Megan Reed
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joined Sep 2005
If you're already too lazy to even bother clicking a link...
Born at the turn of the century into the small farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin, Gein lived a repressive and solitary life on his family homestead with a weak, ineffectual brother and domineering mother who taught him from an early age that sex was a sinful thing. Eddie ran the family's 160-acre farm on the outskirts of Plainfield until his brother Henry died in 1944 and his mother in 1945. When she died, he was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. The rest of the house, however, soon degenerated into a madman's shambles. Thanks to federal subsidies, Gein no longer needed to farm his land, and he abandoned it to do odd jobs here and there for the Plainfield residents to earn himself a little extra cash. But he remained alone in the enormous farmhouse, haunted by the ghost of his overbearing mother, whose bedroom he kept locked and undisturbed, exactly as it had been when she was alive. He also sealed off the drawing room and five more upstairs rooms, living only in one downstairs room and the kitchen.
Locals knew him as Weird Old Eddie, a man whose obsession with the female anatomy spiraled into something truly depraved, fueled by a toxic cocktail of medical textbooks, anatomical diagrams, cheap pulp horror, and smutty magazines. He became particularly interested in the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War and the medical experiments performed on Jews in the concentration camps. Eventually, he moved past theory and into practice, prowling through Wisconsin cemeteries under the cover of darkness to exhume decaying women. He would butcher these remains, hoarding specific pieces—heads, organs, hearts, and guts—like trophies. He’d go as far as flaying the skin to drape over mannequins or even wearing it himself while dancing around his property, a ritual that clearly provided him with a twisted sense of euphoria. Other times, Gein would cherry-pick only the parts that fixated him most; he was pathologically obsessed with female genitalia, which he would handle and occasionally stuff into women's panties to wear around the house. It’s no shock that he turned into a total hermit, driving everyone away from his rotting, derelict farm.
Gein’s obsession with the female anatomy eventually drove him to hunt for much "fresher" material. His targets were almost always women around his mother's age, like 54-year-old Mary Hogan, who vanished from her tavern back in December 1954, and Bernice Worden, a woman in her late fifties who managed the local hardware store before disappearing on November 16, 1957. Since Mrs. Worden's son Frank served as the sheriff's deputy, things escalated quickly; after hearing that weird Old Eddie Gein had been seen lurking around town the same day his mother went missing, Frank Worden and the sheriff headed over to check out the old Gein property—a place that was already legendary among the local kids as being a haunted house.
The evidence left behind was nothing short of a waking nightmare, proving that Gein's twisted fixations had finally spiraled into cold-blooded murder and things far more depraved. In the farm's woodshed, investigators stumbled upon the naked, headless remains of Bernica Worden, suspended upside down from a meat hook with her torso sliced open. It gets worse: her head and intestines were shoved into a box, while her heart sat right there on a plate in the dining room. The sheer scale of the horror was staggering—ten preserved human heads, a discarded strip of female torso skin rolled up on the floor, a belt crafted from severed nipples, and a chair upholstered entirely in human flesh. They even found a skull cap being used as a soup bowl, lampshades stretched tight over skin, a table supported by human shinbones, and a refrigerator packed with human organs. Even his bed was a shrine to madness, with skulls perched on the four posts and a human head mounted on the wall next to nine death masks—literally the skinned faces of women—and bracelets made of skin. The search party couldn't escape the grisly details: skull bowls, a shoebox filled with female genitalia, and faces stuffed with newspaper, mounted on the walls like some sick collection of hunting trophies. There was even a "mammary vest" flayed from a woman's chest. Gein eventually admitted that he actually took pleasure in wearing these human-skin garments, using them to pretend he was his own mother.
When the authorities finally hauled Gein away, they stumbled upon the scattered remnants of roughly fifteen different people inside that farmhouse, though the man himself couldn't even keep track of his own body count. Finding those gruesome, nightmare-inducing relics sent a massive tremor through the America of the Eisenhower era. Right there in Wisconsin, Gein turned into an instant legend of local folklore. Just weeks after the cuffs went on, dark humor involving "Geiners" became a full-blown obsession across the state. By December 1957, the rest of the nation caught wind of the madness when both Life and Time magazines published deep dives into his "house of horrors."
Following a decade spent in a psychiatric facility, Gein was eventually deemed fit enough to face a courtroom. Even though he was cleared to stand trial, the verdict landed him as guilty but legally insane. He was initially sent to the Central State Hospital at Waupon, before being transferred to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1978, where he eventually passed away in the geriatric ward in 1984 at the age of seventy-seven. Interestingly, word was he was always a perfect inmate—calm, respectful, and quiet. He ultimately succumbed to heart and respiratory failure in 1984.
and follows three young hitchhikers traveling through the remote backwoods of the US. They unexpectedly wander near a crater known as >—which gives the movie its name. A local drifter steps in to "save" them, though as it turns out...