#13: Psycho (1960)

"A boy's best friend is his mother."

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a secretary at a burgeoning Arizona real estate office, spontaneously decides to abscond from her job with 40,000 dollars in cash in the hopes that she might make a new life with her alimony-stricken boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin.) Her spur of the moment flight quickly draws the attention of the highway patrol, and in order to avoid the authorities she finds herself traveling the older back roads. Tired from her cross country journey, she pulls into the Bates Motel, where the shy young proprietor (Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates) asks her to join him for dinner . . .

If you haven't seen Psycho, I urge you to stop reading this blog immediately. Go rent, buy, borrow, or steal the movie and watch it. I have serious doubts that there is anyone above the age of six in America that doesn't know what is to become of Marion Crane, or the twisted secret of the Bates Motel- but if you really don't know what I'm talking about, don't let me spoil it- just go out see the movie.

Though certainly dated, this film is, in my own opinion, Hitchcock's greatest work. Stunning for the time, it pretty much paved the road for all future films dealing with serial killers, and is painted with a master's brushstrokes. Consider the use of bird imagery- from the main character's last name, the menagerie of stuffed birds in Norman Bates' back office, to the subject matter of the painting that Norman slips aside to peer at the disrobing Ms. Crane.

The novel that this film is an adaption of, also called Psycho (by Robert Bloch- a good friend of H.P. Lovecraft by the way), was based on the real life serial killer Ed Gein- a man whose morbid fascinations inspired future horror figureheads such as Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, perhaps more famously, the figure of Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill) from Silence of the Lambs. Of all of these adaptations, I find the Norman Bates model to be the most like the real man- who was brought up by an incredibly strict set of parents, whose own hardline religious beliefs apparently stopped them from getting divorced despite their hatred of each other. Yeah, sounds like a great relationship, right?

Before we move on to the next film, however, I can't help but mention the 1998 remake of Psycho by Gus Van Sant . . . While I didn't necessarily hate everything about it, I can only hope that I will- someday in the unforeseeable future- become a billionaire, and thus will be loaded enough to fund a shot-by-shot remake of Good Will Hunting that includes a completely unnecessary masturbation scene.

Check in tomorrow for #12!