Interpreting Ed Gein

* This text contains spoilers for Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.

November 16, 1957 - Plainfield, Wisconsin. Local police arrived at Ed Gein's home on the farm where he had lived his entire life, long after his father, brother, and mother passed away. Up until that day, Ed was seen by other townsfolk as a harmless local character. An oddball who people hired for odd jobs at their own farms, and trusted to babysit their kids.

Not even a veteran investigator could have predicted what they would find in Ed's home, and no one could predict the impact that discovery would have.

Psycho

Only two years after Ed Gein was arrested for first-degree murder and admitted to robbing nine graves - in 1959 - Robert Bloch's Psycho hit the shelves. The novel's main antagonist, Norman Bates, was Bloch's interpretation of Gein's psyche. A man who was obsessed with his mother, unsure of whether he loved or hated her, but obsessed with the values she ingrained deep inside of him. In Gein's case, his mother, Augusta, had him believe that every woman that wasn't as religious or as proper as she was, was a harlot (aka a whore, for the non-biblical folk).

When Norman Bates caught his mother in bed with her lover, betraying those principles she demanded he follow, it sent him into a homicidal rage. While Ed did not kill his mother (but almost certainly killed his brother), his two murder victims were women who looked like his mother and worked similar jobs as Augusta.

Norman’s murder of his mother mirrors the murder of Henry Gein, Ed’s older brother.

Though Norman suppressed his mother's murder, he, just like Gein, chose to dig her out of her grave and bring her home, where her bedroom was kept exactly as it was, untouched save for a layer of dust growing thicker by the day.

The combination of mental abuse, undiagnosed mental illness(es), and the isolation that Gein suffered are faithfully portrayed in the novel and the movie (released in 1960) through Norman.

But unlike Norman, Ed did not keep his mother's corpse in her bedroom. Neither did he leave it intact…

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Psycho terrorized viewers in 1960, but in 1974 horror fans got a real taste of what the Gein house may have looked like through the Sawyer family home in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

After only a few minutes of looking around the home, you'd begin noticing that the furniture and decorations made from human bones and skin were everywhere. The movie only stopped short of depicting the bowls made from human skulls (which Ed did use as his actual kitchenware), but added the cannibalism element, even though there was no evidence that Ed ever cannibalized any of his victims (to be fair, it is easy to see why anyone would assume he did).

What truly makes the movie is the depiction of Ed's most disturbing collection of items. The multiple facemasks made from human skin - adorned with lipstick - that Ed wore when he was alone.

Again, it is made clear in the movie that the character inspired by Ed, Leatherface (very subtle), suffers from undiagnosed mental illnesses, but we are also led to believe that his actual face is deformed to a point where he has to cover it with a mask, and the need to cover it at all times is so great that he collects the faces of his victims, using each mask for a different occasion.

When we see the dynamics of the Sawyer home, we see generations of grave robbers sharing a house decorated with human remains, and it is Leatherface, in a house of only men, who wears the female mask when it's time for supper.

This is an interesting choice, especially for the time, because when Leatherface wears the female mask, the audience doesn't know if he's doing it as his part in playing house, or if he has any desire to experience life as a woman, like Ed Gein did.

Some present-day analysis of Ed's mind shows that he may have been trans. However, in 50s Wisconsin, such a thing was simply unimaginable.

The Silence of the Lambs

The representation of that side of Ed came to light in Thomas Harris's 1988 classic horror novel - and the 1989 adaptation for the screen - The SIlence of the Lambs.

Ed Gein suffered from a combination of severe mental illnesses that led him to believe he not only had no option to do what he did but also believed that, since he was digging up people who were already dead instead of murdering them, he wasn't doing anything wrong. While this view of Ed's crimes may serve as a base for the character of Leatherface, the same can't be said about Buffalo Bill.

This character came to be from a combination of about four serial killers when it comes to modus operadi, but his motivation originated from the man of the hour. Unlike Ed, Bill knew what he was doing was wrong - as evidenced by the lengths to which he went hiding in old Mrs. Lippman's house - but he believed that it was the only way that he could achieve his dream. Bill thought he was transexual, or at least believed that transitioning would solve his struggle with self-hatred.

In the book, we can trace this line of thought to the obsession Bill had with his mother (I know, shocking), a failed actress whose alcoholism caused her son to go into foster care at two years old. Though he had every reason to hate his mother, he couldn't help but want to be just like her.

While we don't get that same explanation in the movie, what we do see is a realistic recreation of the infamous "woman suit", a vest made from human skin that preserved the female figure. Though it is unfinished in the movie, we now know Ed Gein made a vest that preserved the female figure and likely wore it while wearing one of his skin face masks, perhaps sitting on a chair upholstered with human skin.

I can't stress enough how deeply ill this man was, but it was enough that, in Ed Gein's mind, if he wanted to experience what it would be like to be a woman, he might as well wear one, and Bill came to the same conclusion when he was denied gender reassignment surgery.

The images shown in these movies shocked viewers who could not imagine a person who would do such things, much less one single person doing all of those things at once.

Beyond the horrors of his crimes, Gein's story was just so weird that writers and filmmakers couldn't help but wonder what was going through his mind. What kind of person could do such things? And what did that look like?

When horror is done well, it goes beyond fright, it sheds light on what has been hiding in the dark, and, on that gray November day, we all got to learn a lot about the human condition, and what happens when mental illness is left isolated, unattended, and festering.