It’s also hard not to see a streak of Gein in the movie’s most harrowing three minutes, when Sally (played by Marilyn Burns) wakes up tied to a chair for the most demented dinner party imaginable in a room full of human detritus. Psycho may have taken the mother fixation and riffed on it, but Hooper’s film takes inspiration from the ickier, more grotesque details of Ed Gein’s strange life. Though there’s no grave-robbing in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the scene where Leatherface hoists up a terrified victim to impale her on a meathook is straight out of the Gein police report (the movie, it must be said, is surprisingly restrained in its gore). He admitted that, over the years, he’d made up to 40 trips to various graveyards, digging up the graves of mostly middle-aged women and dissecting them at his home. Gein confessed to everything, including the murder, three years before, of tavern owner Mary Hogan, whose skull and organs were among those found at the house. When he was arrested, the sheriff reportedly was so distressed that he grabbed Gein by the head, banging his face into a brick wall. One can only imagine the horror that those police officers experienced when they forced their way into Ed Gein’s museum of the grotesque. The trail led them to Gein’s farmhouse where they discovered her headless, naked body, hanging upside down from a meat hook and slit open down the front. A local hardware store owner by the name of Bernice Worden had gone missing.
It wasn’t until 1957 that the police caught up with Ed Gein.
The texas chain saw massacre ed gein movie#
Robert Bloch admitted the Gein case helped inform his 1959 book (on which the 1960 movie was based), while Sacha Gervasi’s 2012 Hitchcock biopic actually features fantasy sequences of the director visited by a vision of Gein (played by actor Michael Wincott). It’s hard not to see echoes with Psycho here. And he was absolutely alone in the world." As the author Harold Schechter wrote, with Augusta’s death, Ed had "lost his only friend and one true love. No-one knows when the grave-robbing started for Ed Gein, except that it was after his mother died on 29 December, 1945, at the age of 67. Despite the coroner listing asphyxiation as the official cause of death, there were bruises found around Henry’s head, leading some to suspect that his brother was Ed Gein’s first killing. In 1944 Ed Gein’s brother perished in a fire on the farm. Even Henry (Ed’s brother), who by this time was dating a divorcee with plans to move in with her, would worry about Ed’s unusual closeness to their mother.īut Henry wasn’t long for this world.
With her husband’s death, Augusta’s mental hold over Ed grew evermore tight. When the Geins left, it wasn’t the animal cruelty that incensed Augusta, but the fact that the man wasn’t married to the woman he was living with.Īlcoholism finally claimed George Gein’s life in 1940, when Ed was 34. One day, the family went to buy some straw and witnessed a man beating a dog till it was dead. Ed’s mother, Augusta, was a hardline, Old Testament-spouting Lutheran who preached daily to Ed and his brother Henry about the immorality of the world and how all women were whores.
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