wider context of 1980s ED GEIN

True life murderer Ed Gein was an unusual character, born on a farm and raised by a domineering mother. In the space of a few years his entire family died and he was left to raise the farm all by himself. In the next few years he became a grave robber, a necrophiliac, a cannibal, and also took up arts and crafts in body parts. He is seen as one of the most weird and bizarre serial killers of the twentieth century, and maybe only Jeffrey Dahmer got as close to what Ed did. His crimes also inspired the movies Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs. This page is a documentation of his life and crimes.
In his spare time Ed read books on human anatomy and Nazi concentration camp experiments. He was quite interested by it all, especially the female anatomy. Alone in the farmhouse he thought endlessly about sex, until one day he saw a newspaper report of a woman who had been buried that day.
He enlisted the help of an old friend named Gus. Gus was a weird loner too, and quite definitely odd - he went to the asylum a few years later. Gus was Ed Gein’s trusted buddy, and agreed to assist Ed in opening a grave to secure a corpse for ‘medical experiments’. Gus helped dig the graves.
The first corpse came from a grave less than a dozen feet away from the last resting place of Gein’s mother.
Over the next ten years Ed did the same, checked the newspaper for fresh bodies, always visiting the graveyard at the time of a full moon, got the whole female corpse or just the parts he wanted, filled in the grave and took his winnings home. His experiments with the dead bodies was bizarre. He would construct objects from the bones and skin and would store the organs in the fridge to eat later. He also committed acts of necrophilia on the bodies. He even dug up his own mother’s corpse.
Gein was in a series of examinations at the Central State Hospital for the Criminally insane. He was proven insane. The reasons for his actions were seen; he loved his mother but he hated her, so that is why he killed older women. It is said that Mary Hogan had more of a passing resemblance to his mother.
Ed Gein’s activities certainly inspired the literature and film industry. Because of the true nature of the crimes it gave Hollywood a lot of ideas to work on.
One such early film was Psycho. Based on the Robert Bloch novel and made into a Hitchcock film. The connection being the overpowering mother and horror of the film, it made it one of the first of a kind. Robert Bloch got most of the ideas for Psycho from Ed Gein's life.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one movie lightly based on Ed Gein. The story is about a group of travelling teen’s who stumble on a horror house. The house’s residents are a family of weird homicidal cannibals who also like grave robbing and constructing furniture made of bones and skulls alike. The lead bad guy is called ‘Leatherface’. Leatherface likes chasing teen’s around with his chainsaw and wearing the human face mask of his victims. There are about four Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies each with the teen’s trying to escape the deadly Leatherface. The connection is mostly with the house, graverobbery and the cannibalism.
One more recent and Academy Award winning film is Silence of the Lambs. It’s about an FBI agent who’s tracking down a serial killer and to find him she must get the help of an intelligent cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lector. The serial killer she’s trying to track down is called ‘Buffalo Bill’ because he likes to kill women and make clothes of their skin, also he wants to be a woman, hence the skin costume like that of Gein. There are a lot of connections to this film and Ed Gein, being with the skin clothes, cannibalism, and Buffalo Bill being a transvestite.

Ed Gein was definitely one of the most weird murderers of this century. Even though he did kill only two women and suspected for the disappearance of others he is seen as one of the worlds infamous killers. Its what was found in Gein’s house that made him instantly infamous in the murder world.