6 Horror Movies and TV Shows Inspired by Ed Gein's Disturbing Crimes

Both Gein and Norman Bates were small-town loners with serious Oedipal complexes. In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, we see Gein as Bates, the creepy murderer obsessed with his late mother Norma. While Gein was only known to be responsible for two deaths, Bates killed at least six people. Bates is known to have exhumed his mother's body — Gein robbed many graves, especially looking for women who looked like his mother.

Psycho, as we know, would inspire many other projects, including the series Bates Motel with Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore.

Much like Gein, Ezra Cobb, the main character in the 1974 film Deranged is a middle-aged man living in a rural area with his deeply devout mother. Following his mother's death, Cobb begins digging up bodies and murdering women. Also like Gein, we find that he also has a thing for skinning the body and has a mask made of human flesh.

Writer-director Tobe Hooper definitely borrowed elements from Gein's story for the character of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While there was no cannibalistic family in Gein's case, Gein also had skin masks and decor made from human body parts. Like Leatherface, Gein was also easily controlled by his family, especially his mother.

It's not the human liver and fava bean-eating Hannibal Lecter who's based on Ed Gein in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, it's the serial killer Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill. He targets female victims, starving them after their capture so that their skin is easy to remove when he kills them. From their body, he creates skin suits that he can wear, just as Gein made clothes from the corpses he acquired. In addition to Gein, Gumb is also based on the disturbing cases of killers such as Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, and Gary Heidnik.

In case you haven't seen Rob Zombie's 2003 movie, Otis B. Driftwood from House of 1000 Corpses is disturbing beyond all hell. Like Gein, the psychotic character in the film skins his victims and uses their bodies to create art, most notably costumes to wear.

Speaking of things nightmarish, we need to talk about Dr. Oliver Thredson from American Horror Story: Asylum (aka the best season of AHS). Thredson pretends to befriend Lana Winters and Kit Walker at Briarcliff Asylum, but he's just messing around with them. In fact, he turns out to be a deranged serial killer with mother issues. Thredson keeps a downright horrifying "playroom" where he makes things such as a human skin lampshade and skull bowl — which Gein also had in his house of horrors.