The term “serial killer” does not hang well onto Ed Gein. For one, he lacked the numbers, being easily apprehended after his second victim. He lacked the numbers because he lacked the skill. He was not blessed with Bundy’s charm, Rader’s discipline, or Dahmer’s unbelievable luck. Nor did he have the diabolic prosocial graces that allowed all of them to blend into and prey upon normal society. And once caught, he faded into institutionalized obscurity while Bundy, Ian Brady, Edmund Kemper (whom Patrick Bateman confuses for Gein in American Psycho), and many others never seem to shut up. This was just as well, as Gein’s actions speak loudly enough, defying easy description in a kind of nether realm between crime and folk art. Yet it became such irresistible fodder for America’s morbid imagination that Gein became something like the ur-serial killer, outdoing the more typical examples in spirit while doing, in concrete terms, much less.
Gein’s cultural ubiquity would seem to assure immediate inclusion into the post-Serial true crime pantheon. But this was not to be. While in the last five years there have been multiple documentaries and films about Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer alone, Gein laid more or less dormant since 2007 when Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield was released. It’s a run of the mill slasher with Kane Hodder, the Jason Vorhees actor who in no way resembles Gein, in the titular role, suggesting that the Gein framing was added in post. Perhaps without a special break there was nothing new to add. And then the break came, or was at least more consciously sought out given recent trends.
Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein breaks the long silence surrounding the Wisconsin sphinx, by bringing us his actual voice. This continues the habit of archival digging for serial killers explaining themselves. That Gein’s taped interrogation had been gathering dust from his arrest in 1957 to 2019 seems somewhat disingenuous, but I and many others are willing to set that aside for the sheer novelty of this most enigmatic and influential of killers.
An account of Ed Gein is incomplete without a recitation of the facts of the case. On November 19, 1957, Frank Worden visited his mother Bernice’s hardware store in Plainfield, WI after a deer hunt to find her and a company truck missing, and a blood trail leading out the back door. Gein had been in the store the day before inquiring about antifreeze and flirting with Bernice. A receipt for that very product sent sheriffs to search Gein’s farm. Bernice Worden’s body was found in a shed on the property, decapitated and gutted and hanging from the ankles like a hunted animal. Within the house, they discovered the remains of another women who’d disappeared from the tavern she owned in a similar manner, and many more human remains beside from the many bodies he’d desecrated in the local cemetery. Much indeed has been made of the skull bowls and bedposts, the nipple belts, human skin lampshades and upholstery, literal face masks, stray appendages piled up in boxes, and the heart sitting in a frying pan. Gein was arrested, found unfit for trial, and spent the last 17 years of his life in a psychiatric hospital.
Such is the novelty of the Gein case that Lost Tapes (I’m not calling it Psycho for clarity reasons) opens with two viewer discretion disclaimers: a real one and a “seriously, this is gross” one for those who’ve clearly already looked at the crime scene photos, of which the show makes liberal use. Lost Tapes is entertaining in its ghoulish way, utilizing grainy Super 8 effects, stock footage of mid-century Americana, a creepy deepfake of Gein, and other gritty production touches that make you nostalgic for Nine Inch Nails videos. All the talking heads are accounted for: a biographer, a horror film professor, a serial homicide professor, a forensic psychiatrist, a local historian sauntering through the Plainfield cemetery, a necrophilia expert, and some podcasters whose full names are not given.
After the grisly details, the tapes play their central role. Every participant is given the chance to hear the recordings and analyze their contents. I’ve only seen two episodes but can already say that the tapes don’t offer much. Gein was questioned by a judge and a DA who were, understandably, out of their depth, asking leading questions to which Gein mostly gives yes/no answers in his barely audible Elmer Fudd voice. All the conclusions are unsurprising: Gein is evasive and deflecting his direct responsibility on bad memory; he doesn’t feel empathy. He doesn’t seem to feel much of anything. Whether or not an insanity defense would pass muster today—I’m no lawyer, but I rather doubt it would—it seems clear enough at the time that few would have any idea how to otherwise handle this anomalous individual. It is not every day you meet a paradigm shift in the flesh.
At the time of Gein’s arrest, Robert Bloch, a pulp author and Lovecraft correspondent who’d been living in Wisconsin at the time, was writing a novel about man in a small town living in isolation with his neurotic, emotionally abusive mother who seemed to be murdering guests at their motel, published as Psycho in 1959. Bloch was broadly aware of the case but apparently not to Gein’s similarly questionable maternal attachment and other overlaps with his sexually repressed middle-aged murderer Norman Bates. Once it was made, the connection would never be broken, and more explicit echoes, most of which would become genre classics, would follow: the Psycho film in 1960, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. (Lost Tapes references the more exploitative Deranged, also 1974, but does not comment upon it.) Ed Gein had become a legend seemingly without realizing it.
Lost Tapes, being a product of prestige true crime, has more than entertainment on its agenda, of course. Broadly speaking, prestige true crime takes all the grisly data you’d find in the musty airport paperbacks of old true crime but filters its individualistic framing through a societal prism. The lurid recounting of a criminal and their motives, such as what you’d find in Fatal Vision or Echoes in the Darkness, is widened into a polemic, if a careful one, about the systemic conditions that make criminals possible or the existential conditions which doom certain types of people to typical criminal behavior or victimhood. In this specific case, Lost Tapes aims to sort out the legend from the person, the latter being no less fascinating but which is easily lost in the artistry the person’s crimes enabled.
It doesn’t take much effort to convince the viewer that Ed Gein was beset by every possible obstacle to human socialization. He spent the majority of his life on the margins of a triple-digit-population farm town with an alcoholic nonentity of a father and a mother whose unbending piety was only equaled by her rigorous moral attitude that saw sex as inevitably corrupt and all extra-familial social activity as corrupting. Under her exacting supervision, her younger son became less a dutiful Lutheran than a psychic extension of her whims. What those whims entailed is a matter of speculation; that they didn’t adhere to accepted boundaries of any era may, however, be a safe assumption. Once Augusta died, her 39 year old son’s life fell apart; the next 12 years was marked by a kind of psychological retreat as he took on a pseudo-monastic existence on his farm.
Lost Tapes’s anointed necrophilia expert makes an important distinction about the role of fantasy. For most fantasizing creatures, the act forestalls action; but for a few fantasy may propel action. In Bloch’s novel, Norman Bates infuses intellectual airs into his interior life with his volumes of Sade and Huysmans. Gein limited himself to “men’s” magazines which often contained fetishized accounts of Nazi atrocities. Isolation, morbid fantasy, and the practical skills gained from self-sustaining farm life combined to engender Gein’s exceptional craft hobby. He monitored the local paper for funeral notices and by his own estimation spent four years robbing graves for materials.
But the humanizing approach has its limits with Gein, and indeed makes it obvious why his star, so to speak, has declined in favor of his peers. He lacks what I call a nuance void, wherein complexity, inconsistency, and open-endedness provide broader discursive opportunities. While a failed polygraph test on Dateline indicates to the viewer an individual’s likely guilt, a failed polygraph on HBO is another loose thread to pull at regardless of the impact on the polygraph failure. Though prestige true crime aims at finding truth, what truth actually is seems to mutate with the spasms of its narrative structure and the compulsive accumulation of hypotheses. Gein’s case offers few new hypotheses, and what he does offer is too heinous or too problematic to stare at directly for long. Lost Tapes can’t spend too much time dwelling on the extent to which Gein’s media consumption habits influenced his behavior, or how the male-to-female transexual Christine Jorgensen informed Gein’s own sexual ambiguities, if any. And any number of Lutherans can come out of the woodwork to counter Augusta Gein’s neurotic theology.
So Lost Tapes ends up talking around Gein. The entirely expected star of the series already is the necrophilia expert (that is literally what he is called) who’s given maybe the biggest platform he’ll ever have to air the trivia he’s acquired over the years in his area of study. For instance, only six percent of sexual murderers engage in necrophiliac practice. Indeed, necrophilia exists on a spectrum, and he has quite a few vivid examples of sad morticians to persuade you. And it would dismay engagement-addicted Twitter accounts to know that their “Can the dead consent?” thought experiments have already been a matter before state-level courts. At least at one point, the answer in Florida was “No.”
But that is in itself a nuance void, through which the viewer is allowed to consider the distinct possibility that Ed Gein’s proclivities are not so unique, if not so energetically acted upon. Indeed, the appropriation of Gein into mass media is its own illicit desecration, with each film cutting away its own portion of Gein’s case for its tailored use. Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are both preoccupied with their antagonists’ isolation, though where Psycho’s view is elegantly internal, Massacre’s is grotesquely external. While Silence of the Lambs focuses on the crisis of identity and the ramifications of having very limited outlets to process it. The series always comes back to these films and not always to its benefit. Horror has the advantage over true crime in its ability to show rather than to tell, and its freedom from any pretense of a burden of proof. Everything in horror is proven to one extent or another, how the viewer of horror responds to the proof is their own delight or dilemma.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the series takes that into consideration and ends up back where it started. Gein’s life was on so determined a course that it would have been weirder if he hadn’t done what he did. His capture ends up overtaking his crimes for having pushed American popular culture into a more intensified symbiosis between violence and art. National reckoning is a kind of deus ex machina for documentaries, but Gein practically begs it having been upheld as the ignoble savage for the antiheroic era, like a goth Davy Crockett. Lost Tapes may fall short even here, but by no fault of its own. Self-obsession may inspire distinctive artifacts, but the self-obsessed seldom rise to any meaningful self-examination. In this respect Ed Gein and the United States are simpatico. Gein may recede from view again, but he will never totally disappear unless the country that preserves his parts disappears with him.