Originally Posted by WB
Wrightson really earned his reputation as a master horror artist with this "Dark as a Dungeon" interpretation of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film.

[Linked Image from i.pinimg.com]

It was originally the cover of some small-print horror film fanzine, that I've seen listed on Ebay occasionally. A disturbing image, but somehow aesthetically beautiful and expertly rendered down to the last pen-stroke.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the novel and movie of Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, were all inspired by the real-life serial killer Ed Gein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein

Hard to believe these were not just a grisly fantasy, but based on horrific events that actually happened.

Resurrecting another horrific Wrightson masterpiece, just in time for Halloween.

In the pre-internet era, there was a 12-page text article with photos on the source material for this, the murders by Ed Gein, in DEATH RATTLE , issue 7, Oct 1986. Gein's home is photographed in the article, his pickup was purchased and turned into a traveling sideshow at county fairs. Only an anonymous arson of Gein's family farm in rural Plainsville, Wisconsin prevented it from becoming an intended museum of the murders, burned to the ground before it could be sold at auction to someone who voiced a desire to do so. That was clearly an indefinite fame for decades that the small town of 600 people didn't want.

And beyond Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, influenced John Carpenter's Halloween film series, and the Friday The 13th film series as well. And Silence of the Lambs.
The true story being stranger, or at least equally strange, as these fictional versions.

Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho, lived in nearby Milwaukee, and read in the local papers about the Ed Gein case, and used it as source material for his book. Made even more famous in director Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie of the same name. And in the films that followed in the same vein. As I recall, Wrightson's above illustration was initially done as the cover for a Texas Chainsaw fanzine, circa 1975.