A few years after graduating, Morris returned to Wisconsin to pursue an interest in serial killers. He began with Ed Gein, who was then an inmate at what is now the Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun. The notorious prisoner had become a folk legend for killing several people and for exhuming bodies from cemeteries in and around Plainfield, where he had lived on his family’s farm. Not only did Gein (pronounced geen, with a hard g) dig up corpses, but he also used principles of taxidermy to fashion body parts into gruesome trophies. Gein also ate human flesh.
“Ed Gein is one of the proverbial great monsters,” Morris explains. “He, in many people’s views, originated the whole genre of psycho killer movies of the sixties.” His case inspired films ranging from
Psycho to
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Though Gein was arrested in 1957, he didn’t come to trial until 1968, when Morris was a UW student. The notoriety of the case increased dramatically when Gein was acquitted by reason of insanity.
By the early seventies, Morris was doing graduate work in philosophy at UC-Berkeley. He decided to write his thesis on the insanity plea, and secured a letter of introduction from the head of the School of Criminology to the superintendent at the hospital where Gein was incarcerated. Morris traveled to central Wisconsin, where he moved in with Gein’s former neighbors and conducted several interviews with the man himself.
“One truly surreal experience,” recounts Morris, was discovering that the superintendent “was as crazy as anybody I was talking to in the hospital.” His perception was cemented by a conversation in which the head of the institution insisted that Gein was not truly a cannibal, because even though he ate people, by Gein’s own account, he didn’t enjoy it. “Oookaaaay,” Morris thought to himself. “I was entering into a sort of strange, surreal world of Looney Tunes.”
Not necessarily to his own surprise, Morris liked Gein. “I found him really strange and funny, perverse, ironic — not stupid. Crazy, but not stupid,” says Morris.
Discovering along the way that Plainfield had been home to an unusually high percentage of murderers, Morris set out to write a book on the small village. “I never brought it off, which is unfortunate,” he says, “but I accumulated endless hours of interviews, hundreds of them.” Those 120-minute Sony cassette tapes are still sitting in a trunk safely tucked away in the basement of Morris’s office. “I think it’s some of my best work,” he adds ruefully.
Though he hasn’t yet been able to coax a coherent product out of that period of his life, the lessons he learned have stuck with him. “I developed a keen appreciation of how crazy the world really is — not only how crazy, but how people are endlessly misperceived by others,” says Morris. Real-life murder mysteries taught him that “you can talk to five or six people about an event that they have all experienced, and the accounts are so radically different.” That epiphany, combined with a strong feeling that “there is a reality,” helped define the person Morris is today. “People may be interested in avoiding [reality] or rearranging it, or obfuscating it, but it’s there in the wings,” he says.
At the same time as he was following his self-described “prurient” instincts in central Wisconsin, Morris was also becoming deeply enmeshed in the
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. “It was an extraordinary resource,” he says of the trove of prints that included thousands of movies from Warner Brothers, RKO, and a number of Hollywood’s so-called Poverty Row studios. He began viewing films there as a student and then returned after graduating. “You could go into a room with a Kodak Pageant projector and start watching movies — you could program your own film festival,” he says. “You could select a director like William Wellman and watch thirty Wellman films, or, if you wanted, you could watch Howard Hawks or John Ford.”
Morris cites the many hours he spent cuing up classic films in Wisconsin, and also at the Pacific Film Archive at UC-Berkeley, as seminal experiences on his path to becoming a filmmaker. He also credits the many people in Madison who were deeply interested in film and in some way attached to
The Velvet Light Trap, an academic journal founded by UW graduate students in 1971. “My whole interest in movies comes out of the University of Wisconsin,” he says. “There is a history to be written about all the filmmakers that have come out of Wisconsin — there’s a lot of them.”
Morris’s time in the movie archives gave him a lens through which to direct his curiosity. “I’ve always been interested in certain kinds of ideas,” he says, “and film seemed a way to actually think about stuff.”