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 The movie you couldn’t be late for – director’s orders If this is your first time checking in to Larger Than Life, have we got a surprise for you! This week we feature a 50-year-old movie which everybody knows: Psycho (1960); directed and produced by the man himself, Alfred Hitchcock. Who? Well, he’s the father of psychological and suspense thriller movies, famous for his twist endings and the use of 'the gaze' and voyeurism in films. That’s not the only great thing about this week’s episode. It’s the first of a three-part special where all three movies to be featured will be all inspired by the same real-life person. Freaky? Perhaps…
Shower scene, check. Scary silhouette with knife, check. Screeching horror music, check. So this chick, Marion Crane, embezzles $40,000 to marry her boyfriend. As most thriller/horror movies go, the female lead checks into some random hotel somewhere after escaping from something and usually in bad weather, which in this case, are the cops and a storm. So happens this hotel is isolated and owned by a freaky man called Norman Bates. (Now you probably know where I’m going with this) Thus, attractive female lead meets proprietor, who has random arguments with his unseen mother, who is supposedly mentally ill. After Marion and Norman chat, she decides to return the money to her employer. But she HAS to take that shower. Oh yeah, the shower, where Norman peeps at her as she undresses. Marion also gets stabbed to death by a mysterious woman, of whom we can only see her silhouette.
Norman: "Mother! Oh, God, mother! Blood! Blood!”; Boy: “Blarddd! Not funneeEEe!” Now let’s meet Edward Theodore Gein, or Ed for short. He confessed to killing two women, but other random body parts had been found in his possession (think female bits and skull bowls). When the movie was made, he was still alive, his crimes discovered a mere three years earlier, in 1957. So how did Ed Gein’s story inspire the character of Norman Bates? For one thing, Ed was very close to his mother, up to the point where he exhumed graves of middle-aged women who resembled his mother after her death. He took these bodies home, and tanned their skins. Likewise, Norman’s “mother” was a mummified corpse of his real mother which he spoke to. Both men’s fathers died early.
Norman/Ed probably looked something like this, but much, much, more grotesque Who is this woman who kills Marion if Norman’s mother is actually a preserved body? Well, not difficult to guess, it’s Norman himself, playing dress-up with his mother’s clothes. After he killed his mother and her lover in a bout of jealousy, her personality lived on in his mind and surfaced from time to time. Likewise, the real Ed Gein made a “woman suit” he had made from tanned skins of women and also entered “daze-like” states which prompted him to rob graves. It is also suggested that both men had been abused by their mothers. In terms of physique, the movie version of Norman Bates is young and attractive, as compared to his peers (novel version and real-life inspiration) who were almost middle-aged. The shower scene probably never happened for Ed Gein, but the body of a woman was found in his shed; her head and that of another woman’s found in his house. In the novel Psycho, the woman in the shower scene is decapitated, which follows what Ed did to his victims. In the movie, Marion is stabbed to death. At the end of the film, Norman Bates is arrested and committed to a mental institute where his “mother” personality takes over completely. After Ed Gein was arrested in 1957, he was also committed to a mental institute as he was found unfit to stand trial. In 1968, he was tried for his 1957 murder (the earlier one was committed in 1954) and sentenced to life imprisonment in a mental hospital.
Highly coveted item that now resides in a museum Ed Gein died in 1984 from respiratory and heart failure as a result of cancer. In fact, he was so famous for his crimes, visitors vandalised his gravestone and even attempted to steal it. Later in 2001, the recovered gravestone was kept in a museum in Waushara County, Wisconsin. Want to know more about Ed Gein and the other two famous movies he has inspired? Check back here next week for part two of this Larger Than Life special! |
