Deranged (1974): proto-slasher with a commitment to weird American History (Review)

The true story of the Wisconsin killer, Ed Gein, influenced some of the most important films in horror cinema. He was the muse of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There are also films that tackle his disturbing crimes head-on with the gory 2000 film of the same name chief among them, that is not what Jeff Gillen & Alan Ormsby’s 1974 film Deranged – out now on Arrow Video – sought to do. There’s a little more going on under this hood.

In this accurately titled film, Ed Gein has been renamed, Ezra Cobbs. Ezra (Roberts Blossom) is very close to his religiously evangelic and fatally ill Ma (Cosette Lee) and when she dies he doesn’t really know what to do with himself, he tries to live a normal life, but that doesn’t last too long and his insanity growing by the day. His solution is to dig up his Mother’s corpse under the cover of night and take her home with him. At first, he talks with her as if nothing had happened, but as time passes he believes his dead Mother needs company while he’s out working, therefore he digs up other recently deceased Women taking them home with him. After a chance encounter with the one Woman his Mother could trust, Ezra develops an interest in the living, preying on younger and younger girls.

Now there are many things that make Deranged a strange film, the chief has to be the inclusion of documentary-lite passages where a local journalist sits in a shot near Ezra, detailing the ins and outs of his mental state and what will come to be. This sort of technique is intended to make Deranged more of a re-enactment than an outright straight adaptation of history. This is particularly true with the opening TV-doc disclaimer stating that names have been changed to protect the identities of involved parties.

The humour also deserves billing when describing what makes Gillen & Ormsby’s film such a one-off. There are two ways humour manifests itself. There’s a scene involving an elderly man at the bar and a séance that can only really be described as surreal. There’s no other way to describe a sex scene instigated through possession, textbook surreal. Comedy also comes from the disarming honesty of Ezra which is apparently true of the Ed Gein legend. On more than one occasion, he tells people what happened to locals who’ve gone missing, but no one believes him owing to the uncomplicated way he blurts these things out. “oh, Ezra, with your jokes”.

One of Deranged’s claims to fame is that it’s one of FX and makeup maestro Tom Savini’s earliest FX jobs. Even though much of the blood is made of that popular 70s model of red paint and the dead bodies littered around Ezra’s house never come remotely close to convincing. Even with this being true, there is still that one memorable scene where Ezra uses a spoon to scoop a brain out of one of the corpses he finds. This infamous scene is disgusting in all the right ways with this new restoration, a scene where you can see glimmers of the future Savini would have in one small, graphic moment.

What makes all these strange disparate threads work is the lead actor Roberts Blossom. Most of the cast is much of muchness, but Ezra Cobb Roberts Blossom is perfectly cast. His expressive face elevates Deranged past what is an otherwise trashy little oddity. He’s a respectful religious man who’ll always address people as Sir and Ma’am, and even though he’s a little eccentric he gets on with the community. In the privacy of his own home, however, he’s a damaged soul who dresses up corpses and sits them at his dining table; he also wears the skin of the dead as a mask. Knowing what he is capable of and his self-imposed isolation from respectable society makes the scenes where he stalks his prey all the more effective.

With a brooding organ score and a frighteningly believable performance by Roberts Blossom, Deranged is a strange film about an equally strange man. Playing out like a slasher before the genre became all-powerful but employing ideas that’ll always make it feel fresh. The film might be trashy and the comedic inclinations hit or miss but the director duo’s commitment to the weird excesses of a difficult true story mark this Arrow Video release as one for the truly curious.

Thanks for reading our review of Deranged (1974)

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