PSYCHO written by Robert Bloch (Simon & Schuster, 1959)
PSYCHO directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1960)
Norman hadn’t noticed the coming of the rain, nor the twilight. But it was quite dim here in the parlor now, and he reached over to switch on the lamp before resuming his reading.
It was one of those old-fashioned table lamps, the kind with the ornate glass shade and the crystal fringe. Mother had had it ever since he could remember, and she refused to get rid of it. Norman didn’t really object; he had lived in this house for all of the forty years of his life, and there was something quite pleasant and reassuring about being surrounded by familiar things. Here everything was orderly and ordained; it was only there, outside, that the changes took place. And most of those changes held a potential threat. Suppose he had spent the afternoon walking, for example? He might have been off on some lonely side road or even back in the swamps when the rain came, and then what? He’d be soaked to the skin, forced to stumble along home in the dark. You could catch your death of cold that way, and besides, who wanted to be out in the dark? It was much nicer here in the parlor, under the lamp, with a good book for company.
– from the novel Psycho
, if it’s possible to spoil a 55-year-old book and 54-year-old movie.
What can I possibly say about
Psycho the book, or
Psycho the movie, that hasn’t already been said and probably better?
Nothing. But that won’t stop me because both are cornerstones of the horror story as tales of terror. Let’s start with a quote from Hitchcock used by Bloch in his “unofficial autobiography,”
Once Around the Bloch:
“
Psycho all came from Robert Bloch’s book.” (from an interview in,
The Celluloid Muse)
And a comparison bears that out:
With a few exceptions, the characters and plot of the movie are surprisingly faithful to the book. Mary in the book becomes Marion in the movie. Both Mary and Marion have a sister, Lila, and both Mary and Marion are in love with Sam Loomis, who is in debt and refuses to marry until he digs his way out and can provide a real home rather than the back room of his hardware store where he currently lives. In chapter two Bloch explains how Lila forces Mary to go on a cruise after years of sacrificing for Lila to go to college, and how she met Sam who had won a trip on the same cruise. Hitchcock dispenses with the cruise and other extraneous material by panning in on the tail end of a tryst, Marion anxious to be married and begin their life together, Sam temporizing and telling her he’s made real progress in paying off his debts. In just a few minutes of film time, Hitchcock encapsulates and visually condenses that chapter.
In both book and movie, Mary/Marion’s boss, a real estate agent, unexpectedly earns $40,000 in cash on a sale and has her take it to the bank for deposit; the movie-boss is a pleasanter man and the movie-buyer less of a lecher. Temptation overrules judgment, and because it’s a Friday she runs away with the money hoping the weekend and a couple of car swaps will give her the cushion to make a get-away and reach Sam, convince him it’s an inheritance and start their new lives as Mr. and Mrs. Loomis. But an 18-hour drive offers time for reflection and Mary/Marion comes to doubt the wisdom of her actions; she has to stop or fall asleep at the wheel, and so she meets Norman, proprietor of the Bates Motel.
Bloch-Norman was based very loosely on Ed Gein. 1957 America was shocked by the discovery in Wisconsin of Gein’s murders and the uses to which he had put the dead bodies. Bloch says in his autobiography, “I based my story on the
situation rather than on any person, living or dead, involved in the Gein affair: indeed, I knew very little about Gein himself at the time. It was only some years later … that I discovered how closely the imaginary character I’d created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation.”
Bloch-Norman differs considerably from Hitchcock-Norman. Bloch’s Norman is overweight and 40 years old, and in his thought and action wavers from subservience to his mother to irritation at the restrictions her care places on him to fear of her actions when angered. Hitchcock’s Norman is younger and as portrayed by Anthony Perkins, tall, slender, his speech and manner reminiscent of Hitchcock’s frequent leading man, Jimmy Stewart (
Rope,
The Man Who Knew Too Much,
Vertigo). Where Bloch’s character conforms to the stereotype of the mother-fixated male, Hitchcock’s Norman displays a level of calm and sensibleness, and his high school jacket and aw-shucks manner about accepting the duty of his mother’s care camouflage his kinks, making him seem the all-American boy until he uncovers the hole in the wall that reveals Marion to his gaze and reveals his voyeurism to ours while simultaneously inviting us to partake of his point of view; in retrospect this and later revelations make the earlier scenes between Norman and Marion morbidly comic (“… a boy’s best friend is his mother”) in a manner not found in the novel, though often found in Bloch’s short stories.
The difference between the Normans, for me, lifts the film above the novel. While a recent reread has raised my estimation of Bloch’s novel, it is mainly a good thriller, well-organized, deftly presented and cannily written to hold its major revelation until very near the end. The film Norman, though, allows Hitchcock to do all that while exploiting the novel’s potential for satirizing the American reverence for motherhood and the social approval that may disregard the effects of such reverence on the maturity and sexuality of the American male, thus refining and extending Hitchcock’s examination of certain American males in
Shadow of a Doubt.
Oh, and for anyone wondering, the shower scene is in the book, has a similar though perhaps less visceral impact and wastes 100-percent less Hersey’s Chocolate Syrup.
From this point most of the movie proceeds similarly to the book, and the majority of the changes are for narrative flow or perhaps visual plausibility rather than touching on theme. For instance, Bloch’s Arbogast, the insurance investigator, is described in keeping with his Fort Worth origins, tall and wearing a Stetson; possibly Hitchcock didn’t care for the visual potential or perhaps he felt the character should tie into the movie’s first scene, and so his detective is played by Martin Balsam, a fine barrel-shaped, gruff-voiced character actor who seems all New York City.
Besides the change in Norman, probably the only other major change favors the book. In the novel, after Sam and Lila have discovered Norman’s secret, after Norman has been institutionalized, Sam visits Lila with a condensed version of what he’s heard from the specialists who have been treating Norman. It’s brief and given by Sam in fairly plain language. This allows Bloch to hint at a future relationship between Sam and Lila and to let any holes in the explanation pass by unchallenged because Sam is just trying to get across what he’s heard. By contrast, Hitchcock trots out Simon Oakland, a solid but not subtle character actor, as a psychiatrist pontificating on Norman’s condition, ramming home the conclusions the movie had already spent over an hour illustrating.
Both novel and movie end strongly, Hitchcock using what Bloch supplied, though the movie’s imagery has a gut-level punch the book does not quite equal: Norman, alone in his cell, thinking in his mother’s voice, quite calm, certain he – she – is being watched and just as certain she can show how mild-mannered she is, that she wouldn’t hurt a fly. And then Hitchcock juxtaposes a skull over Norman’s face. From the first time I saw
Psycho this scene disturbed me more than the shower scene.
Blame
Psycho for the hordes of insane killers, including the seemingly invulnerable and eternal stalkers from slasher movies, who invaded big and little screens starting in the 1960s. Certainly John Carpenter lifted some inspiration for
Halloween – Michael Myers’ psychiatrist was Dr. Sam Loomis – and, while I haven’t seen it, Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion is said to have a Hitchcockian feel. Other fine directors from Stanley Donan to Brian De Palma have tapped into either the comic or the horrific side of Hitchcock as inspiration for enjoyable entertainments. Donan’s
Charade acts as homage to comic suspense movies like
The 39 Steps and
North by Northwest, while De Palma’s early career was devoted to making thrillers that echoed
Vertigo and
Psycho, establishing him in the 1970s and early 1980s as one of the business’ hottest young directors.
One of the more interesting deconstructions of Hitchcock’s thrillers is 1992’s
Basic Instinct, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas. Verhoeven, like De Palma, worked at a time of fewer restrictions on the depiction of sexuality and so was able to move to the foreground the sexuality that simmers behind the character interactions in much of Hitchcock’s work. No languorous looks ala
Notorious, no fireworks flashing behind a kiss ala
To Catch a Thief,
Basic Instinct depicts courtship as brutal competition, as predatory power plays with the possibility of death as climax. Where Hitchcock always gives you someone to cheer for, Verhoeven does not; if you can get past that, it becomes a tale of terror with parallels to Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” where prey and quarry prove similarly proficient.
That said, after conversations with other viewers I’ve concluded
Basic Instinct is a love it or hate it movie, some viewers intrigued by how the director and screen writer apply Hitchcockian camera movements and angles of shots or turn around character tropes like the ice cold blonde princess who eventually melts for the hero – no melting allowed in this movie; others view it as derivative trash, insulting to the Master and bordering on porn. I’d be lying if I denied the other side didn’t have a point.
There were two official big screen sequels to
Psycho, the first directed by Richard Franklin,
Psycho II. It’s been a long time since I last saw it and all I really remember is thinking the title sounded like a brand of dog food sold at the time, the movie wasn’t as bad as I expected, and Meg Tilly can somehow look intelligent in anything with almost no effort. I haven’t seen
Psycho III (directed by Anthony Perkins himself) or the scene-by-scene remake of
Psycho (directed by Gus Van Sant); from reviews and word-of-mouth, I’m inclined to keep it that way.
About the recent TV show
Bates Motel, I fell off about mid-way through the first season because of equipment difficulties, and haven’t caught up. The implication that the community around the motel was as off-kilter, violent and mentally unstable as the Bates family seemed promising. If anyone has been keeping up, please drop a line; I’d like to hear more.
More related Hitchcock:
Frenzy (1972; starring John Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster)
Somewhat neglected movie contemporary to
Psycho:
Peeping Tom (1960; dir. Michael Powell; starring Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey)
Brian de Palma channeling Hitchcock:
Sisters (1973; starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning)
Obsession (1976; Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, John Lithgow)
Dressed to Kill (1980; starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen)
Blow Out (1981; starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow)
Body Double (1984; starring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry)
[De Palma was often chastised for being too Hitchcock-like, and sometimes it does feel more like imitation than inspiration. Still, this streak of thrillers produced entertaining movies that range from good-ish to very good. My favorites are
Sisters and
Body Double – not everyone would agree with the latter. I also think
Blow Out is underrated; it was the first Travolta movie I liked and, maybe not coincidentally, his first flop.]
Thrillers with similar themes to
Psycho directed by David Fincher:
Seven (starring Morgan Freemen, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow)
Zodiac (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo)
Similar reading/viewing:
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson &
The Killer Inside Me dir. by Michael Winterbottom (2010; starring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba)
[An earlier movie version starring Stacy Keach receives good word-of-mouth. This version is excellent, at least as good as the novel and follows it reasonably closely; a strong
noir outing. Affleck was a revelation; I don’t recall seeing him in anything before, but he carries the movie. Hudson is fine as Affleck’s fiancé, and Alba is also fine, something I don’t expect to say about Alba and so a pleasant surprise.]
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris &
The Silence of the Lambs dir. By Jonathan Demme (1991; starring Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine)
More Bloch:
Out of the Mouths of Graves (Mysterious Press, 1979)
The Early Fears (Fedogan & Bremer, 1994)
American Gothic (Simon & Schuster, 1974; last reissue ibooks, 2004)
Of broader interest:
Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier
The Snowman’s Children by Glen Hirshberg
Sharp Objects &
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Monday:
Stoker
Can't wait. 
