he's a complete psycho

WITH the possible exception of Vlad the Impaler,no human being has inspired as many horror movies as Ed Gein.

So far,around 40 films have been based on the lonely,middle-aged farm boy who,in the mid-Fifties,dug up cadavers for company.While most of these such as Three on a Meathook or Skinner went straight to the video bin,the wacky Wisconsin handyman also inspired the low- budget verit horror film Deranged as well as such classic chillers as Psycho,The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.Yet,up until now,the man himself,the man who "scared the hell out of America ",has been off-limits for moviemakers.

This is mainly due to Ed 's modus operandi.Although his exploits later gave birth to the term "serial killer "Edward R Gein was in fact found guilty of committing just one murder.

But it wasn 't so much how many Gein killed as what he did with the bodies of those already dead.While the good burghers of Plainfield,Wisconsin, slept in their beds,Ed was down in the graveyard digging up their relatives and creating the ultimate house of horror with their spare parts.

"I think it 's taken this long to bring Ed to the screen because any studio executive who wanted to keep his job shied away from the more unsavoury aspects of the story,"says Chuck Par-ello,director of the upcoming bio-pic Ed Gein."But recent movies like Hannibal have proved that nobody 's shocked by anything any more so now we can really explore Ed 's pathology."

That pathology,according to Ed Gein 's British producer,Hamish McAlpine,"all comes down to mother loss ".Indeed,Augusta Gein 's demise left her son Ed feeling so lonely that he decided to exhume her.Unfortunately,he waited a whole year before putting his plan into action,so she wasn 't exactly in good shape.Therefore,the resourceful Gein had to salvage parts of other recently buried bodies,both to repair her and also to provide her with "some company ".

"When he dug up those bodies," points out McAlpine,"they were all freshly buried women,which he then took home and pretended were mum."

The producer then reveals that although Ed 's house was a complete tip,"he always kept his mother 's bedroom absolutely immaculate ".

Such was the derangement of Gein 's mind that writers and moviemakers have been able to pick 'n ' mix through the handyman 's pathology and still leave room for the next generation to take up the bloody trail.Thus Psycho seized on and transformed Gein 's mother fixation.Fourteen years later Tobe Hooper exploited the myth and ritual of the American hunter tracking his (human)prey for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.And then Jonathan Demme backtracked to Gein 's sexual psychosis to explore the methodology of serial killers in The Silence of the Lambs.

To fans of Psycho who feel a sense of dj vu when confronted with the scenario of an only son in thrall to an over-possessive mother,Gein 's misdeeds will sound all too familiar.("All women are sluts,"Augusta repeatedly warned her son.)But,as Robert Bloch, whose novel provided the basis for Hitchcock 's 1960 classic,conceded later on in the 1970s,Ed Gein "went Norman [Bates ]one better ".

When the local sheriff broke into Gein 's farmhouse on 16 November 1957,it was the opening day of the hunting season.All kinds of human body parts had been severed,hung up or adapted into items of clothing or home furnishings.Suffice to say that Ed 's armchairs really were arm chairs.What 's more,Gein indulged in necrophilia and cannibalism - a human heart was waiting to be boiled up in a saucepan and all kinds of other "isms "which,as Bloch pointed out,"would not have been very popular with readers in the 1950s ".

SO it wasn 't until the more liberated 1970s that Ed Gein 's more disturbing decorative and culinary habits could be explored in 1974 's Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Gein 's Grand Guignol filters into Hooper 's film through its native-Indian-style decor and ritual.Like most people,the movie 's main villain, Leatherface,decorates his home in a way that reflects his personality Grandma and the family dog have been dried out and hung up like hunting trophies and there are also a couple of those arm chairs.But as for delving into the endlessly rich seams of Gein 's pathology,that would become the preserve a decade later of the

crime-journalist-turned-cult-novelist Thomas Harris.

Like the film it inspired, Harris's novel, The Silence of the Lambs, is connected to Psycho as well as to Gein. Both feature male protagonists deformed by dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. But whereas Norman Bates kills his mother out of jealousy, Harris's Buffalo Bill/Jame Gumb kills because he wants his mummy back.

In an even eerier echo of Ed, Buffalo Bill feels wrong in his own skin.

Asked why he killed, Gein muttered: "Well, you see, it was a sex problem.

I blame all my trouble on my mother. She should have made me a girl."

But where Ed just expressed a wish, Buffalo Bill uses the skin of his victims to assemble the suit he believes will make him feel like a woman.

And, in that sense, his roots go back even further than Ed Gein's, since he is a figure stitched together like that prototype of horror Frankenstein's monster.

Unlike his hapless victims, Gein died of natural causes in the Central State Hospital of Wisconsin in 1984 at the age of 77. Ten years earlier, sickened by the sight of ghoulish tourists, the citizens of Plainfield had descended on Gein's farmhouse and razed it to the ground. In some ways, they were way too late. Ed Gein's legacy had already escaped and his fictional children had woven themselves firmly into the fabric of American horror.

Copyright 2001
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