September 2024 Bonus Review: Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein
the true crime that's worth your time
Juuuust in case the subject line doesn't imply it strongly enough: content warning.
The crime
Multiple murders, as well as grave-robbing and desecration of corpses.
The story
I struggled with whether to lead with this, because it may say as much about me as it does about Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, but I did in fact doze off partway through MGM+'s four-part series on "the Plainfield Ghoul" and his enduring influence on American culture.
But I think what it says about me isn't that I've become inured to the more grisly sights of the genre, which Lost Tapes certainly isn't shy about revisiting, or that I've lost interest in the ways other genres adapt true stories as a way of mediating or managing our fear of inhuman humans.
Rather, it's that the promising Lost Tapes is at least 45 minutes too long, repeats everything from contemporary photos to talking-head interview snippets to the titular lost tapes themselves too many times, and has too much regard for its own production choices. Take the content warning on the series itself.
A little cutesy, I guess, but it's not inaccurate – the horrors that greeted investigators on Ed Gein's farm in 1957 are stern stuff. But the content warnings change with each episode: "it's worse than the first episode"; "we guess you get the point by now," eg. It's not that it's flip; it is, but a little black wit isn't the worst thing. It's just not as witty as Lost Tapes thinks. I could say a similar thing about the muzzy-focus black-and-white recreations of the farmhouse interior, which had no electricity or running water and was littered with bleak hoard detritus like busted table legs and rusty unrinsed cans, over and above the vile evidence of dead bodies being "repurposed" (an interviewee's word, not mine). Clearly the production designer took time and care with it, and it's not poorly done. It's just not done well enough to justify the runtime spent, not when you see it half a dozen times.
Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein is directed by James Buddy Day (Manson: The Women; Fall River), and I've liked previous projects of Day's pretty well, because he does have an instinct for what makes a case significant, and how to explicate that for nonfiction television. I didn't dislike this one, for the record, and I understand why it got made – if audio of a notorious murderer is "unearthed" (again, not my word choice, and that chyron should have gotten rewritten) and you have the opportunity to play it for an audience for the first time, and to get deans of true-crime commentary like Harold Schechter and the Last Podcast on the Left hosts to comment on it as they hear it, you kind of have to get after it.
But Lost Tapes doesn't seem to have figured out its point of view. It's not first-drafty, but it's…drafty. We hear a handful of the interrogation sequences on the tapes at least three times too many. It tacks back and forth between analyses of Gein psychologically and exegeses of iterations of Gein filmically, which feels more indecisive and "meanwhile"-ing for "meanwhile"-ings sake than it does purposeful; some interviewees have a lot to offer, but others' bromides about the therapeutic applications of horror films don't add much. There's a goddamn drone shot of a goddamn water tower. Lost Tapes needed another, much more pitiless editing pass that reorganized the series' strongest material (and there's a lot!) and cut the fat (ditto).
Having Schechter "lead" a discussion of Gein as a lasting source of fascination, as seen through the lens of Schechter's Ripped from the Headlines, might have worked as an organizing principle. A chronological look at the evolution of serial killers, paraphiliacs, and so on in horror movies; Gein's influence on our understanding of forensic psych…Lost Tapes needed a stronger throughline than just "so check this gnarly shit out."
The other issue, which I mentioned in passing in my Fall River review vis-a-vis trying to find Epix, is the MGM+-ness of it all. I imagine creators get a freer rein at MGM+, a little more room to take risks, a little more runtime to play with, and on the one hand, I think that's awesome, and I've liked several of the streamer's true-crime offerings. On the other hand, I haven't loved them, necessarily; I had the same "there's something here, but it's unfocused" comments about MGM+'s Amityville series last year, and again, it's not that Lost Tapes is bad or tedious – but this is a streamer that is and has been the butt of running jokes about how it doesn't exist. Like, Mari and I literally just did this bit on Crime Seen the other day. If you want people to take you $6-a-month seriously as a destination for true crime…or anything else? You need to not let too many properties feel bloggy like this one does.
Because, you know, I don't not recommend Lost Tapes. It's got good access to experts and case materials, it's got legit bracing visuals, and it's got – I think – at least the beginnings of a grand unifying theory about Gein, his mother, and the stories we still tell about them both. But recommend subscribing to MGM+ just to get it?
To get it and the Amityville thing, and their Manson doc, and Hollywood Black: maybe. I wouldn't mind having someone else to talk about their library with. Just for this: can't do it. It's not quite there.
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