Ed Gein Newsreel

Ed Gein: Pop Star

I don't know what makes men like Ed Gein superstars, when all they leave behind them is suffering, loss and madness. Maybe it's that their stories are so bizarrely gothic and so filled with lurid details that no movie could make up. Ironically movies about these creatures will later appear - the weird parts repackaged for general consumption. After this we can relax, take a breath and tell ourselves, "Well heck, it's only a movie." When this happens enough, when we've seen the film, read the books and got the pez dispenser, men like Gein become no more real to us than a Leatherface, a Freddy Krueger or King Kong. Soon they have a separate 'star image' and while they still give most of us the chills, for others they are 'anti-heroes' or symbols of rebellion. Perhaps this is the only way we can make life bearable, by fictionalizing them, making fun and denying anything really ever happened. But it did happen and Gein was real. So were his victims.

Below we document the life of Ed Gein as a man - and as an icon.

While living in Wisconsin (only 35 miles from Plainfield) author Robert Bloch reads about Gein in the local newspaper. "Once I knew about the series of crimes," he later related, "I tried to imagine how he could conceal them, and what would trigger them in the first place."(1) Bloch later turns this into the novel Psycho January 1992

An article appears in the Phoenix New Times about The Ed Gein Fan Club. Run by Foxx Entertainment Enterprises, the club offers fans an official 3-D puff print glow-in-the-dark T-shirt, a button and a bumper sticker all for only for $19.85. "Think about it," laughs club founder Damien Fox "Wearing the skins of an entire woman and dancing in the moonlight? This is great stuff. It really is."(3)