P&AM 92: ”Psycho“

1960 • R • 1h 49mins • Watch trailer • Stream on Prime Video • Rent it
👀🚫 Blind Spot: A famous movie I’m only seeing for the first time

You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like freshly-folded cardboard boxes. The AC isn’t really keeping up. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “Hey, what should I rent to go with this?” Tonight he says, “You ever see the Hitchcock one? You know [snaps fingers repeatedly], with the shower? The hotel one?” He’s gotta mean Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller that jumpstarted the slasher genre. Let’s check in.

Here’s the plot. Marion (Janet Leigh) and Sam (John Gavin) have been dating for a minute but his debts aren’t marriage material. She swipes $40,000 cash from her boss and drives out west to pay them off. Partway there she stops at Bates Motel to sleep, meeting friendly but undersocialized innkeeper Norman (Anthony Perkins). He’s into her but his mom doesn’t like her one little bit. We hear her screaming at Norman to keep it profesh from a block away. Later that night a mysterious figure stabs Marion to death while Marion’s just trying to shower off a long day of driving. Norman finds her body, stashes it in Marion’s own trunk and rolls her car into a nearby bog. Now that’s a full-service innkeeper.

A couple days later, neither Sam nor Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) have heard from her. Seems fishy. They hire PI Arbogast (Martin Balsam) to find her. He follows Marion’s trail to Bates Motel and chats up Norman. Norman seems okay, even if he’s got that kind of off look of deli meat that’s been in the back of the fridge for too long. Arbogast phones Lila to catch up, saying he’ll take another run at Norman. Feels like there’s more dirt to dig up there. Shortly after, Arbogast meets the same wrong end of a kitchen knife just like Marion did. Sam and Lila team up to solve the mystery themselves. But can they figure out why all these dead ends lead to Bates Motel? And can they survive whoever’s perforating visitors? And what’s Norman’s deal, anyway?

Look, I’d never seen Psycho before. Right moment never came, I guess. Maybe I didn’t think it would be fun in the way that taking in a classic sometimes isn’t. I tried watching The Big Sleep a few months back but it felt like doing homework. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shy about hard work. But I don’t do homework. And I never eat my vitamins. And I’m not a good boy.

I wasn’t going to pop in Psycho just because I was supposed to. So what changed? Well, this summer I went to the movies.

On a Thursday evening in mid-July I saw Longlegs. My packed showing gasped and laughed in all the right spots. I’m gonna level with you. The movie itself doesn’t work for me. Starts as tense as Twisters but gets as silly as MaXXXine. That’s a pair of tones that’ll tear a movie clean in half. But I and the hundred and fifty-ish teens and twenty-somethings I saw it with had a great time. A crowd has a way of making a flick like that more than the sum of its parts.

The director who made Longlegs is a fella by the name of Osgood Perkins—Oz to his friends like Jordan Peele. Perkins started as an actor but lately spends his time on the other side of the lens. He led with The Blackcoat’s Daughter (’15), then I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (’16) which you probably saw on Netflix.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “ ‘Osgood Perkins’, wow, now there’s a name,” you’re right. Perkins shares that name with his grandfather. The name skipped a generation. His dad was called something different. His dad was called Anthony Perkins. And Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates in Psycho.

Psycho came out in ’60 but it started in ’59. That’s when 41-year-old novelist Robert Bloch published a nasty lil’ thriller he’d been writing in Weyauwega, Wisconsin. Bloch tapped into the zeitgeist by writing a villain eerily similar to killer Ed Gein. The law caught up to Gein around the same time the book hit shelves.

The book sold well, moving its first printing at a respectable clip. A positive review in the The New York Times caught movie studio assistant Peggy Robertson’s eye. She read it, then gave the novel to her boss. He loved it. That’s when Bloch got an offer from an anonymous party. They wanted the film rights. Musta seemed weird—his novel skews much more explicit and transgressive than the eventual film version. Was Bloch’s book movie material in 1959? Nope. But the anonymous seller offered $9,500. And Bloch said yes.

The buyer, of course, was Peggy Robertson’s boss, Alfred Hitchcock.

Why Janet Leigh took this role

📕 Read the novel and liked it.

🎬 Wanted to work with Hitchcock.

1️⃣ Had 1 movie left in her 7-picture contract with Paramount.

💰 Forgot to ask about her salary, which was 1/4 her usual for this.

💀 Hitchcock hid different iterations of Mother’s corpse in her dressing room closet during production, which is a normal and totally okay thing to do that I’m sure she loved it.

Alfred Hitchcock was having a bad year. His previous project, North by Northwest, did well. But the two things since both fell apart. I don’t know much about Flamingo Feathers but the other one, No Bail for the Judge, suffered from bad timing. It’s star, Audrey Hepburn, got too pregnant to do it. Since the film was built around her, it imploded and Hitchcock walked away. Hitchcock had the yips. And other up-and-comers were coming for his crown.

Psycho was going to change all that. With a hot project in his hand Hitchcock went to the Paramount execs. They said no. “What if I wave my normal salary? Make it for peanuts?” he asked. Still no. They hated the material too, but he’d already bought the right and felt committed to the project. What’s a Hitchcock to do?

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Shoot, that Alfred Hitchcock fella seems like a wily so-and-so,” you’d be right again. Here’s what he did. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the TV show he was making for CBS, was in its fourth season. A battle-tested well oiled machine they were. So he borrowed his TV crew, plunked down his own dollary-doos, built a hotel and house on a backlot and got to work making Psycho himself.

The long and short of it was that he was stuck with Paramount and Paramount was stuck with him. He had one picture left in his multi-picture deal with them. After trying to deliver it two times before he was hell-bent on the third time being the charm. Paramount agreed to distribute, but Hitchcock kept 60% ownership over the movie itself. Technically he owned 60% of the literal film negatives because they went hard in 1960.

Did you wonder why Psycho is in black and white? North by Northwest was in color a year before. The answer? Like you thought: Money. But no color helped dial down the gore too. Hitchcock went nine rounds with the rating board in black-and-white, think about what woulda happened if all that blood and flesh were in living color. Woof.

If it was that good, how come they never made a sequel? Actually, they did. Here’s all the Psychos that came after Psycho.

✌️ Psycho II (’83) Norman’s back at Bates Motel 22 years later but someone’s murdering again.

💖 Psycho III (’86) Norman falls in love, someone else is doing murders, and Anthony Perkins directs.

👦🏼 Psycho IV: The Beginning (’90) A made-for-TV sequel to part 3, but with flashbacks to Norman’s early life.

🎥 Psycho (’98) Shot-for-shot remake by Gus Van Sant at which everyone shrugged.

📺 Bates Motel (’13-’17) A TV show prequel to Psycho set in present-day.

After it hit theaters on June 16, 1960, Psycho made $32M dollars worldwide. $15M of it landed in Hitchcock’s pocket. The only picture in ’60 that made more was Spartacus. Hitchcock himself never shot a better money-maker. So folks went to see it, but what did they make of it?

Reviews were mixed. You gotta remember, the ‘50s horror that came before was wall-to-wall monsters and magic. Pivoting from rubber suits and makeup toward the horror inside someone who looks average was ahead of its time. Folks had accepted what was implausible (like I Was a Teenage Werewolf in ’57) but weren’t ready to accept what actually was plausible—that monstrous acts usually don’t come from werewolves. They come from people.

👩 Marion: Wants her boyfriend to commit to her and has just the forty large to make it happen. Thinks crime will bother her a lot less than it does.

💁‍♂️ Norman: Terrorized by his mom, keeping her alive by terrorizing everyone else. Thinks he’s a lot sneakier than he is.

🕵️‍♂️ Arbogast: Trying to sort out the devil from the details. Thinks good police work will keep him a lot safer than it does.

👩 Lila: Knows something’s rotten in Denmark and will get to the bottom of it. Thinks curiosity killed the cat and hopes it doesn’t kill her too.

🎥 The Camera: Peeks through every window and around every doorway to show us all the freaky stuff. Thinks it hides how pervy Hitchcock is way better than it does.

The NYT said, “There is not an abundance of subtlety … in this obviously low-budget job.” They called it “a blot on an honorable career”. Newsweek called it “plainly a gimmick movie” while Esquire said it was “merely one of those [Alfred Hitchcock Present] TV shows padded out to two hours”, which it kinda is. Caroline Lejeune, film critic for The Observer, walked out partway through and immediately resigned in a very cool move you can really only do once.

But not everybody negged it. The Chicago Tribune pointed out how “[Hitchcock] used his camera with a sharp skill to achieve shock value [with] the staring eye, the flowing blood, the sudden plunge of a knife.” For my money, the guided tour-like camera moves are best part. For his part, The Miami Herald’s Jack Anderson was shocked both by the existence of underwear and by murders. “Psycho saws away at every nerve right from its first scene with Janet Leigh in her unmentionables to its last gruesome moment.” The Washington Post called Psycho “the sort of eerie, creaky, gobby Snap-Apple-Night that will find many sharooshed and others liverish,” which means … I don’t know what.

Psycho was up for four Oscars. It won none. Hitchcock cashed in his ownership of Psycho for enough stock in MCA, Universal’s parent company, to ensure no suit could ever tell him no again. The Library of Congress added Psycho to its National Film Registry for preservation. It created the slasher genre and raised the rep of low-budget spook-‘em-ups. And it remains one of the best movies of all time, period.

🏚️ Texas Chainsaw Massacre (’74) Big old country house

🏨 The Shining (’80) Unfolding psychosis at a place of lodging

🔪 Scream (’96) Stabbing with a chef knife

👬 Identity (‘03) Multiple personalities at a motel

🚗 X (’22) Sinking a victim’s car

That’s Psycho, wrapped up in a shower curtain, tossed in the trunk and rolled into the bog. I’d narrowly missed seeing this for years, glad I finally got around to it! Fresh off of Longlegs and with the 4k version of Psycho streaming free on Prime Video I was all out of excuses.

In other news, I saw twenty-something movies at the multiplex this summer for $60. Movies are having a great August, but I’ll probably say bye to my Regal Unlimited pass after this month until next summer. See anything you loved lately? Trap is my latest favorite.

Share this with a pal! Get ‘em so hyped on a classic that they run around dressed as their mom.

• Things that weirdly don’t matter: Marion changing cars, a policeman tailing her for miles, the $40,000 cash. Not sure why none of those go anywhere.

• The Bates Motel and Bates House building were built on a Universal Studios backlot and are still there. You’ll see them if you take a tour or watch MaXXXine.

• Anthony Perkins improvised constantly eating candy corn.

• Perkins was gay, spending his life in various degrees of openness about that at a point in history during which being openly gay was even more difficult.

• Hitchcock planned on no music at all for all the hotel scenes. But Bernard Herrmann convinced him to try his composition for the shower scene. Hitchcock loved it, used it, and doubled the composer’s salary.

• They used Hershey’s chocolate syrup for blood (yum!).

• Leigh rarely took showers for the rest of her life. Only if she had to. Can’t blame her.

• This is the first time a flushing toilet had appeared in a mainstream US movie.

• Psycho was rated A (Approved) in ’60, M (Mature) in ’68, PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) according to equivalence guidelines, and finally R (Restricted) in ’84.