Ed Gein: The Musical
It’s difficult to look at the old black-and-white news photos of Ed Gein, with his vacant stare, goofy grin and raggedy farm clothes, and realize that he was once referred to as “The Butcher of Plainfield” for his unusual hobby of exhuming dead bodies (and creating some of his own), dressing them out like deer after the kill and making useful household items from their parts, including a wastebasket made of human skin and soup bowls carved out of human skulls.
It's harder still to picture Ed singing along with his work, one snappy tune after another while, say, dismembering the body of a young woman, dressed like a bride, in his barn. (Watcha gonna do with her hand, Ed? Oh, I see, use it to strum a country tune on air guitar then. Can’t wait for the encore.)
That fanciful scenario in one of the opening scenes in Ed Gein: The Musical, a 2010 film by Wisconsin native Dan Davies who not only co-produced the film and wrote the screenplay, but also plays the titular role with pathos and humor. Fans of the genre— narrow as it is—will be pleased to note that the film was just picked up by SRS Cinema, a distribution company specializing in low-budget cult and horror films and will soon be destined for national rerelease.
Real-life Ghoul
Gein, a real-life ghoul, was diagnosed as criminally insane and confined first to Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun and then to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison from the time of his arrest in the late 1950s until his death for respiratory failure in 1984. During that time his former neighbors burned his farm to the ground, and Gein’s body is now buried in the Plainfield Cemetery in a grave unmarked because some souvenir hunter stole the headstone. His exploits have inspired films from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. It’s worth noting that none of those films were musicals.
“I came up with the idea in 1995 while I was drinking a lot of beers with my good friend Ian Teal in Waupaca,” says Davies, who was born in Milwaukee but grew up in Waupaca, about 25 miles from Plainfield. “I told him, half-jokingly, that it would be funny and weird if Ed Gein’s life was turned into a musical comedy. Ian was not amused and looked at me like I had two heads. That's when I knew I was on to something.”
Davies’ grandfather knew Ed Gein and his grandmother knew Bernice Worden, one of two women Gein was convicted of murdering to feed his strange appetite. Davies and his business partner Steve Russell, who also directed the film, self-financed the 92-minute epic’s $25,000 production costs through DaviesRussell Studios in Appleton, where Davies now lives. “A lot of that was spent on copious amounts of beer and pizza for our cast and crew,” Davies notes.
A Plausible Gein?
Appleton rock musician Will Keizer, whose most recent album is titled Angel in a Haunted House, wrote the score.
In preparing for the role of Gein, Davies relied on input from a friend who worked with emotionally challenged and damaged human beings for insights into their characters and behaviors. From that insight, he built a plausible version of Gein for the film.
Despite the lack of a formal distribution company, word of about the film spread after it was released in January 2010. Ed Gein: The Musical already has had more than 500 screenings in 11 states and has aired on the Retro TV Network and PBS. Press coverage appeared in more than 1,000 publications, and writer Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune referred to the film as “Sweeny Todd in a red plaid shirt.” Duane Dudek, former film critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, wrote, “Ed Gein: The Musical fills a niche that few knew even existed.”
The fun notwithstanding, Davies knows that the subject and its treatment is not to everyone’s taste. He has great sympathy for Gein’s victims, and even a little for Gein himself, especially after extensively researching the character he played in the film.
“Ed was horribly abused as a child, with an alcoholic father who beat him almost daily and a domineering, mean-spirited and pathologically religious mother who, by some accounts, probably sexually abused him,” Davies says. “Sadly, the two of them concocted the perfect recipe for creating a monster.”
