A: A box of farmer fannies.1
The following year, Robert Bloch loosely adapted the Gein crimes for his novel, relocating his tale to Phoenix and concentrating on the mother-fixation aspects of the story while playing down the mutilation and cannibalism. An assistant gave Alfred Hitchcock the book and he procured the film rights soon after reading it. The director also had his staff buy up as many copies of the novel as they could find. He wanted to prevent readers from learning about the plot and then revealing its secrets. After some initial resistance from Paramount Pictures, the “Master of Suspense” directed his most famous and financially successful film—one that would never have been made if not for Ed Gein, a quiet little cannibal, who explained to the authorities, “I had a compulsion to do it.”2
Is it really a surprise, though, that our greatest cinematic villain is a man-eating psychiatrist while the mild-mannered runner-up is based on a real-life cannibal killer? Perhaps not, if one considers that many cultures share the belief that consuming another human is the worst (or close to the worst) behavior that a person can undertake. As a result, real-life cannibalistic psychopaths like Jeffrey Dahmer (another Wisconsin native) and his Russian counterpart, Andrei Chikatilo, have attained something akin to mythical status in the annals of history’s most notorious murderers. Whether through a filter of fictionalization, where man-eating deviants are transformed into powerful antiheroes, or through tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life cannibals, these tales feed our obsession with all things gruesome—an obsession that is now an acceptable facet of our society.
A different attitude was taken toward “primitive” social or ethnic groups whose members might not have shared the Western take on cannibalism taboos. At best, these “savages” were pegged as souls to be saved, but only if they met certain requirements. In the first half of the 20th century, for example, explorers and the missionaries who followed them ventured into the foreboding New Guinea highlands and quickly imposed one hard-and-fast rule for the locals: Cannibalism in any form was strictly forbidden.
But far worse instances of cultural intrusion occurred elsewhere and throughout history, as those accused of consuming other humans, for any reason, were brutalized, enslaved, and murdered. The most infamous example of this practice began during the last years of the 15th century when millions of indigenous people living in the Caribbean and Mexico were summarily reclassified as cannibals for reasons that had little to do with people-eating. Instead, it paved the way for them to be robbed, beaten, conquered, and slain, all at the whim of their new Spanish masters.
Similar atrocities were carried out on a massive scale by a succession of flag-planting European powers who (if one believes their accounts) wrested South America, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific away from man-eating savages, whose behavior placed them beyond the pale of anything that could remotely be described as human.
So were European fears about cannibalism simply an invention used to justify conquest, or were there cultures, including those encountered by the Spaniards, where the consumption of humans was regarded as normal behavior? Although defining someone as a cannibal became an effective way to dehumanize them, there is also evidence that ritual cannibalism, as embodied in various customs related to funerary rites and warfare, occurred throughout history.
As I began studying these forms of cannibalism, I sought to determine not only their perceived functions, but just how widespread they were or weren’t. Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly given the subject matter—there is disagreement among anthropologists regarding ritual cannibalism. Some deny that it ever occurred, while others claim that the behavior did occur but was uncommon. Still others claim that cannibalism was practiced by many cultures throughout history and for a variety of reasons. One such body of evidence led me straight back to European history, where I learned that a particularly macabre form of cannibalism had been practiced for hundreds of years by nobility, physicians, and commoners alike, even into the 20th century.