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The Crimes That Built American Horror: What Gein Actually Did
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ed Gein's confirmed murders were only two — but the grave-robbed bodies, the skin masks, and the shrine inside that Plainfield farmhouse created American horror's founding mythology. This is what investigators actually found, and why the damage had been building for decades.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what most people get wrong about Ed Gein. They think the horror started when the police walked into that barn.
To understand what happened in Plainfield, Wisconsin, you have to start with Augusta Gein. Augusta was Ed's mother.
The neighbors thought he was odd. Harmless, but odd.
In December of nineteen fifty-four, a woman named Mary Hogan disappeared from the tavern she ran in Pine Grove, Wisconsin. There was a blood trail.
On November sixteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, Bernice Worden didn't open her hardware store in Plainfield. She was the owner.
Gein was found incompetent to stand trial initially and was committed to a psychiatric facility. He stayed there for a decade before being declared fit.
Here's the thing about Robert Bloch. He was a professional horror writer living in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, less than fifty miles from Plainfield, when the Gein story broke.
Alfred Hitchcock was in a particular position in the late nineteen fifties. He was famous but feeling constrained.
The lineage from Gein to American horror cinema runs straight and clear. Tobe Hooper was aware of the Gein case when he made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in nineteen seventy-four.
Robert Bloch could have written about any number of real criminals. What made Gein the right story was the psychological legibility of it.
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