The Unopened Tomb of Augusta Gein and the Shoe Werner Herzog Ate

 

Ed Gein was never the monster we think we know. That’s the trap. Dahmer collected bodies as souvenirs, Bundy seduced to destroy, Gacy buried teenagers under his house. Gein only killed two people. The rest, he dug up. He wasn’t a predator but a scavenger, a broken son of a tyrannical mother, rummaging through rural Wisconsin cemeteries to upholster his farmhouse with human skin. The Nazis taught him that bodies could be raw material. His shattered mind did the rest. He was so deteriorated they declared him unfit for trial. He seemed so harmless that Plainfield families let him babysit their children.

Gein’s paradox is brutal: no one wants to talk about the real man, but everyone exploits his shadow. Robert Bloch wrote Psycho inspired by him. Hitchcock turned him into Norman Bates. Tobe Hooper warped him into Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Jonathan Demme refined him into Buffalo Bill for The Silence of the Lambs. Slayer dedicated “Dead Skin Mask” to him, painting him as a thrash metal demon. Pop culture built an empire on Gein’s bones, but Gein himself, that poor devil trapped in an infernal farmhouse, doesn’t offer much. There’s no glamour in severe mental illness. No thriller possible in a man who crafts lampshades from human faces because his mother forbade him from understanding sex.

Plainfield wanted to forget him. Everyone except one. Errol Morris, a wayward philosophy student who had already interviewed serial killer Ed Kemper, wanted to understand the ideas behind Gein’s acts. He wanted to sit across from him in the psychiatric hospital and ask why. Morris wasn’t a filmmaker yet, but he had a disturbing theory: Gein had desecrated dozens of graves around his mother Augusta’s, but never hers. Or had he? Morris speculated that Gein had dug a side tunnel from a neighboring grave to reach Augusta without leaving a trace. The question was obscene and necessary: Was the mother’s body still in her coffin?

In 1976, Morris shared his theory with filmmaker Werner Herzog. The two had met by chance, both outsiders obsessed with the margins of human experience. Herzog, who had already filmed in jungles and deserts chasing uncomfortable truths, saw cinematic perfection in Morris’s idea. He proposed a direct solution: buy two shovels, go to Plainfield’s cemetery at night, dig up Augusta Gein, and film it all for a documentary called Digging Up the Past. It wasn’t a joke. Herzog arrived at the cemetery with a shovel and camera. Morris never showed up.

Herzog abandoned the documentary but not Wisconsin. The atmosphere of Plainfield, that American Gothic of abandoned farms and buried secrets, captivated him. He filmed Stroszek there, his heartbreaking story of a German accordionist chasing the American dream only to find desolation. Morris accused Herzog of stealing his material. Herzog, far from offended, challenged him: “Make your own film.” And he added an impossible promise: if Morris managed to release his first feature, Herzog would eat his shoe.

Two years later, Morris premiered Gates of Heaven, a documentary about pet cemeteries that dissects death, capitalism, and American denial with surgical precision. Herzog kept his word. In front of cameras and witnesses, he boiled his leather shoe, seasoned it, and ate it. The short documentary is called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. The scene is absurd and moving. Herzog chews with dignity because a man of his word doesn’t back down, not even from boiled leather. He was celebrating Morris finding his voice.

Augusta Gein’s tomb was never opened. No one confirmed the tunnel theory. But the obsession of two filmmakers with a mediocre killer and his dead mother created something more valuable than any answer: a bet on art, madness, and how far we’re willing to go for a story. Gein wasn’t the monster. The monster was the need to make him one. Herzog understood that. Morris did too. And between them, with shovels that never touched dirt and a boiled shoe, they proved that the most disturbing truth lies not in the graves we open, but in those we never dare to touch.