Deranged (1974)
Directed by Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby.
Starring Roberts Blossom, Cosette Lee, Micki Moore, Robert Warner, Pat Orr

Of all the films based on the real life story of Ed Gein, I would say this one is the most accurate. Since I grew up in a small town in Michigan, I’ve always found this film to be very creepy, since there were a few people in my town that could easily have been another Ed Gein. In case you’re not aware of the facts, Gein was from Plainfield, Wisconsin that murdered at least 2 people, but also had dug up several people from the local graveyard, using their body parts for nefarious things, before he was caught in 1954. How something like that could have be going on, and nobody would have ever know, boggles the mind. According to author Robert Bloch, that is the one thing that he took from the whole Ed Gein affair for his book Psycho, that a small town America could be housing a terror that nobody was aware of. Tobe Hooper also took a lot of ideas from Gein for his film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), including the fact that Gein had face masks made from human skin. Continue reading →