Sarah tells Mike how Ed Gein became one of America’s most famous serial killers despite not actually being one. Plus, the cinematic villains Gein inspired and what the slasher movies of the 1980s were really about. Digressions include Freud, summer camp logistics and the T-1000. Mike continues to awkwardly insert his teenage crushes into every conversation.
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Sarah tells Mike how Ed Gein became one of America’s most famous serial killers despite not actually being one. Plus, the cinematic villains Gein inspired and what the slasher movies of the 1980s were really about. Digressions include Freud, summer camp logistics and the T-1000. Mike continues to awkwardly insert his teenage crushes into every conversation.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Halloween Special - Ed Gein
Sarah: Serial killing is like figure skating: you either do something innovative before anyone else, or you do it a million times.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we circle back to every serial killer we've ever known and loved.
Sarah: For the record, this was not my goal with this show. They were like, Sarah, let's talk about misremembered history. And I was like, okay, Michael. I respect the fact that most people don't automatically want to talk about serial killers. And here we are, because you enabled me.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for the New Republic and Buzzfeed and the Believer. And also as of this episode, a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Mike: Yes, congratulations. And today we're doing something a little bit different in that we're both obsessed with Halloween and obsessed with killing. And so today we thought we would talk about one of the first real slashers, serial killers, and then talk about three of the movies that he inspired. And basically how the killer, the slasher, the serial killer, whatever, has been socially constructed throughout the years. So we're mostly going to debunk Ed Gein, and then we're going to not really debunk, but just sort of talk about how he shows up in different forms in movies that we like.
Sarah: Yeah. And I really want to call this episode ‘Ed Gein and the Final Girl’, which I appreciate is not a very SEO friendly term. So we're going to talk about Ed Gein, which as the back copy of the book I read about him promises, “The basis of two of the most terrifying films ever made: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Toby Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” And the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is considered the first true slasher movie. And so we're going to talk about the slasher genre, and then we're going to talk about the Silence of the Lambs, which is an interesting horror movie because it's one of those horror movies that's so good that people like to say that it's not a horror movie.
Mike: It's a real movie. It's a legitimate movie.
Sarah: It’s a real movie. Yeah. My take is that horror movies are real movies. But we're going to start, however, by going back to 1957 Wisconsin. So, Michael, what do you know or guess about Ed Gein? Is that a familiar name to you?
Mike: Yes. Because of my serial killer phase, I know the names of many of the serial killers. However, Ed Gein is one of the ones I skipped.
Sarah: Like how in history class in high school, they would like to spend too long in the industrial revolution and then skip over World War I and go straight to World War II.
Mike: Basically. I can’t even describe Ed Gein’s crimes. I just remember sort of being like, I'm going to sit this one out.
Sarah: So Ed Gein is frequently described as a cannibal. He's sort of popularly remembered as a cannibal, and there is some ambiguity about whether he was engaging in cannibalism because he denied it, but denied other activities that there's some suggestion he may have partaken in. So, you know, he was less truthful and self-aware.
Mike: What a jerk. You’re saying he told fibs? I already don't like this guy.
Sarah: He was less consistently truthful. What we do know is that he was living among a spectacular number of preserved human body parts. And let me start by reading you a quote from one of the police officers who was first at the scene at his house. Which first of all, let me set the stage.
So the day this all goes down is November of 1957. Ed Gein in the morning, he lives in Plainfield, Wisconsin, which is a town in the middle of the state with a population, I think at the time, of about 600 people. And in the morning, it's the opening day of deer hunting season. So all the able bodied men are gone from town. It's like a small town during the Civil War. And so he goes to the town hardware store, where the clerk is a 58 year old woman, and he goes in, buys some antifreeze from her, goes back out to his car, then goes back inside, looks at the selection of guns, takes one off the wall, takes a bullet out of his pocket, puts it inside and shoots her. And then possibly cuts her throat immediately to bleed her, which is something that the police at the time speculate, because it's something that deer hunters do. And it's something that he is someone who grew up in a community where deer hunting is really important, would know how to do.
He himself later has a hard time remembering specifically what he did afterwards. He later described feeling as if the things that were happening around him and that he was doing weren't entirely real. He drags her out of the building, puts her in the truck that the hardware store owns, drives the truck a few miles. Changes his mind, goes back, gets his car, takes his car, and puts her into the back of it and takes her to his house, where he hangs her up and decapitates her and essentially butchers her like a deer. Disembowels her and cleans out her abdominal cavity and does exactly what you would do with an animal that you had hunted and killed.
Mike: Jesus Christ.
Sarah: The hardware store owner, her name is Bernice Worden, her son comes back that afternoon, realizes that his mother is missing and that there's a large pool of blood on the floor of the hardware store. And luckily, since the victim wasn't a college student, the police weren't like, “Ah, she probably had a bad nosebleed and wandered away”, as they would be prone to say about Ted Bundy's first victims in the seventies. So the police take the event seriously and kind of have a feeling that maybe Ed Gein had something to do with it. Because it's a very small town and he's…
Mike: Is he the town weirdo?
Sarah: I think so. So this is a small town in the upper Midwest in the fifties. He was a bachelor in his fifties, a bachelor farmer who actually was just living on the family farm that he had allowed to fall into disrepair over the years. And I think that bachelors tend to fall under suspicion. But he wasn't a person in town who people were afraid of. He was considered strange, but he wasn't considered dangerous or scary.
Mike: Murdery-strange.
Sarah: I don't think people had any concept of murder-strange. People had him babysit their kids.
Mike: Oh fuck.
Sarah: Ted Bundy, also an accomplished babysitter. The funny thing about serial killers is that there's all kinds of human beings and all kinds of ways to develop, I believe, the kind of psychology that would allow you to repeatedly take human life. But it does seem as if with some of the serial killers that we know about, it seems as if you weren't in the victim category group for them, you were pretty much safe. Or if you were part of their daily life, things would probably be fine for you. And Ed Gein had murderous interests in women who physically resembled his mother, his dead mother, which he would later admit to the police pretty freely.
Mike: That’s awfully on the nose, Sarah. That's pretty obvious. If you were writing a novel about this, it’d be like, yeah, really?
Sarah: It's not my fault Ed Gein is an unsubtle person.
Mike: The mom, really? Ed, come on. Do better.
Sarah: Psycho is based on this case, loosely. But in terms of the most insane, lurid part of it, that he's living with the voice of his dead mother in his head and killing people because of that. That part is true.
Mike: So that’s his motive?
Sarah: I don't think he ever really tried to explain himself. When he was questioned by the police, based on their questions, he made some interesting statements. I don't think he ever felt the need to explain or justify what he was doing. But people who asked him questions did get answers.
So on the morning that Bernice Worden disappears, her son comes back, he finds the scene. He reports it to the police, the police immediately suspect Ed Gein, and they go to his house. He's not at home. The Gein farm doesn't have electricity, which was not that unusual in the fifties in small town Wisconsin. This is also a great Testament to how profoundly unprepared the police in this tiny town are for something of this magnitude. Neither of them has a flashlight when they get to the Gein farm, and so one of the police officers lights a match.
Mike: No fucking way. It's so horror-movie. It's very slasher movie.
Sarah: Yeah. And again, if you were watching this in a movie, you'd be like, are you fucking kidding me? The police don't have flashlights? What kind of a story are you asking me to buy? And of course that's what actually happened.
And so one of the police officers lights a match, they walk inside, and they immediately become very concerned about not dropping the open flame they're carrying because the house is full of paper and debris and potentially upended kerosene and inflammable type things. It's just become this sort of midden of trash. And then in the trash they start finding human remains.
Mike: Oh my God. So immediately, they're just like, “Yep. This dude's a killer.”
Sarah: Well, not necessarily. Because they find many more preserved body parts than correspond to a) the murder that was carried out that day, and b) the murder that was carried out a while previously of a tavern owner a town or two over who also was in her fifties, also looked like Ed Gein’s mother, and who they suspected him for at the time, but could never connect to.
So there's potentially two murders that the police are looking at, but there's body parts from way more people. One of the objects that he has, to me this is the most bizarre and distressing one so I'm just going to say it first so we can move past it, is a belt made of human nipples.
Mike: No way. What? That's bad. That's mean.
Sarah: And so what they later find out is that he's been engaging in grave robbing. And he's been engaging in grave robbing to an extent that he has been visiting not just the Plainfield town cemetery, but two other cemeteries in the area. Because his needs aren't able to be met by the recently dead of his own hometown, presumably. And he's been robbing the fresh graves of recently deceased women of varying ages and has all of these preserved parts of them.
And so imagine you are a police officer holding a match, walking into a farmhouse of this guy who you don't know where he is or what - presumably based on your suspicions, which you're being at least tangentially corroborated by the decorating scheme - has committed a murder earlier that day. And you're walking around and you find a mask made of human skin.
Mike: Oh God. And that's before they find the butchered woman, the poor butchered woman, they find all this other stuff?
Sarah: They find Bernice Worden's body before they go into the farmhouse. And the book I have is illustrated with some very lurid cartoons, which I'm not going to show you because you're not old enough to see them yet.
Mike: I appreciate that.
Sarah: All right. So I'm going to read you a passage from this book. “The searching officer's made various observations, '' Shiphorster recounted, ‘I had a feeling I never had before in my life because I had never seen anything like this. It was so horrible. We found skulls and masks. That is, the skin portion of the head that had been stripped from the skull and preserved and put in plastic bags. There were several of those skulls. We found a box that had women's organs in it.” That means vaginas, or rather it means vulvas because it's the outside facing portion of the vagina. “And I noticed one small one was gilded a gold color with a ribbon tied on it. I believe a red ribbon.”
Mike: One of the vaginas? Oh my God. Okay.
Sarah: “We found leg bones and discovered the chair seats were made out of human skin. They were crudely made. The outside portion would be smooth and if you looked underneath, you could see strips of fat. It wasn't a good job.”
Mike: Holy shit.
Sarah: And one of the things that I think is really interesting about Ed Gein is that we blur these two behaviors together, but they are separate. There's killing someone, there's aggression and violence toward a living human being. And then there's grave robbing, necrophilia, potentially. Wanting to take body parts from an already dead person and use them in some way. That's…
Mike: Crafting. Sorry. I shouldn’t make light of this, really, but you're right. In a way, you can call it a victimless crime.
Sarah: It's not a violent crime. It has victims in the sense that it’s really upsetting to the family members who find out. And based on what you believe about the afterlife or the human body, it can be disrespectful to the victim or to the person, especially if they were someone that you knew in life. To me, it's on a much smaller order of scale.
Mike: But it sounds like he's also doing both. Are these the only two people that he killed or is he dabbling in both at the same time?
Sarah: It seems to have been that he started with the grave robbing and then that started escalating to procuring actual victims. But it's interesting that he's remembered even as a serial killer because he isn't, actually, according to the FBI, you need three victims.
Mike: He only has two.
Sarah: He didn't make it, he's in the farm league.
Mike: Yeah. I didn't know his body count was that low, actually.
Sarah: Serial killing is like figure skating. You either do something innovative before anyone else, or you do it a million times. So Ed Gein only killed two people. Dorothy Hamill won a gold medal in 1976 with two double axles and no triple jumps at all.
Mike: So do you consider Ed Gein to be one of the first mass market serial killers? The first one to be in Time Magazine and be national? Because I'm just imagining this from the context of 1957, the Leave It To Beaver era. I'm just imagining what a huge panic this would have caused.
Sarah: It's funny. During any period of history there's some kind of really violent and extreme behavior that we become aware of as a society and becomes part of our kind of secular canon, and then we forget about it. So people in the fifties probably remembered violent crimes that we no longer remember.
Leopold and Loeb was a mass media covered event that happened in the 1920s and that was the ambiguously, sexually motivated murder of a young boy by two young, extremely wealthy men. So something that also at the time felt extremely shocking and motiveless. But you know, there is nothing new under the sun. We just forget things.
And what's interesting too, there's cannibalism, there's necrophilia, these are both words that we have. We don't have a word for just wanting to be surrounded by the dead. I have a piece of bear fur, I keep it on my bed. I sit on it when I need to feel courageous, especially when I'm writing. That's not so different from having a piece of preserved human skin that you use for somewhat similar reasons.
Mike: I guess.
Sarah: Just that mine was ethically obtained.
Mike: Yeah. So what do we know about Ed Gein’s background? What led him to become this, I'm sure you'll be fine with this label, ‘monster’?
Sarah: No, stop it. Come on. What do we know about the life of this bachelor farmer who made regrettable decisions? Ed Gein was born the second son to his parents. His dad was an alcoholic who often didn't work and was reported by Gein and others to have been abusive. So we had a bad relationship with his father and a close relationship with his mother, who was very religious, and had a standoffish relationship with the other people in town because she judged them all for not being godly enough. The Gein’s were Lutherans.
Mike: Was he spoiled by her?
Sarah: No, it was a very, I think he grew up in a very hardworking household. And his mother was known in town for always being very tidy. The farm was always very well kept. They never spent a dollar they didn't have. They just had a very tough, but very orderly life. His older brother died when he was relatively young. His father died in 1940, and his mother had a stroke in 1945 when he was about 40 years old. And so he spent much of the next few years taking care of her because she was incapacitated. And then she ultimately died of a second stroke, which he blamed on the neighbors having a loud argument that she, I think, just overheard. And so you can see he’s losing his grip.
After his mother died, she was buried and he apparently believed that he could raise her from the dead through force of wills and attempted to do that but couldn't. And as far as we know, he didn't do anything with her body, but after she died, he nailed the door to her bedroom shut. And so when the police came to his house and found all of his preserved relics and grave robbed items and things, his mother's bedroom was the only room of the house that wasn't completely filled with whatever we call these objects.
Mike: Was he doing grave robbing type of stuff before she died? Or did her dying really trigger all of this?
Sarah: Her dying seems to have been the beginning of it. And what he talked about, I know you think that I'm prone to overrate the influence of loneliness on an extremely violent person's trajectory, but one of the things he talks about repeatedly to the police is that, you know, I just wish I had had a relationship with somebody, and he felt like he just didn't know how to have relationships. And he complained about how the neighbors came and spent time with him or came over, but it was only if they wanted him to do a handyman thing for them or babysit. It's one of those surreal things that sums it up. The people who lived in Ed Gain’s town before any of this came to light, just thought of him as someone who you don't want to spend time with him or anything, but if you need a babysitter at the last minute.
Mike: He's too weird to hang out with, but give your kids to that guy.
Sarah: It's amazing that kids survived childhood in mid-century America. If you were a kid growing up in the fifties and sixties, your life was being babysat by serial killers and having your temperature taken with mercury thermometers.
Mike: I'm actually fascinated by the fact that he doesn’t start doing any of this stuff until after he's 40. Usually these psychotic breaks seem to happen in your late twenties, I think, is when schizophrenia peaks. And your personality is really set, you're very coagulated as a person by the time you get to your early thirties.
Sarah: To me, that's similar to what we talked about with Jeffrey Dahmer. Which is that he has this inactivity period, as far as we know, where he kills someone when he's 18 and then doesn't kill anyone again for nine years.
Mike: Which implies that these things are not inevitable, and that these people are not some freight train rushing toward the population that we're powerless to prevent. That indicates that there is some level of control. There is some level of structural forces that maybe would have been able to prevent some of this, potentially.
Sarah: Yes. He just didn't have the resources, inner or outer, to have a better way of finding human contact. There's a lot else that goes into it, but to me that's as good a way of explaining it as anything else, or of trying to. And much more valid than, he's going around this geyser of rage and violence and evil, and he must take more victims. He's not a vampire, he's a lonely guy.
Mike: Was he weird? Did he try to make friends? I mean, one of the things that I came across in the loneliness research is that a lot of people who think that they're lonely, are actually just really antisocial and behave in ways that make people not want to be around them. So they're desperately lonely, but because they assume that everybody hates them or they assume that everybody is judging them, they treat other people in these really hostile ways. So even when they try to get out there and go see a friend, they basically just treat everybody like shit and nobody wants to be around them, which just drives them further. But they call it loneliness rather than I'm actually really annoying to be around.
Sarah: Annoying to be aroundness makes you lonely.
Mike: Yeah. I know, Sarah.
Sarah: Yeah. So that’s the Ed Gein story. And we're now going to make the jump from lonely Wisconsin farmer to the normal teenager who only does normal teenager things, and how the entity is a threat to them.
So, yeah. The crimes of Ed Gein naturally become a media circus. It's similar to the situation that Truman Capote depicts In Cold Blood and that this mass of big city people descends on this tiny town. And so it has a big cultural impact. Psycho, which comes out a couple of years later, is directly inspired by those events.
But tell me, now knowing the Ed Gein story, how does Psycho differ from that?
Mike: He's much more attractive, as we've discussed. This is the invention of the slasher, right? That Ed Gein wasn't really much of a slasher.
Sarah: He was not a slashing type.
Mike: Yeah. It sounds like he killed people almost because he was more interested in them as dead bodies than as living people. Whereas in the Psycho story, you've got the physical overpowering. Anthony Perkins is fighting with these women and stabbing them to death in this very violent up-close way. Whereas Gein, it seems like, is killing them in these more clinical ways and then doing body stuff.
Sarah: And so Psycho is about a woman who's done a bad thing, right? She's stolen money and she has a married boyfriend. Because of that, she's got to get dead. So she flees, she's driving away from her job where she's just stolen all this money. She stops at the scenic Bates Motel and checks in with a charming, young man named Norman Bates, who's played by your and my mutual crush, Anthony Perkins. Who just comes off as shy and a little lonely.
“Well, I run the office and tend to cabins and grounds and do little errands for my mother. The one she allows I might be capable of doing.”
“And do you go out with friends?”
“Well, a boy's best friend is his mother.”
And then goes to take a cleansing shower and is stabbed to death. Isn't it amazing, too. I mean, I feel like this is a time in America, finally women are having this kind of mass experience of coming together and being like, remember that seemingly innocuous piece of media that everyone agreed in the eighties and nineties or whenever was just a regular old thing to be a pillar of our culture for decades, but women couldn’t communicate freely enough as a large group to come together and form a consensus around like, wow, that was actually, why did we do that?
So Psycho, you know, the shower scene in Psycho, which is in every AFI special, every film school intro course, every whatever. And it's about a woman being stabbed to death. The great goal, the amazing payoff that we respect is this cultural achievement is women's terror. That's interesting for us to be so fascinated by. Psycho is one of the most immediately recognizable cultural artifacts that we have as Americans. Everyone knows that if I go, ree, ree, ree. Right? You know what that means.
Mike: What is the line between Ed Gein and Psycho?
Sarah: Let me read to you an exchange between Gein and the police, which I think is interesting in light of talking about how Psycho deviates from the Ed Gein story.
“Question. Did you ever have the thought that you would have liked to remove or cut off your penis and preferred to have it in the shape of the sexual organs of a woman?
Answer. Well, part of that is true.
Question. What part of that is true?
Answer. That like removing part of myself.
Question. Do you ever have any recollection Eddie, of taking any of those female parts, the vagina specifically, and holding it over your penis to cover the penis?
Answer. I believe that's true.
Question. You recall doing that with the vaginas of the bodies of other women?
Answer. That I believe I do remember.
Question. Was there a resemblance in some of these faces to your mother?
Answer. I believe there was some.
Question. How about the face? Have you ever replaced the faces over your own face?
Answer. That I did. I'm pretty sure of that. The part's sort of like eyes, those parts of a head. There should be some parts of just a head, and I suppose there would be about two or three.
Question. Do you remember how you held the faces over your own face?
Answer. I believe there was a cord in here.
Question. Do you think you would wear the face over a prolonged time?
Answer. Not too long. I had other things to do, about an hour or so.
Question. Did you ever put a pair of women's panties over your body and then put some of these vaginas over your penis?
Answer. That could be.”
Mike: Jesus.
Sarah: And this, by the way, is a book by Judge Robert H. Gomar, who was a judge in Ed Gein’s case, which is a very weird thing that he then wrote a book going on from that. “One of the garments, if it can be called that, found in the home was the complete front scan of a woman, including breasts. This had a cord to suspend it around the neck. Gein told Chase that on moonlight nights, he would put this on and prance around the yard.”
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: I want you to leave in all of that silence.
Mike: I just think all of this is a victory for Freud.
Sarah: I know. Poor Freud who didn't get to see people acting out his theories.
Mike: I feel like this is one of the reasons why this resonates so much is because people were fucking obsessed with Freud and psychoanalysis from the fifties to the seventies, and this confirmed, in a stupendous anecdote, what Freud had been saying. That we all have these little desires within us to fuck our mothers and stuff. And this little, tiny nugget that's inside of all of us gets acted out in these extreme ways. And so it confirms these preexisting beliefs that most of society had.
The rise of psychoanalysis during this time should be its own episode. People were obsessed with psychoanalysis and Freud at this time, and we're really keen to confirm it. I think that's one of the reasons why Psycho is so resonant too, is because that confirmed a lot of pre-existing conceptions that people had.
Sarah: Well, and also - and this inevitably merges with a fear of queerness in this period -where it's like, it's the mother's fault for being overbearing and it's the boy's fault for being a weak link. And you get this sort of sexually other figures who come up in these media depictions. And you have Norman Bates who is…
Mike: Hot and reedy. He’s kind of effeminate. He's seen as this weakling, skinny wristed, you wouldn't expect him to be the serial killer type. He is coded as effeminate. He does play it a little bit…
Sarah: Bookish. Yeah. He looks like he wants to sit quietly under a tree and read. Which is a very suspect type at this time. Yeah. And then his alter is a violent dominant older woman. So then to go to the next, according to the back of the book copy, ‘the most terrifying film ever made’, shows up again in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Which is also really interesting for being a movie that hints at the filmmakers having a fairly clear idea of the backstory of the family of killers that they depict, and one of their problems being that there isn't a woman around. The chainsaw murders in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre really are depicted a little bit like the Lost Boys and Peter Pan, they just need a Wendy.
Mike: I have not seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in probably two decades. Can you summarize the plot for me?
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, you can summarize that movie in a sentence. A bunch of teenagers go to check on whether a grave robber has taken their grandparent’s body parts. And everything is fine, and so they go to their grandparent's old farm and wander over to the farm next door to ask for gas, and then they all get killed. Except for one girl who survives to the very end of the movie. It is to me, the most fantastically scary movie that I've ever seen.
“I just can't take no pleasure in killing. Just some things you gotta do. Don't mean you have to like it”.
And so what happens during the killing phase is that they just wander over to the wrong farm, essentially. It's a family that used to all work in the slaughterhouse in the town. And then the slaughterhouse got shut down, because horror movies in America are all about economic anxieties. So they are killing human beings and serving them as barbecue meat in the gas station that they run. It’s a family made of the older brother, there's the youngest brother who's the hitchhiker, who the wholesome teenagers encounter at the start of the movie. And there's grandpa. And then most famously there's Leatherface, who wears a dress when he's feeling domestic and doing kind of a mother role and cooking for people. He wears a butcher's apron when he's in his butcher role. And the start of all the killing in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that our first victim, a guy named Kirk who looks like a young Jeff Bridges, goes over and just knocks on the door of this house. He wants to borrow some gas. And then Leatherface comes out with his human skin mask on and his sledgehammer and hits the guy on the head and drags him in and starts going to work butchering him. He has no intent, he just knows that he's been told to protect the house and he butchers. And that's just what he does. He doesn't want to hurt anyone. He doesn't conceive of himself as hurting anyone. He doesn't have any malice. He's just the low IQ, middle child of a family that's suffering from an economic downturn.
And then there's an amazing scene later on in the movie when another person has come over, who Leatherface has just killed, and you as the audience has just watched. And then you watch Leatherface just sort of put his hands to his face, sort of looking overwhelmed and stressed out. And the director of the movie has described that as his moment of being like, why do people keep coming over? What's going on?
Mike: That's like me getting work emails and being like, why, why does this keep happening? Why do I have to keep writing people back when they write to me?
Sarah: This is terrible. I just got rid of this email by answering it, and now you're answering it, and that defeats the whole system.
Mike: How do you see the evolution between Norman Bate and Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Because there is an evolution between those two movies.
Sarah: So Psycho comes out in 1960, Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes out in 1973. What's going on? What's America consistently involved in during those years?
Mike: Vietnam.
Sarah: Yeah. And then in 1973, here's this movie about these kind of hippie kids, wholesome, just want to have a nice day trip out to the country and not hurt anyone or get eaten. Kids who are reading their astrology books, and going to their grandparent’s house, and want to go to the swimming pool, and just have a nice day and live a nice peaceful life. And then walk over into the wrong yard and knock on the door and become meat.
And it's interesting to me, too, that Leatherface as a character has this queerness about him that isn't really a part of, he wears a dress, he wears a wig, when he's being sort of the mother role of the family. He’s sort of the Wendy. And so Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes out, becomes an unbelievable success. And at around the same time, Black Christmas comes out. Which is another kind of early slasher movie that has a house full of sorority girls who were being preyed on by a madman who is also placing heavy breather calls to their house. And the twist at the end is that the calls are coming from inside the house.
Mike: That's where that comes from?
Sarah: That's where that comes from. I think that was an urban legend before that, but the calls are coming from the attic. And then Black Christmas is successful. And as always happens, people take note and they're like, all right, something where you can spend only a few hundred thousand dollars and the most expensive effect you have to buy is the illusion that a madman is murdering a sexually attractive young woman. Who can say why people love this, but they really seem to. Let's keep making these.
John Carpenter's Halloween comes out in 1978, and was financed by an executive producer who instructed him to make a movie about someone killing babysitters. And so he made his killing babysitters movie.
“Halloween night, it's when people play tricks on each other. It's all make believe. I think Richard was just trying to scare you.”
“I saw the boogeyman! I saw him outside.”
“There was nobody outside.”
“There was!”
“What did he look like?
“The Boogeyman”.
That's where we get the slasher villain as we really come to know him in the eighties.
Mike: And this was also a time when it seemed like there was more anxiety about crime in general in America. Part of the reason why these slasher movies were popular was because they seemed at some level plausible, right? This was an actual fear that people had, just random crimes or random psychopaths wandering the earth.
Sarah: Yes. I think that slashers were motivated by that fear, and also by white flight. Because slasher movies, the Friday the 13th movies take place at summer camps, the Nightmare on Elm street movies take place in this sort of unnamed, idyllic, suburbia. And so to the Halloween movies, they're about slasher movies, they’re about small towns, they're about suburbs, they're about college campuses, they're about high schools, they're about summer camps, they're about white people. And they're about the appearance of a malignant entity in a place where he is not supposed to be. And which, you know, intrinsic in that fear is the idea that there are other places in America where of course people are supposed to get murdered all the time.
Mike: Yeah. It's these foreign elements, if the infiltration of these innocent spaces by something that shouldn't be there. Namely, violent crime. But nothing bad happens here.
Sarah: Innocence is being white and middle-class, and having no reason to suspect that your life is going to make you a victim of violent crime. As a nation of people who have an extremely hard time telling the difference between correlational and causational data, we assume being a white, rich, suburb dweller, who is unlikely to be the victim of violent crime, because your life is extremely safe and cushioned. We think that means that you're less likely to get killed because you're making good choices and you're not putting yourself in harm's way and you don't deserve anything bad to happen to you. But it's just something that you have bought for yourself and for your children. And I think intrinsic and the kind of slasher movie premise is this nagging doubt, this subconscious feeling, that we don't deserve this.
And so Friday the 13th, a bunch of summer camp counselors go to a summer camp to prepare for an opening the next day, it actually takes longer to prepare a summer camp then 12 hours of having sex and playing monopoly, but whatever. They all get killed by some unseen figure who in the last reel is: twist! Revealed to be a nice lady in a nice sweater.
“Steve should never have opened this place again. There's been too much trouble here. Did you know that a young boy drowned the year before those two others were killed? The counselors weren't paying any attention. They were making love while that young boy drowned. His name was Jason. I was working the day that it happened, preparing meals here. I was the cook. Jason should have been watched every minute.”
Do you remember the moment of that reveal? Have you seen that movie?
Mike: No, I haven't seen all the slasher movies. I've seen the original nightmare on Elm Street, but that's the only one.
Sarah: So it turns out that the killer this whole time has been a nice, middle-aged lady, who was traumatized by the death of her son, who is developmentally disabled and who drowned when she was working at the summer camp 20 years ago. The wholesome, middle-class camp counselors who are supposed to be paying attention and taking care of all of the children were ‘making love’ and they didn't hear him drowning. And so now she has to kill everyone who has sex.
Mike: Because she hates millennials. It's all about hating millennials.
Sarah: She's a working woman-class person with a disabled kid who's in this middle-class utopia, and her child was killed by it, by the ignorance of the rich and able-bodied. And so she has to kill everyone. And there's this feeling of guilt being expiated when if you're like a middle-class teenager, a middle-class whatever, someone who identifies with this guilt backed this sort of secretly guilty place in society. If you go through this ride where you identify with the prey and with being preyed on by someone who represents a figure who has been wronged by the strength of your society and that is going to respond disproportionately by killing everyone, the only solution is to fucking annihilate them in order to make sure that they don't keep killing everyone in site. And being in a position of such intense victimhood that all you can do is fight back with all of your strength, is exactly the fantasy that people who already have all the power and feel guilty about it, like to pretend that they're in.
Mike: What’s interesting about it, and I guess this gets us to Silence of the Lambs, but there's also the kind of the demise of the slasher film, too. I wonder if that represents us moving on to new anxieties.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because the slasher kind of starts to die in the late eighties, right? Friday the 13th moves from Paramount to New Line Cinema, which is a lower rent studio in the late eighties. They stopped making Nightmare on Elm Streets. They stopped doing a new Friday the 13th every year. Halloween sort of limps along but doesn't make as much money as it used to.
So this all leads us to our final destination, 1991, the Silence of the Lambs.
“We’re interviewing all the serial killers now in custody for a psycho-behavioral profile, could be a real help in unsolved cases. Most of them have been happy to talk to us. You spook easily, Sterling?”
“Not yet, sir.”
See, the one we want most refuses to cooperate. I want you to go after him again today in the asylum.”
“Who's the subject?”
“The psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter.
“Hannibal the Cannibal.”
Mike: But so do you consider this to be the end of the line for phase one slasher movies?
Sarah: I do. And I also think that this is the moment when the serial killer really comes into his own as a character in American life. Through the eighties, you know, Freddy Kruger was pretty mouthy, Michael Meyers didn't speak, and Jason grunted. And also, they weren't evil geniuses. None of these people were behaving systematically. They're often acting in a somewhat supernatural way. They were inhuman entities, they were coming back from the dead repeatedly or through your dreams.
And with Hannibal Lecter, we have this larger than life, super-intelligent, prisons can't hold him figure, who is seen as having all of these semi supernatural powers. But it's seen as coming, not from any supernatural force, not from anything beyond the human, but from him being evil. And I think that's kind of the beginning of us seeing the most terrifying villain. And also the villain that we automatically go to as someone who's powerful in a way that they're aware of and they can plan and be strategic and be an evil manipulative genius. Jason was not manipulating people. The villains that we start to fear, I think move from fiction into non-fiction. We become enamored of the genius serial killer with Hannibal Lecter, and then we start looking for that figure in our true crime narratives. And true crime cable TV mushrooms in the nineties.
And you know what's cheaper than making a movie, even if it's a really shitty movie, that you shoot at a boy scout camp in New Jersey with a bunch of people who don't have SAG cards yet? Generating media from actual crimes, actual trials. You go, you show up, you get your interviews, you get your discord music from your discordant music warehouse. You can do an episode a week of that, you're never going to run out of material. Why bother creating fiction if there's so much in reality that we can make in entertainment.
Mike: It's the Nancy Grace-ification of true crime.
Sarah: Yeah. But going back to the Silence of the Lambs, this is a personally important movie for me, too. And one of the things that I struggle with about it is that it is really transphobic. And for a lot of years, that was something that I rationalized. And then I met a transwoman and we were talking about that general subject and she was like, “Oh yeah, I've been called Buffalo Bill so many times.”
Mike: God.
Sarah: Yeah. And just had one of those moments where you're like, oh fuck. I just didn't know. Can you describe Buffalo Bill, and you just talk about this, especially now that we've also talked about Ed Gein, and what that character is being made to represent in that story?
Mike: Yeah. He's kidnapping women, and then starving them so they lose a little bit of weight and their skin is loose, so he can cut off their skin and wear it.
Sarah: Yeah. It's also a fat phobic movie. Because the hallmark is before he claims his victims he asks, are you about a size 14? That's by no stretch of the imagination overweight.
Mike: Yeah. The average American woman is “plus size” at this point. So these are normal American women. I always think that what that movie really implanted was the idea of the omnipotent serial killer that's always two steps ahead.
Sarah: It's a whole cat and mouse thing. Hannibal Lecter is like the Michael Corleone of serial killers. You're like, oh, that's who everyone thinks that they are.
Mike: What does it mean that we transitioned from slasher movies to more psychological, omnipotent, serial killer movies?
Sarah: The psychopath diagnosis. So the word ‘psychopath’ appears in sort of American pop culture. That really starts with the Silence of the Lambs. You don't really see it before that. The FBI coined it, or Robert Ressler who was an FBI profiler, coined it in the late seventies, around the time that Ted Bundy was starting to be in the news. But it's something that lay people, you really look at the numbers and there was an explosion of that word being referenced just in movies and popular media and sort of everyday discourse as a household word after the Silence of the Lambs.
So we also, for whatever reason, became more interested in armchair diagnosing things like psychopathic behavior. I think also interestingly, The Silence of the Lambs came out in 1991. Jeffrey Dahmer was caught in 1991 that summer, a few months later. And then after that, what other serial killers do we have who fit our sort of classic American, white, straight male, loner, sex criminal mode? After that, who is there?
Mike: School shooters. That's the only people I can think of, Eric and Dylan.
Sarah: There's school shootings and there's terrorism, and there's mass shootings too. Now we started in the schools and then we moved to the malls and the stadiums. But I think it has to do with our media fixation, our entertainment fixation with serial killers has to do with the fact that we don't really have that much reason to be afraid of serial killers anymore. And we've talked about this before. It's hard to operate as a serial killer today.
Mike: Right, because you get caught much quicker.
Sarah: And also, we have better technology. It's very hard to be off the grid. If you have a cell phone on you and you haven't turned it off, then your movements are being tracked. If you get onto a freeway, if you go through a toll plaza. The average person in New York City has their photograph taken 200 times a day.
I honestly think that our movements are so relentlessly tracked based on the way technology is part of our lives today that you have to be too smart to be a serial killer and probably the nineties kind of grade inflation of serial killer intelligence. Because Ted Bundy wasn't that smart, Jeffrey Dahmer wasn't that smart. We're prone to think of serial killers as being manipulative, evil geniuses. They tend not to be. Hannibal Lecter was, but he was fictional. But you would have to be a genius to be a serial killer today, but the thing is, we don't really have that many of them anymore in the way that we think of them.
Mike: They're all working for hedge funds.
Sarah: Sure. You make more money that way. If you're taking victims that mainstream America cares about - middle-class white people - then you're not going to get away with it unless you're a genius. So I think as we stop actually having serial killers of the kind that we used to have, we become more obsessed with this sort of fictionalized idea of them.
Mike: We want to keep the narrative, even when the facts don't support it anymore.
Sarah: We’re kind of watching a torch being passed from Buffalo Bill who's maybe a more historical serial killer. He's disorganized, he is clearly insane, and he lives in the Midwest. To our new idea of the serial killer, the Terminator, the T.
Mike: T1000, another crush of mine. Yeah.
Sarah: Oh, yeah. You like skinny guys.
Mike: Well, just like skinny, mean guys. Yeah.
Sarah: With Buffalo Bill, the movie’s transphobia comes out. And the idea that Buffalo Bill is kidnapping and skinning these women because he's been denied his petition, what we called at the time, of sex change operation. So he's making a woman suit out of real women as our friend Ed Gein once did.
And what I find interesting about that, I feel like this has come up in so many of our previous episodes and will continue to, is this idea that mainstream society will identify something uncomfortably or scary about itself, and then project that fear onto a marginalized group. And I feel when I look at Buffalo Bill now he's inspired by Ed Gein, who did exactly the same thing, who made a woman suit for himself and wore it in the moonlight, and had some kind of psychic needs, some kind of fantasy life that involved putting a vagina over his penis and wearing a mask of a dead woman for an hour or so until he had too many farm chores to do, apparently. And you know, for the most part, one could say in a peaceful way, living out this fantasy life. We have him inspire this character who’s ruthlessly violent, taunts his victims, takes joy in sadism, is this tremendous danger to American women, and we're able to identify him as dangerous and I think able as Americans to flock to a story about this dangerous man. Because the danger comes from him being this character who is presented to us as queer and transgender. And that's what makes him dangerous, that he's sexually deviant. That he's not a regular, healthy, straight, white, American male.
Because what makes Buffalo Bill scary is not that he wants a woman suit. We're not afraid of him, for the most part. We're afraid of the fact that he wants to do violence to women and kidnap them and keep them in a pit and torment them and take parts of them for his own use and destroy them in the process. Buffalo Bill, all of the things that make him scarier, are the things that make him a straight guy.
Mike: I think it's useful. We're doing this around Halloween time. Halloween is a time when we become convinced that there's these random people that are out to poison cookies and put razor blades in apples, even though those things make no sense. And so we have to keep learning these lessons, becoming afraid of them, and then we have to systematically debunk them, and then we just learn them in a new form. And it seems like slashers and then serial killers and stranger danger and all these other versions of this that we've had, are just ways of learning the same thing. There are many, many, many people out to get your children, and then we have to systematically debunk those.
Sarah: Yeah. It's such a funny thing, too, that teenagers in the eighties are growing up on these movies because they're the most establishment lesson imaginable. The outsiders are here to kill you, protect the world you know, and the one that your parents gave you.
Mike: I just think if we can learn anything from all of this it's that we should put all of our guilt and anxiety into volunteering at a soup kitchen or giving money to a local political candidate or something. I just hope that we're taking all of these anxieties that we still have and writing checks to dog shelters or something.
Sarah: I would conclude by saying, to me, the through line in all of this is that in all of these scary stories, we often create figures who are supposed to be scary because they are different from us, because they are not regular, straight, white, American men, but who are scary because they are.
The least scary thing about Buffalo Bill is the fact that he's like Ed Gein. The most scary thing about him is the fact that he behaves in the way that American men were and are being trained to behave, which is to see women as objects to be used as pieces in his own fantasy. I feel like Ed Gein is interesting to me because that's where his needs took him. But for a long time, he wasn't there, he didn't display violence toward anyone. He didn’t kill anyone until sort of the end of a long life of mental decompensation.
Mike: So don't trust straight, white people who live in the suburbs. And if you are one, go volunteer at a homeless shelter.
Sarah: If you are a privileged, white person who feels guilty, don't give into the temptation to create a story where you're really the victim in all this. You're not. Just get comfortable. I will see you at Jason's shack in the woods.