Chapter Two: Psycho II
By Brett Beach
May 26, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“Dear Mr. Hitchcock, ever since seeing your film Psycho, my son has been afraid to take a shower. What should I do?”
“Madam, I suggest you send him out for dry cleaning.”
An auteur, a craftsman, and a consummate showman who knew how to sell himself as a brand to help sell his movies (for only one example, do a web search for the teaser trailer for Psycho), Hitchcock had few equals then or now. Psycho holds a special place among his films, not for being the best, but for its unexpected plot surprises, and three of the most finely crafted sequences of horror/terror the cinema has to offer. Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano, working from Robert Bloch’s novel, knew just how to bring unpalatable material to the movie-going public at large. (Compare this with the reception at the time accorded to fellow British director Michael Powell’s chilly chiller Peeping Tom, a film with very similar thematic concerns that opened in the same year as Psycho, was largely derided and blasted, and effectively wrecked Powell’s career.)
It may seem heresy that there have been three sequels, an aborted attempt at a television series spinoff in the late ‘80s (“The Bates Motel” with Bud Cort), and an, ahem, frame-by-frame remake — a few words on that in a second — thus far, but none of them detract from Hitchcock’s achievement. It was in fact Van Sant’s 1998 homage/rip-off/art installation take on Psycho that helped me finally make my own peace with Hollywood’s constant and continual exhumation of everything “old."
As Van Sant’s “prize” for the commercial and Oscar success of Good Will Hunting; as a time capsule of Vince Vaughn’s uber-eclectic film choices in the years post-Swingers (see also: Return to Paradise, The Lost World, Clay Pigeons, The Cell), as an attempt to be wholly “faithful” to source material while exerting your own style and influence — all of these reasons and others give Psycho GVS a curio factor.
But I have always felt that the raison d’être for the entire thing is at the very end. Every time I watch the scene that plays out over the closing credits, which is nothing more than a four minute long unbroken overhead shot of police cars and emergency vehicles pulling away from the swamp where Norman Bates has buried his victims, eventually leaving the frame empty of human activity, I am always seized with the feeling that this time I will see or hear... something. Something hidden in the frame will leap out, or the ambient noise of insect life at dusk will give way to a shattering scream. In its uneasy mood and twilight setting, it is the antithesis of the traveling car sequence that closes Good Will Hunting. “We all go a little mad sometimes,” indeed!
In bringing together thoughts for this column, I was quite shocked to discover that there was a book sequel to Psycho, also titled Psycho II and written by Bloch, released in 1982, the year before Anthony Perkins reprised his most famous role for the first time. Bloch’s book was completely thrown over by Universal Pictures, who apparently hated an early draft to such a degree, they hoped to convince him not to publish it. Based only on the description, I can understand the outrage, but it also strikes me as intriguing and simply too self-referential for the times. To wit: Bates escapes from his asylum while dressed as a nun, and then somehow makes his way to Hollywood where they are... shooting a movie based on his killing exploits. This was Bloch’s attempt to make commentary on the cycle of “slasher films” and “dead teenager movies” that were en vogue at the time.
Richard Franklin, an Australian director, was chosen to helm Tom Holland’s original script and the pair went on to collaborate again the following year, also for Universal, on the kids-and-espionage thriller Cloak & Dagger. Franklin’s post-Psycho II output consisted mostly of television episodes with an occasional feature film (including another Chapter Two — FX2: The Deadly Art of Illusion), while Holland achieved more success and a certain amount of cult fame writing and directing a pair of horror films with a sense of humor — Fright Night and Child’s Play. Opening in the summer of 1983 to divided, but not overly hostile reviews, and respectable box office ($8 million opening and $35 million final gross against a $5 million budget, the door was opened for Psycho III (which in July of 1986 pulled in less than half of its predecessor at $15 million) and Psycho IV: The Beginning, which debuted instead on Showtime.
As an act of cheekiness, or simply to put the inevitable comparisons to the first film front and center, Psycho II opens with Marion Crane’s last shower, excised (almost in whole) from Psycho, and thankfully kept in the original black and white. From there, Holland’s screenplay unleashes a heavily plotted whodunit that plays at times like the slasher cousin of a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller.
Twenty-two years after being locked away in an asylum, Bates finds himself released back into society, the result of state budget cuts and the belief that two decades have helped him achieve a good rapport with reality. With no halfway house services available to help him ease back into society, Bates finds himself living at the only place he knows: that house on the hill. His tenuous grip on reality quickly goes out the window as it becomes apparent that someone is attempting to drive him crazy. Or is that really the case?
Holland’s storyline may actually be a little too clever and pseudo-byzantine for its own good. I am not suggesting Psycho II is wrapped in a Chandler-esque plot fog by any means, but out of the six murders in the film, the identity/ies of who commits the first three is not something I could entirely vouch for. Considering the plot twists in the second half and the very real possibility that Norman isn’t the only one gone nutty, I maintain that this ambiguity, deliberate or otherwise, serves the film well. It also seems appropriate for a film where numerous characters are attempting to mindfuck one another and audience sympathies are apt to shift among the lead characters at various junctures.
There is also an obvious attempt by Holland to balance the project’s slightly more high-class status with the graphic violence that the young audience of the time might expect. Thus, two of the six murders are spread out over the first 90 minutes, and are relatively tame, while the final 20 minutes deliver death by knife through the mouth, knife to the chest followed by a fall over a second-story banister, and death by poisoning and a shovel to the head. In a very subtle wink to slasher films, there is a teen as a victim, and he does get killed while enjoying a doobie, but before he can get past second base with his lady friend. (On a side note, long before I saw the film, I read Mad Magazine’s parody, aptly named “Sicko, Too” which proved to be just as bloody as its inspiration, and perhaps more disturbing. It certainly left visual imprints in my mind.)
Franklin has two key assets at his disposal, and he makes wonderful use of both to help the film score as a minor success. Without the combination of the iconic set — the house above and the adjoined 12 units below — and Anthony Perkins' relationship to the character that came to define him, Psycho II would be more apparent as a blatant cash grab.
Production designer John Corso (who followed this project by working as PD on most of John Hughes’ films for the rest of the decade) finds a way to give the buildings the psychic weight they need to compete with the mental baggage that begins to consume Bates. Psycho used the house sparingly, but Psycho II goes above and below and over into side parlors and down back staircases (and yes, into showers), at times leaving the impression that the Bates House is really an M.C. Escher design where all paths leads to everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. In brightly lit color, the property as a whole seems a lot seedier and creepier.
Perkins may have never been able to escape from the specter of Bates, especially in the final act of his film career where he played psychos of various degrees in any number of forgettable films, but he was always a skilled actor (Oscar-nominated and Cannes-feted) and he refrains from ever phoning in his performance. The passage of actual time, with Perkins going from his late 20s in the original to pushing 50 here, is rendered not only with the lines in his face or gray in his hair, but in the twitch of his features and behind his eyes as well.
With 22 years to think about this character and have his career defined by him, Perkins responds with a deeply felt duality. There is the frayed nerves live wire side as Norman strives to stay sane and finds the world conspiring against him, and then there is the calm descent back into madness, with a pinch of knowing in a line reading and a slight nod and wink in the direction of camp, letting Perkins at least have a little fun with the character. Wearing a never-ending series of khakis and ill-fitting shirts, Norman seems so benign early on it’s almost too hard to imagine him doing whatever a mother might request of her son. Almost.
Next time: After a nearly three-decade interval, Jeff Bridges once again becomes the ghost in the machine.