The Human-Skin Lantern from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho movie (scene, actor, director)

[oeccscclhjhn]

Originally Posted by Monastic555

Agreed--the Chainsaw film was much closer to Ed Gein than the Hitchcock movie was.

Then there's Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs.

[Monastic555]

Originally Posted by oeccscclhjhn

Then there's Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs.

Now that you mention it, yes, that's another one.

[Monastic555]

Originally Posted by Ghengis

you know, they could just take a picture of it...if it sounds like bs, it's probably bs

Since the above skeptic scoffed at the idea of actual tattooed Skin being extracted, here is the proof:

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5222032

[Iconographer]

Originally Posted by karlsch

The Nazis making human skin lampshades is an untrue urban legend. Not that they didn't do other things that were at least as bad.

The lampshade story came out of the trial of Ilse Koch, and the accusations were disproven:

"There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the "***** of Buchenwald", had written that she had lamp shades made of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lampshades were made out of goatskin. In addition to that, her crimes were primarily against the German people; they were not war crimes against American or Allied prisoners ... Later she was tried by a German court for her crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment. But they had clear jurisdiction. We did not."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch

[Monastic555]

There is a dictionary term for books bound in human-skin. The technical term is anthropodermic bibliopegy.

[Monastic555]

Harvard University has at least one copy of a book bound in human-skin. Not a human-skin lantern but a book. So it's close.

[ironpony]

Originally Posted by Monastic555

Agreed--the Chainsaw film was much closer to Ed Gein than the Hitchcock movie was.

But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre though had three serial killers in it, where as Ed Gain was just one. So doesn't that count as a huge departure from the true story compared to Psycho though?

[Monastic555]

Originally Posted by ironpony

But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre though had three serial killers in it, where as Ed Gain was just one. So doesn't that count as a huge departure from the true story compared to Psycho though?

I see your point. But the point we were trying to make about Chainsaw was that it showed Ed Gein's Furniture made of Human-Bones which was not shown in Psycho at all.

[banjomike]

I never noticed anything like this in Psycho. But if it existed, the lampshade was definitely not the real thing.

It would be to difficult, legally risky, and far too expensive to find a real skin lampshade. If one does exist in the movie, it was certainly made of a calfskin drum head, cut loose from its rim, softened to made it pliable, then painted with dyes after it became dry enough to be painted.

That's how movie studios make props like this. A drumhead and a paint job would have been no more than $15-20 back then, and Hitchcock was next to broke when he made Psycho. He was saving every nickel he could on its production. He simply couldn't afford expensive set dressing or the special effects he used in Vertigo or The Birds back then.

Vertigo lost him a bundle, and he needed to make up his loses as cheaply as possible. There are no special effects at all in Psycho. By filming in black and white and shooting on a very cheap back-lot set, Psycho only cost Hitchcock about as much as a half-year of his TV series.

[OzzyRules]

I think it's unfortunate that such a great movie had any such horrific inspiration from real life. But I really loved this Hitchcock movie.