Colour Me Good Arrggghhhh!!
UK retail giant Tesco has withdrawn from sale on its website a colouring book that depicts gory scenes from horror films. Colour Me Good Arrggghhhh!! features images from Psycho and Hellraiser, among other films, and was marketed online at children aged five to eight.
Tesco said the book had been placed in the wrong category when listed on its website by a third-party seller. Publisher I Love Mel said the book, which had been offered for sale by one of its stockists, was aimed at adults.
The 16-page colouring book features on its cover an image of actress Janet Leigh screaming as she is stabbed to death in Psycho’s infamous shower scene. There are pictures inside from The Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Fatal Attraction.
East Sussex-based author Mel Elliott said: “My products are pop culture-inspired and aimed at playful grown-ups. They are not aimed at kids. “They are usually sold to grown-ups in fashion shops and book stores.” The Royal College of Art graduate said she had been unaware that the stockist of the book had placed it on sale through Tesco’s website.
‘Psycho’ Prequel ‘Bates Motel’ Straight to Series
News via The Hollywood Reporter: A&E is checking in to the Bates Motel. The cable network has opted to bypass the traditional pilot stage and order its Psycho prequel Bates Motel straight to series aimed at a 2013 premiere.
From Lost‘s Carlton Cuse and Friday Night Lights‘ Kerry Ehrin, the series is inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho and is described as a contemporary exploration of Norman Bates’ formative years. It will explore his relationship with his mother, Norma, and offer a look at the backstory that helped forge the infamous serial killer. It’s been dubbed as a cross between Twin Peaks and Smallville.
The series, which will begin preproduction and casting immediately, is scheduled for a 2013 premiere on A&E. Cuse and Ehrin will executive produce the Universal Television and Carlton Cuse Productions effort. Anthony Cipriano penned the pilot script.
“We are proud to be partnering with Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin on their thrilling reinvention of one of the most compelling characters in cinematic history,” A&E president and GM Bob DeBitetto and A&E exec vp programming Dave McKillop said in a joint statement announcing the news Monday. “It’s a provocative project from two of the best storytellers in the business, and we’re looking forward to getting started.”
Bates Motel marks former Lost co-showrunner Cuse’s first TV project since his run on the island-set ABC drama.
The A&E effort is not the first time a Psycho spinoff has been attempted; NBC aired a 90-minute TV movie titled Bates Motel in 1987. The A&E series also marks the latest serial-killer prequel story, joining NBC’s Silence of the Lambs prequel series, Hannibal, which hails from Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller.
Serial killer prequels and Hitchcock history are both subjects that are currently being explored at other places too. There’s Hannibal, Bryan Fuller’s Silence of the Lambs prequel TV show that is currently in development, for one. Also shooting are Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Fox Searchlight’s behind the scenes drama starring Anthony Hopkins, and The Girl, which features Toby Jones as the famed thriller director.
‘Hannibal’ on NBC
NBC’s new take on serial killer Hannibal Lecter is shaping up to be quite an interesting (and series-TV-friendly) departure from films like Silence of the Lambs. Reported by socialpsychol HERE in November 2011.
Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daises, Heroes) is taking five pages of backstory about the infamous cannibal psychiatrist from Thomas Harris’ book Red Dragon and using it as the basis for the first couple seasons of his planned drama.
Hannibal, which has received a 13-episode series order, features Lecter solving crimes with empathic FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). For the first time, viewers will spend quality time with Lecter while he’s at large and before the world knows his secrets, working side by side with a similarly brilliant man who is destined to catch him.
“It’s before he was incarcerated, so he’s more of a peacock,” Fuller tells EW.com. “There is a cheery disposition to our Hannibal. He’s not being telegraphed as a villain. If the audience didn’t know who he was, they wouldn’t see him coming. What we have is Alfred Hitchcock’s principle of suspense — show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat when it’s going to go boom. So the audience knows who Hannibal is so we don’t have to overplay his villainy. We get to subvert his legacy and give the audience twists and turns.”
“It really is a love story, for lack of a better description, between these two characters,” Fuller says. “As Hannibal has said [to Graham] in a couple of the movies, ‘You’re a lot more like me than you realize.’ We’ll get to the bottom of exactly what that means over the course of the first two seasons. But we’re taking our sweet precious time.”
“Doing a cable model on network television gives us the opportunity not to dally in our storytelling because we have a lot of real estate to cover,” Fuller says. “I pitched a seven-season arc including stories from various [Thomas Harris] books.”
The show will include familiar characters from Harris’ novels, though he’s “Starbucking” the genders of a couple of them. FBI boss Jack Crawford will remain male, but Dr. Alan Bloom is becoming Dr. Alana Bloom, and tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds is becoming tabloid blogger Fredricka Lounds.
Between Hannibal and Fuller’s Munsters reboot pilot Mockingbird Lane, the writer certainly has his hands full. Still, there’s one other TV series idea that we’re all hoping eventually gets off the ground — the return of Star Trek.
Fuller has previously spoken to director-producer Bryan Singer about teaming to reboot the TV franchise, though any movement depends on rights-holder Paramount and Trek’s current creative kingpin, J.J. Abrams (who, of course, knows a thing or two about making TV shows too). The consensus has been that there is unlikely to be a Trek TV show while the current movie franchise is still regularly hitting theaters.
“Bryan and I are big fans of Trek and have discussed a take on what we would do, and we would love to do it,” Fuller says. “I don’t think anything is going to happen in any official capacity until after the next movie comes out. And I’m sure it would be wisely under J.J. Abrams’ purview of what happens. He’s the guardian of Trek right now.”
Hannibal Lecter Hunts Serial Killers
Known most famously for playing serial killer cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter, in serial killer flick Solace, Hopkins will play good guy John Clancy, “a former doctor with psychic abilities who works for the FBI and is drawn into unique serial killer case that pits him against a formidable foe.”
The film has gone through an incessant rewrite process with Sean Bailey and Ted Griffin having a stab at it first before it was rewritten by James Vanderbilt (Zodiac). However, the most recent draft was written by the very talented Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon). The film is said to come at a time when studios are backing off from serial killer stories as other bad guys like aliens and assassins seem to be the focus. Perhaps in that way Solace will be a bit of gamble for New Line.
Ed Gein
Edward Theodore “Ed” Gein (August 27, 1906– July 26, 1984) was an American murderer. His crimes, which he committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, garnered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin.
After police found body parts in his house in 1957, Gein confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, in 1957. Initially found unfit to stand trial, following confinement in a mental health facility, he was tried in 1968 for the murder of Worden and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he spent in a mental hospitals, the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. The body of Bernice Worden was found in Gein’s shed; her head and the head of Mary Hogan were found inside his house. Robert H. Gollmar, the judge in the Gein case, wrote: “Due to prohibitive costs, Gein was tried for only one murder — that of Mrs. Worden.”
With fewer than three murders attributed, Gein does not meet the traditional definition of a serial killer. However it is the insane collection of human body parts that has given rise to the Ed Geinmythology. Searching the house, authorities found:
Four noses- Whole human bones and fragments
- Nine masks of human skin
- Bowls made from human skulls
- Ten female heads with the tops sawn off
- Human skin covering several chair seats
- Mary Hogan’s head in a paper bag
- Bernice Worden’s head in a burlap sack
- Nine vulvas in a shoe box
- A belt made from human female nipples
- Skulls on his bedposts
- Organs in the refrigerator
- A pair of lips on a draw string for a windowshade
- A lampshade made from the skin from a human face
These artifacts were photographed at the crime lab and then were properly destroyed.
Regardless, according to the creators Robert Bloch, Tobe Hooper and Thomas Harris, his real-life case influenced the creation of fictional serial killers Norman Bates from ‘Psycho’, Leatherface from ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, and Jame Gumb from ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.
The story of Ed Gein has had a lasting impact on western popular culture as evidenced by its numerous appearances in movies, music and literature. Apart from influencing 3 of the horror genres most iconic movies, Gein’s story was adapted into a number of movies, including ‘Deranged’ (1974), ‘In the Light of the Moon’ (2000) released in the U.S. as ‘Ed Gein’ (2001), and ‘Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield’ (2007). Deranged is disturbingly creepy, the others, as is usual with this fare, are awful. A biographical musical titled ‘Ed Gein: the Musical’ 
premiered on January 2, 2010 in Menasha, Wisconsin. Haven’t seen it…
On July 26, 1984, Gein died of respiratory and heart failure due to cancer in Stovall Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute. His grave site in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers chipped off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is now in a museum in Waushara County. Rot in Hell.
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