MGM+ To Stream Docuseries On Serial Killer Ed Gein, Who Inspired ‘Psycho’ & ‘The Silence Of The Lambs’
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Streaming platform MGM+ has picked up a four-part true crime docuseries on a serial killer so heinous he inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, directed and executive produced by James Buddy Day, will premiere on MGM+ in September, documenting a murderer and body snatcher known as “The Plainfield Ghoul” and “The Mad Butcher.”
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“For years, filmmakers, journalists, and scholars have tried to unravel the mind of this notorious killer, and with new reveals and never-before-heard recordings, viewers will be transported to late-1950s Middle America and submerged in Gein’s perverse mind,” notes a description of the multi-parter. “The series explores Gein’s upbringing and twisted relationship with his mother (which famously inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), his early grave robbing, the murders leading up to his arrest, and the police’s discovery of his terrifying house of horrors—all accompanied by the brand-new revelations revealed in the recordings.”
In a statement, MGM+ chief Michael Wright said, “This gripping and disturbing docuseries shines a light on an infamous chapter in our true-crime history. Psycho takes an in-depth look at not only the life of one of the most notorious serial killers of our time, but also explores the impact his crimes had on both the victims and our culture.”
Day’s credits include Fall River and Blumhouse’s Compendium of Horror. Ed Gein’s compendium of horror, meanwhile, included exhuming corpses in cemeteries around his Plainfield, Wisconsin home and turning body parts into household items like lamps and wastebaskets. He confessed to killing two women and was suspected in the deaths of others. Gein died in a Wisconsin mental facility in 1984 and was buried in the Plainfield cemetery where he himself used to unearth remains (in a ghoulish twist, someone stole his gravestone in 2000, but it was recovered a year later in Washington state).
Doc legends Errol Morris and Werner Herzog collaborated on a previous documentary project about Gein that never came to fruition. Morris (The Thin Blue Line) even interviewed Gein several times before the killer’s death.
Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein is EP’d by Day; Jill Latiano Howerton and Josh Kunau also serve as executive producers for Roots Productions. Amazon & MGM Studios Distribution will distribute the series internationally.
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