Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

Ed Gein inspired Leatherface, Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.

Brotherhood of the Wolf was inspired by the French tale The Beast of Gevaudan. The Beast of legend was described as wolf-like or hyena-like unlike the film version.

My mind's at a standstill right now, otherwise I could tell you some other genre flicks that had real-life inspirations.

And the original Mummy is loosely based on the events surrounding the unearthing of King Tut. I don't think Boris Karloff was killing people, but there were a lot of strange accidental deathes.

i'll try to dig up some other horror movies based a true story.

^ It's a hoax, but the DeFeo murders are true.

The remake is a flaming pile of dogshit that needs to be done away with.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is practically the stuff of legends created by an original advertising method saying it was based on a 'real' events. Alas, it was, but then it wasn't. Ed Gein, the Ghoul of Plainfield, was mentioned earlier so let me elaboriate on it some more.

Ed Gein was a sheltered, couped up mamma's boy. She was highly religious, and very protective of her children. This started his downward spiral into the macabre madness as so told today. Women were said to him to be evil, this obviously confused him even more at his teen years while his hormones were off the wall. Only he was never aloud to healthily let them bloom. When his mother died, it pretty much left him alone and that's when the trouble began in his early 40's.

His mother was the only women in his life. And as this tale goes, one night he went to her grave, dug her body up and brought it back home where he proceeded to board her remains up in a room. Some say he went as far as to have sexual relations with his mothers corpse, but as much as I could ever gather... That was merely speculation to make his crimes more sick than what they already were. And they were sick.

He got a taste for grave robbing, but not in the usual sense. He didn't dig for riches left with the bodies, he dug FOR the bodies. For companionship. He made bizarre works of art out of human remains. The most popular being a belt made entirely out of human (mostly female) nipples. But that's not his most dirturbing, as he also made an entire 'suit' from the remains of women and would strut around in his back yard generally pretending to be his deceased mother. It uh... eased his pain.

Ed Gein was labeled as a serial killer, and as the way with this disturbing legend, this was actually not the case. He was proven to have killed two women. The one being a sort of secret crush. Walked into the store she worked at and shot her in the face. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time, he also killed her sister. Loading the bodies into the back of his truck, he headed home.

When the women went missing, he made the mistake of joking about it... Saying he had them back up at his house. The womens son said that Ed had gone to see her earlier in the day of the murder. Cops went up to merely question Gein, but got more than what they bargained for. It was dark, the room they had entered at the side of the house was sort of like a large pantry. The smell was horrendous, walking around simply trying to find a light source. I do believe Ed was not currently home... He was noteable for taking long walks until evening came.

A young officer bumped into something, it felt like a gutted deer carcass. His partner hit the lights, and to their horror it was the body of the Ed's love interest. Hung upside down, gutted, hollowed out, and headless. Further investigation, her head would found in a paper bag. Gein had made furniture out of human parts, a refrigerator full of organs, skulls he had used for bowls, and things of which only the darkest parts of our imagination could dream up.

It was later theorised Ed may have killed two men who hired him as a hunting guide, and two un-identified women bodies found in his house. But were never proven. He went to Central Hospital in Wisconsin, under reasons of insantiy re-awaiting another trial. It was then deemed he suffered from a form of schizophrenia, where instead of going back and forth between personalities, he was primary stuck in the one that made him do the things he did. He lived the rest of his life out too become a model prisoner, he was able flourish in his later years to have the stable mind he was not given earlier in life because of his jilted raising. Nurses and doctors said he was a kindly, gentle old man who could've been anyones grandfather who visited and he gave them treats. He died in the late 70's, I do believe, in his sleep.

And thus that is the story of Ed Gein. Ghoul of Plainfield, Grandfather of Gore. A real tragic character in a history of people who could not have the same said about them.

On an interesting note, where Leatherface was based on Ed Gein, like so many other movie killers, his infamous mask was inspired by an odd costume party director/writer Tobe Hooper went to in college. One person who arrived was a med student, wearing a mask of real human skin he removed from a study cadavre and dried it out to become like leather. And while Ed Geins influences played later in the writing of the movie, the concept of the story first came into Hoopers head during Christmas... Standing in a long, slow moving line at a store when he looked across the building seeing chainsaws hanging and he just thought about how easy it would be to mow all those people down so he could be first in line.