.

It was so bizarre that the psychiatrists that evaluated him

as well as the judge, probably, said, "I just don't know.

Let's just wait and see what we have."

Eventually, he was found competent to proceed

because he always was competent.

Oh, he looks somewhat healthier.

He seemed a rather dark and gaunt personage 10 years ago.

He seems more like a middle-aged businessman at this time.

Ed Gein, he had all kinds of fantasies

about traveling to Europe.

This is the courtroom where Ed Gein was.

- Hey, Scott. - Hey, Wes.

Nice to see you.

This would have been whereabouts Ed Gein stood

when he was on trial.

I pretty much think it's identical

to what it was back then, from the photos I've seen.

Judge Robert Gollmar presided over Gein's 1968 trial.

Gein was found insane.

When he first appeared before me,

I got the impression somewhat of a puppy.

He was a small, neat-looking man,

and he stood there

with a kind of ingratiating little smile on his face.

It was obvious he wanted to make a good impression on the judge,

and if he'd had a tail to wiggle,

I'm sure the puppy description would apply to him.

I had contacted Judge Robert Gollmar

and was invited to his home.

He did have this kind of Colonel Sanders aura about him.

He'd kind of basked, I think, a little

in his connection to the Gein case...

...because it was obviously kind of the highlight

of his judicial career,

and he had taken advantage of his position in the case

to write a book about Gein.

One thing he did do in the book

was reproduce crime-scene photographs

of Bernice Worden's violated corpse hanging from the rafters,

disemboweled -- very shocking photographs...

...which had incurred the anger

and the resentment of the people of Plainfield,

because they felt those photographs

should never have been publicized.

He took parts of the people home with him.

He took the skin of women particularly.

He decorated furniture with it.

He made many other items out of it.

At that time --

I don't know if it still holds --

but Wisconsin had what they call these bifurcated,

or split trials.

First, Gein would be tried for the murder of Bernice Worden.

Then he would immediately have another trial

in which his mental competence would be determined.

My folks never talked about a trial.

I don't think that they thought we needed to know

these horrific details of the crime.

We knew that my dad was having --

We thought that my dad was having heart problems.

My dad would get such bad pains, and I hated to see that.

I'd say, "Dad, what's the matter?

What's the matter?" "Oh, nothing.

I just got indigestion," he'd say.

But then one night, it was just a massive heart attack,

and that was it.

He had just turned 43 years old.

One of his relatives said

that the sheriff was actually the last victim of Ed Gein

because he was so disturbed by what he'd seen

and so disturbed at what Ed Gein's actions

did to him personally,

Ed Gein may as well have killed him.

Gein was found guilty

of the first-degree murder of Bernice Worden.

Immediately, there was a second part of the trial,

and he was declared mentally incompetent

and returned to the mental institution.

So, in effect,

Gein was convicted and acquitted at the same time.

The issue is his mental state

at the time of the crime.

In this case, you could argue that he has a mental disorder,

but that's not all with respect in meeting the legal standard.

You need a defect of reason.

And that usually means your thinking is delusional --

"God told me to do it."

"Martians are controlling my mind" -- that type of thing.

Well, Gein knew what he was doing.

He knew very well what he was doing.

When I look at this from a distance,

I don't see any basis for incompetency or legal insanity.

Disturbance? Yes.

Legal insanity? Based on what?

He knew what he was doing,

and he knew what he was doing was wrong.

That's the standard.

Back in 1962,

the crime-scene investigators returned all the body parts

from Ed Gein's house, and they put them in a mass grave,

which would include Mary Hogan's head.

So they're all in that one grave.

So this is the spot of the mass grave

where all the body parts are.

His skin suit, all the masks,

Mary Hogan's head is probably here.

So now we're trying to uncover it.

Okay. This is it. We found it.

It says, "This is dedicated to the unknown

that are buried here."

Gein admitted to digging up nine to 11 bodies,

most from this Plainfield cemetery.

But to this day,

no one is sure how many graves may actually be empty.

So it's actually weird that they would not have confirmed

and identified precisely who was missing from which grave.

I don't think nowadays anyone would accept the --

What should we call him?

The patient or the perpetrator?

...would accept their self-report as being valid

and entirely truthful,

especially if you're raising issues about mental illness.

Plainfield does not want to be remembered

as the home of Ed Gein.

People here do not want to be reminded that it was murder

and grave robbery which put Plainfield on the map.

The people of Plainfield were angry

that the world had shined a spotlight on them

as the home of Ed Gein.

They were this small farming community

that was perfectly happy with being isolated

and not being known by the rest of the world.

It was very traumatic to the community.

And after the Gein crimes came to light,

all these jokes began to circulate around the community.

They were called "Geiners."

So they're not especially funny, but it would be like,

"Why did Ed Gein always keep the heat on in his house?

So the furniture wouldn't get goose bumps."

Or, "Why didn't people want to play cards with Ed?

'Cause they were afraid he'd come up with a good hand."

"What were Ed Gein's favorite pastries?

Ladyfingers." You know, stuff like that.

You know, folklorists tend to see that kind of sick humor

as, you know, a defense against all the horrors.

I remember when we first were reading Harold Schechter

about the concept of Geiners,

and it's kind of a direct line to us,

to The Last Podcast on the Left.

It's more of kind of a mirror of, like, how people react

to that horrible thing and why we say these jokes,

which is to cope with horrible information.

It's showtime.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

came out in 1974.

A lot of people were very upset by Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

What's the matter, honey? You don't look so good.

Some people were very, very disgusted

and walked out of the film.

They were so upset by what they saw as hyperviolence on-screen.

You're going to see a movie called Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Like, what do you expect?

But for a lot of audiences, it also was thrilling.

It was something that was so new, that was so different,

that was doing something entirely new with this form

and with this genre.

When you understand

that it's partially based on an actual story,

on something that actually happened...

What happened was true.

...all of the sudden, that outlandishness

becomes something that's possible in real life

and possible in somewhere like Wisconsin.

Part of the film's inspiration came from the news.

And it was so graphic.

I mean, it was -- it was unbelievable.

I have relatives from Wisconsin

that lived about 27 miles from, you know,

where the Ed Gein incident happened.

And so when the Wisconsin relatives came to town...

...they would tell this story

about the guy that covered his furniture with human skin...

...makes the human-skin lampshades.

"Oh, my God."

And, you know, those people continuously wound me up.

Whatever they told me --

and I'm sure I can't or wouldn't even want to recall all of it --

but it stuck with me.

It was always ever-present.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

After you stop screaming, you'll start talking about it.

People are afraid of that little house

in the middle of an abandoned field...

...when you're driving down the highway.

It's why Texas Chainsaw Massacre

was based off of his actions,

why Psycho was based off of his actions.

Because it was just such a unique moment in crime history.

And then you see the guy who did it,

and it's this goofy backwoods gremlin.

I first saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was 22.

I can identify that it was at this exact moment

because it left, like, a really dirty stain on my brain

that I have never been able to scrub away since.

I remember really clearly seeing that opening of the film...

and being so unsettled and so upset,

because what that extreme close-up of an eye does

is it puts us immediately in the zone of watching something.

I think by making Leatherface into this character

who wears somebody else's face,

Tobe Hooper is in some ways making a really sick joke

about how we understand character psychology to work

and how we understand our own psychologies to work.

The face that we present to the world,

often that is kind of the face of another person,

but here it's literalized in Leatherface.

And so imitators and people inspired by it,

they kind of sprang up really, really quickly,

because it was so abundantly clear

that this was a work of such imagination, such creativity,

but also it was a work that was so rooted

in exactly what was happening in the U.S. at exactly that moment.

I probably saw him about 10 times.

Every time I went, I was a new person to him,

even though I had seen him before.

And he would not recognize me --

or he wouldn't seem to recognize me.

People in the hospital basically didn't react at all to him

because he was basically just a patient.

He was demented.

So he really didn't cause any problems.

They never had to call any codes

or any special kinds of interventions

because he was acting out.

He was just there.

He was a monster.

And I think people tended to not see that part of him.

Gein lived as a model prisoner.

Never displayed, certainly, any signs of violence.

The big story was that he was harmless.

I think people kind of felt sorry for him

because he had been there for years now

and wasn't showing symptoms.

It just seemed, in many, many ways,

Ed's life in a mental institution

was far better, you know, than the kind of life

he had been living up to that point.

You know, he was living in this horror house,

you know, surrounded by the body parts of human beings.

No electricity, no running water.

The only living things in the house were the spiders

and the vermin.

Now he was, as they say, three hots and a cot.

We had other human interactions and so on and so forth.

So, you know, I think he lived out his life,

you know, pretty contentedly.

My takeaway from my time with Ed Gein

was I was very sad for him.

He was really an enigma...

and he could never have made anything different in his life.

This is it.

Ed's right here.

The tombstone got stolen.

So once it got returned, it's right now in a basement --

Some cemetery board member has it,

and they're talking about burying it somewhere,

so they never put one back on.

Augusta's right here.

Henry's on the far left end.

I always get an adrenaline rush being out here,

seeing all the souvenirs being left for Ed.

All the incense and work gloves and flowers.

A lot of people come out here and visit Ed.

Eddie had a very troubled life,

and I think it had to be a relief to him when the end came.

It affected me not one way or the other.

Eddie had been there part of my life.

Now he's gone.

I'm from Chicago,

so Ed Gein was always satelliting in my consciousness.

I'm Chuck Parello.

I am the director of the movie Ed Gein.

It is time for you to do the Lord's work.

Are you ready, Edward?

I'm ready, Mama.

I got into the preparation

for making the Ed Gein movie by first watching

as many incarnations of the story that I could.

So I watched Psycho, Silence of the Lambs,

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deranged.

And we did go to Plainfield.

I did feel an obligation to make it historically accurate.

I thought there had been so many fictitious takes on it

and people just borrowing elements from it

that this time around, we were going to tell it

the way that it really happened.

The portrayal of Ed in my film

actually comes off as kind of sympathetic.

I think that ended up being the right decision

because you do empathize with him,

even though he's a horrible, degenerate person.

He was misunderstood, and he just didn't get any help.

I don't really see him as evil.

I see him as someone who's sick,

whose psychosis just kept getting worse and worse

and...who couldn't get any help.

The evilness that manifests itself

in the bad stuff that he did was quite another matter.

There was a scene in the script

where Ed was sewing together a skin suit,

and I ended up taking it out just because it was too similar

to something that was in The Silence of the Lambs.

I knew there would be fanboys who would say,

"Oh, you took that from The Silence of the Lambs,

not knowing that it was actual source-material stuff.

There's been six movies based on the book Psycho,

and there's been a prequel TV show.

House of 1000 Corpses

is a movie that clearly fits into this lineage.

It's so clearly influenced by Tobe Hooper,

but then also with Ed Gein put back in and made central,

more so than in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Then Devil's Rejects is a great example,

because that film also takes on a kind of twisted Americana.

There's definitely things about movies like Ed Gein

and Psycho that really makes you look twice

at the kindly neighbor,

you know, that lives next door to you.

When Ed Gein came out, it just became a hit.

All of a sudden, it was everywhere.

But at the end of the day,

you just turn it off and go back to leading your normal life.

One thing I tried to do was to show the plight of the victims

and show that these people

actually had horrible things happen.

I think that's what makes it have longevity

and stick-to-your-ribs kind of appeal.

I think all of these movies

and the story of Ed Gein,

they really demonstrate a couple of things.

They tell us that horror

is something that is a way that we understand ourselves.

It is a necessary element of how the United States functions.

I think one of the main attractions

to the Ed Gein character is that he was an outsider.

We've all felt like we didn't belong,

people didn't like us.

So there's this general thing that just --

that everybody can identify with, and I certainly did.

Well, I mean, no one knew of the existence of this tape.

I mean, this casts a whole new light on the Gein case.

It's the whole context.

It's almost as if something emerged,

a crack in Gein's psychology that allowed all this primitive,

archaic stuff to pour out.

In this modern America,

where all these families were gathered around,

you know, watching Leave It to Beaver on TV,

you know, you had this guy, simultaneously,

in this little hellhole of a house...

...dressing in the victims' skin and so on.

The question arises as to why does Gein

or any offender like him keep doing it over and over again?

And the answer is it's part of what arouses them sexually,

and the sexual instinct itself is strong.

The fact that Gein kept doing it

shows how strong the compulsion was,

how strong the urge was to do it over and over and over again.

And if he didn't get caught,

he would have continued to do it until he got arrested.

When I listen to the tapes, there's the researcher in me

that's interested at an intellectual level

about learning more from the actual words of a killer

describing in detail why they did what they did.

So there's a part of me

that's just intellectually fascinated by that.

But then there's another part of me that, you know,

when I take off the researcher hat,

there's an eeriness in hearing somebody

who's seemingly so oblivious

to the nature of what they have been doing.

Ed Gein doesn't even remember some of the things

or pretends or talks about how he doesn't remember things.

So the banality of what he's talking about

is also really striking.

The man is truly very ill.

So as you're talking to him,

it's becoming very, very evident that he is --

You're hearing him. One-word sentences.

They end like, "That's right. That's right."

Like just trying to just -- like he's talking about the weather.

He sounds exactly as I expected him to sound,

but he has an underlying urge that he does not understand.

Like, there's something inside of him

that is absolutely undying.

It will not go away.

And this is the only way that he can manifest that.

That's the most calm person I've ever heard

with a bunch of vulvas in a box, you know?

What do you think Augusta would have thought of all this?

Augusta would have disapproved.

Ed Gein was a puzzle.

Why did he come out the way he did?

Why didn't his brother turn out the way Ed Gein did?

They were raised in the same family...

...the same kind of relationship,

the same mother and father, the same environment.

Why did Ed Gein become such a horrible murderer?

Someday, somebody who's smarter than I am

is going to figure out these people

before they kill everybody.