Nothing happens in Psycho. This is something you notice when you return to it after not having seen it for some time, in my case after at least a decade. Though it acquired a reputation at the time of its release for its violence, that violence is as minimal as it can possibly be. The body count is only two, and their killings are, by today’s standards, brief and efficient. Yet they stick in your memory enough to make you forget that there is almost nothing going on in between. The opening one-woman road trip/anxiety attack may fake out the actual plot, but it does little to deflect the most stilted and awkward conversations ever committed to tape. It is several, often tedious minutes of people struggling to talk around what they actually want or need to talk about: unrequited or unquenchable desires, concealment of crimes, the quest to uncover those crimes, and the discovery of new crimes that far exceed expectations.
Of course none of this is incidental. You do not make one of the most effective shockers in cinematic history by carpet-bombing the senses. Whether he intended to or not, Alfred Hitchcock had already established the necessary component for making even a decent slasher: using your time wisely.
Slasher films are centered on antagonists with minimal self-control. A successful slasher requires a maker with an almost superhuman mastery of self and an oracular level of judgment. Only after those demands are met is the imagination allowed to run wild. But this is to repeat myself (and countless others) and to make a false comparison. Neither the films that came in the wake of Psycho nor its contemporaries like Peeping Tom and Homicidal have the same motivating factors, the same level of control in its makers, or the same lack of control in its world.
The most significant scene in Psycho is not the most iconic. True, when you see the “shower scene” for the first time you are without a doubt scared shitless. This is a testament to Hitchcock’s craftsmanship that no prior context or hype can prepare you for the genuine article. But Hitchcock is just fulfilling an obligation to his chosen genre. The relative speed of the killings—hardly possible in reality I should think—is indicative as much of impatience as it is of sudden terror. He wants them out of the way. It’s actually those boring in-between sequences that so occupy his attention. Because everyone, character and viewer, is flying blind down a hidden pathway, quite literally as the Bates Motel has been rezoned into oblivion. Death is half the battle in horror, not even; the rest is discovery.
It’s not at all clear that Lila Crane (Vera Miles) needs to look in every corner of the Bates home in search of whomever else is there with Norman. She’s not even in any particular hurry when she does it, even though time seems to be of the essence. But maybe she can’t help it. Maybe she’s captivated by it. The entire house appears to be stuck in some other era, as if it refused to adjust with the world’s whims. It’s cluttered not just with Norman’s birds, but with Victorian-style knick-knacks, ornate furniture, gaudy wallpaper, and arcane plumbing. “Really, this whole house belonged in a museum!” Robert Bloch wrote in the original novel. Then she goes to Norman’s room.
What that scene signifies probably differs from viewer to viewer; but it is significant, not to mention very sad. It is only slightly longer than the murder scenes, but the way the camera lingers on every inch of the space is telling of the interest we are expected to take in it. The impulse toward voyeurism is established early on; now it is going in the opposite direction. Yet it is also more than mere voyeurism, giving the lurker not a salacious snippet but a whole life story. Lila is creeping around what is basically a boy’s room. But seeing as Norman Bates is unusually boyish despite being in his late-20s at most, this isn’t so off-putting at first. Norman seems at first glance like someone who is not ready to get rid of his stuffed animals or procure a larger bed. And despite his responsibilities—”habits,” as he calls them—he is of negligible adulthood having been forbidden from talking to women and having more or less abnegated himself from connections of any kind with anyone. It’s pathetic and curious, but not ominous. At least until she discovers his bookshelf. Lila is seen holding a hardcover book with no text on the spine; she gives no obvious expression when she reads it, but it is implied to be unseemly.
Bloch’s novel is more explicit about Norman’s reading habits. Mother doesn’t like his little library of blasphemy: books about the violent rituals of the Incas, the occult writings of Aleister Crowley, Sade’s Justine, Huysmans’s La Bas, and “a nondescript assortment of untitled volumes” with “pathologically pornographic” content. In addition to being older and cruder in Bloch’s conception, more in keeping with the Ed Gein inspiration, Norman is also a bit of an edgelord dilettante. The wisdom of the omission of these details in the film is clear enough. There needed to be a more delicate indication of Lila realizing that the situation was less straightforward than she, Sam, and the viewer had assumed. It makes what would have been a rather absurd, or at least more lurid, reveal far more devastating.
That scene understandably loses most of its impact with Gus Van Sant’s notorious 1998 shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake. This was partly the fault of the makers, who replaced the unlabeled book with a vintage porn magazine that Julianne Moore’s more worldly and assertive Lila snickers at. But in truth it was largely the fault of the circumstances. No matter how Van Sant approached the remake, which he claims in the making-of documentary that he was pitched rather than the other way around, he must have known he was up against an awkward situation.
Like the Bates house, Psycho is better suited to a more archaic time that is not so morally relaxed, not so badly dressed, and not so abundant in serial killer lore and the original film’s gorier progeny. The trailer doesn’t even try to conceal the main selling point of the original. There is no point in doing a shocker when nothing is shocking. So naturally the film, even as it stayed almost exactly the same, had to mutate if it was to be palatable.
I went into the theatrical release of the remake with the expectation that I was about to watch something perverse if not outright provocative. I was in broad agreement with the critical consensus that this was not the best means for the director of Good Will Hunting to spend his enviable cultural capital. I set these concerns aside anyway, being a teenager rather than a critic who is paid to explain their bad life choices in print. Thank God for that, because I had a fascination with Psycho that was not easy to explain. Speaking today I would say it was rooted Psycho’s compelling meditation on exterior appearances versus interior impulses—Marion going on the run with $40,000 in cash; Norman relinquishing his autonomy to a dead woman whenever he gets a hard-on; Lila being a lurker. But in truth, Norman Bates was my induction into the concept of the romanticized antihero. Why it fell to that skinny, hermetic, boyish, emotionally and sexually stunted serial killer is beyond my capacity—or just willingness—to articulate. Norman took on a transgressive, existential cool for someone who knew no great hardship and never knew, or really cared to know, the touch of much of anyone. Look, I’m not fucking proud of it. And for what it’s worth, I didn’t stick to it. Bates Motel played on this aura, but like all television its deconstructive antics left too little to the imagination and I was bored by it. The gold-plated obfuscations of maturity!
At least in that regard, the remake was a blessing. For all the effort to retain what made Psycho brilliant, what Gus Van Sant added to it only made it grimy, awkward, and disillusioned. Anne Heche’s Marion is flighty, self-destructive, and not convincingly remorseful; Leatherface has fewer red flags than Vince Vaughn’s more mature-looking, spastic, and randomly chuckling Norman. I’m not going to argue here if these are improvements upon the original performances—though in some respects Heche would have an edge over the icy, unknowable Janet Leigh—but they do give that version of Psycho an unexpected dose of realism, as if it was adapted from a true crime podcast. Psycho ’98 follows a bottomless pit of obsession similar to true crime world in which viewers know full-well every step the characters will take, into whose flesh the knife will be plunged, and by whose force the knife will be driven. It is not a shocker; it is a doom montage. It is much closer to (or even a more honest version of) the modern slasher, which aims to shock but cannot exist without sending bodies to their prescribed fates.
Psycho ’60 and Psycho ’98, rather than being opposed works, are better understood as mood pieces using the same material—bad mood pieces. Psycho ’60 is the sleek black-and-white bad you dream of doing; Psycho ’98 is the awkward full-color bad you do over and over again. But like the Scotland of Macbeth, the primary accelerant of Psycho is not going to be easily removed whatever form it takes. It is fused into it. It’s fear and impulse feeding off of each other. It’s a fear of the isolated and the enclosed; of the road less traveled or untraveled. And it’s the impulse to travel it anyway, and to see what’s inside the house even while accepting the certainty that you’re going to regret what you find within it for however much life you’re allotted after entering.
Comes a point where I'm genuinely envious of your productivity, but I couldn't have stumbled into a better essayist. Thanks for sharing your work with us.