Deranged (1974) on Netflix
R19741h 23mCrimeHorrorThriller
Ezra Cobb cares for his domineering mother Amanda on their Midwest farm; she has raised him to despise women. After she dies, he digs up her body and brings it home.
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- Netflix2.6/5
- IMDb6.3/106,686 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes40%
Trailer
Plot summary
Middle-aged Ezra Cobb farms alongside Amanda, his elderly mother, in the rural Midwest. Amanda is deeply religious and has spent years telling her son that women are sinful; she warns that sin pays out in disease and death, and she names Maureen Selby as the one woman he should look up once she is gone. When Amanda's long illness finally takes her, Ezra shuts himself away. Nearly a year passes before he hears voices pushing him toward her grave. He goes at night, opens the grave and carries the decomposed body to the farmhouse, holding it together with wax and strips of fish skin. The obituaries give him an idea: other graves could supply parts to keep his mother company. A newspaper columnist narrates the events.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Deranged (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producer Tom Karr, who had been fascinated with Ed Gein for years, funded Deranged himself with money he earned as a concert promoter for Led Zeppelin and Three Dog Night.
SPOILER
To secure an R rating, several sequences were truncated or cut entirely, among them an extended murder of the waitress Mary Ransum and a dissection in which Ezra Cobb mutilates Miss Johnson's corpse and eats brains from its skull.- Deranged was the only film Jeff Gillen ever directed; the actor, who died in 1995, played the mall-store Santa in A Christmas Story, whose director Bob Clark was an uncredited producer on Deranged.
- Art director Albert Fisher dressed the sets with stacks of crime serials and pornographic magazines, taking inspiration from newspaper stories about Ed Gein and his crimes.
- Although the plot was based on the crimes of Ed Gein, the title Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile is misleading, since Gein never experimented with necrophilia.
- Deranged vanished after its 1974 release but was rediscovered in Florida in the mid-1990s, after which MGM, the parent company of its distributor American International Pictures, issued it on home video.
