psycho

Bonus Features: Notorious (1946)

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Our current Movie of the Month, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 post-war noir Notorious, is a love story first and an espionage story second.  Most of the thrills in its first hour are found in the bitter flirtation between Ingrid Bergman & Cary Grant, whose catty chemistry pounces on the dividing line of what the Hays Code would allow without ever fully crossing it.  There’s so much explosive energy in their love-hate situationship that you often forget the real threat in the picture is the Nazi cabal they’ve gone undercover to subvert.  It isn’t until the second half of the film that any of the Nazi expats step into the spotlight with vicious enough villainy to match the volatility of Bergman & Grant’s flirtation. That centerpiece isn’t any of the men who make up the secret Nazi cabal smuggling uranium into their Brazilian hideout, either.  It’s one of those men’s mother (Leopoldine Konstantiin), a true believer in the Nazi cause whose default distrust & hatred for Bergman proves useful in outing her as a spy. 

Notorious may have been one of the first instances of Hitchcock getting distracted from a movie’s more obvious villains to focus on an evil mother figure instead, but it would be far from the last.  In the 1960s in particular, he made a string of iconic thrillers that highlighted wicked mothers at the periphery of the center-stage evil.  So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to further sink into one of the all-time great directors’ unresolved Mommy Issues.

Psycho (1960)

If you’re going to delve into Hitchcock’s auteurist Mommy Issues, you kinda have to start with the movie that put the “psycho” in “psychobiddy,” right?  Psycho is a notorious act of misdirection. It starts as a seedy noir about a lovelorn secretary who robs her boss blind in the daylight, then shifts halfway through to a proto-slasher about a Peeping Tom motel owner who slays that amateur thief and everyone who comes looking for her.  It’s also misdirection in the characterization of its sweaty, pervy killer, since its casting of the goofily charmingly Tony Perkins in the role masks the psychosexual violence of the shower scene until it’s too late for his first victim to escape.  Perkins is such an adorable, All-American sweetheart that the audience is tempted to continue blaming his overbearing mother for his . . . transgressions, even after it’s revealed that she’s been dead for a solid decade before the audience arrives at the Bates Motel.

Regardless of Norma Bates’s status as a living being, she’s a dark presence in the picture – sometimes literally, as when her silhouette appears in a shower curtain or at the top of a staircase during a kill scene.  Before we know what Norman is capable of, we hear Norma shaming him about his “cheap erotic mind” in shrill arguments from the Gothic home outside the motel.  By the time Norman insists that “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” we’re already aware of how abusive she is to him, framing him as more of a victim than a killer.  The fact that he’s the one keeping his mother alive through his taxidermy & cosplay hobbies is beside the point; the half-remembered, half-improvised arguments he has with her ghost tell a clear story about how her responsibility for his violence.

The Birds (1963)

There’s at least clear Freudian pop psychology reasoning behind the wicked motherhood themes of Psycho, whereas they’re almost completely arbitrary in Hitchcock’s when-animals-attack thriller The Birds.  For a long stretch of The Birds, Hitchcock seems uncertain of who’s more likely to peck Tippi Hedren’s eyes out: the supernaturally murderous birds swooping at her head or Lydia, her new boyfriend’s well-meaning but slightly overbearing mother.  He eventually does decide that the killer birds are the bigger threat, but it’s a hellish journey getting there.

Hedren stars as an heiress playgirl with an international tabloid reputation for living freely, pranking with wild abandon, and frolicking naked in public fountains.  When her flirtatious pranks lead her to the doorstep of a seaside small-town lawyer (Rod Taylor), she immediately finds herself at odds with the oblivious hunk’s mother (Jessica Tandy).  The women’s competition for the himbo lawyer’s affections is hilariously apparent in their casting & costuming, mirroring the combatants with similar height, hair, and icy demeanor.  Thankfully, being attacked by an organized army of winged hellbeasts in “The Bird War” eventually inspires the women to bond, but in the meantime their volatile tension inspires debates about whether it’s better to experience “a mother’s love” or to just be abandoned, spared of it.  There’s a lot of uncanny avian violence in The Birds, but it’s somehow just as unsettling watching a grown man peck his mother on the cheek and call her “Dear” while allowing her to compete against a would-be lover.  I have no idea what those two threats—crow & crone—have to do with each other, but I do know it makes for a great thriller.

Marnie (1964)

It’s somewhat foolish to push for a personal, auteurist read on Hitchcock’s adaptations of various novels & short stories that happen to dwell on fictional characters’ Mommy Issues, but by the 1960s his choices to adapt these specific projects really did spell out an obsessional pattern.  For instance, the director went through three hired screenwriters during the development of this 1964 noir Marnie, because each were too squeamish to get as psychologically dark as he wanted the picture to be.  Through Marnie, Hitchcock perversely lays out all of the various sexual & psychological hangups with women & marriage that echo throughout his work, so it’s impressive that he made a little time to parade around his Mommy Issues too.  Thorough!

Much like the initial protagonist of Psycho, the titular Marnie is a seemingly obedient secretary who loots her boss’s safe in the opening sequence, leaving town with grotesque piles of cash.  The difference is that Marnie is a habitual thief instead of an impulsive one. She’s also a Freudian headcase, her icy demeaner immediately melting whenever she’s confronted with a lightning storm or the color red.  Tippi Hedren plays her as the uneasy middle ground between Norman Bates & Marion Crane: a violently psychotic, intensely vulnerable victim.  What’s most unsettling (and maybe even unforgiveable) about Marnie is that Hedren’s victimhood is not blamed on the wealthy playboy (Sean Connery) who exploits her kleptomania to blackmail & rape her as his reluctant bride.  Instead, all of Marnie’s problems are—shocker—blamed on Marnie’s mother, a Baltimore widow whose “Aww shucks, I’m just a poor Southerner” facade barely covers up her distanced disgust with her only child.  Marnie’s mother adopts neighborhood children as surrogate daughters to ramp up Marnie’s jealousy, offering her actual daughter so little affection that she’ll shout, “Don’t be such a ninny!” at her during a full mental breakdown instead of laying a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.  A last-minute flashback eventually fills in the details of how these two women initially arrived at this hateful mother-daughter dynamic, but not until after Hedren mocks the impulse to investigate & explain their dynamic with the line “Me Freud, you Jane.”

Alfred Hitchcock made over 50 movies in his half-century career as a director.  I’m sure somewhere in that expansive canon you can find counter examples of his fictional mothers being lovely, loving people.  I do find it amusing that so many of his mother figures at the height of his auteurist control as a major filmmaker are awful, hateful women, though.  They’re the reason killers kill, the reason thieves steal; they’re the one thing in this world worse than literal Nazis.

-Brandon Ledet

Psycho III (1986)

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The very concept of a sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-slasher Psycho should be treated with extreme suspicion, especially since it took two whole decades for one to reach the big screen. Psycho wasn’t retrofitted to the slasher franchise model until after distant descendants like the Halloween and Friday the 13th series converted its transgressive psychosexual discomforts into crowd-pleasing genre tropes. There’s something inherently degrading about reducing one of cinema’s most notorious creeps to the same level as a Freddy, Jason, or Chucky, but the decades-late follow-ups to the Hitchcock classic still maintain a semblance of legitimacy thanks to Anthony Perkins’s consistent involvement in the Norman Bates role. If you ask most people who even remember that the Psycho sequels exist, you’ll mostly just hear perplexed relief that “They’re not that bad.” Most of that apologetic defense is reserved for Psycho II, a safe but at least unembarrassing continuation of Norman Bates’s story (by way of borrowing its plot wholesale from a much more daring, satisfying film – William Castle’s Strait Jacket). That’s because Psycho II was only made as an act of brand-management damage control, as Universal was dismayed by a novelized sequel to Psycho that mockingly satirized the burgeoning slasher genre and the studio wanted to reclaim control of the title’s public image. As a result, Psycho II is respectably unremarkable, almost to the point where the public forgets that it exists. If you want something really gutsy that actually takes risks with the Psycho brand, then, you have to look to the third installment.

Unlike its admirably adequate predecessor, Psycho III was a commercial flop – forever banishing all further continuations of the Psycho story to the lowly dregs of television. It’s a shame too, since the film stands as a rare auteurist effort from the one contributor who remained constant in all four proper Psycho pictures: Anthony Perkins. Even when he wasn’t playing Norman Bates, Perkins was forever typecast as a wiry killer pervert thanks to the career-defining role, so it makes sense (however sadly) that he would have to use that very platform to express himself artistically. Psycho III is Perkins’s debut feature as a director, and you can feel his personal attachment to the film & character seeping through the screen in a way that’s missing from the measured image-control conservatism of Psycho II. Perkins fully commits to the leering ultraviolence & self-conflicted sleaze of The Psycho Slasher-Sequel here in a way that feels impressively, uncomfortably driven by his id. It’s the best that most late entries into a slasher franchise could hope for: a unique sensory experience that compensates for following a familiar story template by amplifying the violence, sexuality, and surreality of the genre to the point of total delirium. I’d be hard-pressed to put into words exactly what Perkins was trying to say with this sweaty, over-the-top wet nightmare, but it does feel personal to his own creative id just as much as it expresses his most famous character’s psychosexual torments. It’s a shame, then, that the film tanked at the box office and his only other crack at directing a feature was a forgotten micro-budget cannibal sex comedy (titled Lucky Stiff) just a couple years later. It feels like he was really onto something here, but just didn’t yet have the formal skills to precisely hone in on it.

Although he might not have been fully equipped to express himself as a director, Perkins was at least smart enough to pull inspiration from lofty artistic sources. His most commonly cited inspiration was the Coen Brothers’ own directorial debut Blood Simple, of which Perkins was reported to be a huge fan. Indeed, Psycho III does borrow a neon-lit desert motel aesthetic from that stylish neo-noir, and Perkins even hired composer Carter Burwell for the Psycho III score based on the strength of his work in that picture. The influence that really stands out to me, though, is what Perkins picked up while working with notorious madman Ken Russell on one of my favorite films of all time: Crimes of Passion. Just two years after starring as a poppers-addicted priest with a dildo-shaped murder weapon in Russell’s film (his only acting role between Psycho II & Psycho III), Perkins just happens to deliver an oversexed neon-lit slasher with an almost psychedelic fixation on Catholic guilt here. You can feel Russell’s sweaty fingerprints all over Psycho III’s purple neon motel interiors, which are lined with enough porno magazine collages and Catholic relics to keep a psychoanalyst busy for decades. The film never fully jumps from by-the-numbers slasher to Ken Russell psychedelia, but it does weaponize that influence to emphasize the sleaze, the artificiality, and the inner turmoil of Norman’s tiny corner of Hell in a fascinating way. It likely also helps that the film was penned by screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue the same year he wrote Cronenberg’s The Fly, adding a whole other layer of grotesque sexual mania to an already volatile concoction.

The film opens with a young nun (Mommie Dearest’s Diana Scarwid) declaring “There is no God!” against a black screen, then accidentally killing a fellow sister who attempts to prevent her suicide. Disgraced, she hitchhikes into the desert away from her convent at the mercy of a contemptible drifter (Jeff Fahey), who immediately attempts to forcibly grope her while parked in a rainstorm. These two figures – the suicidal nun and the misogynist drifter – inevitably end up taking residence at the Bates Motel under Norman’s leering eyes. From there, Psycho III gradually transforms into a standard (even if remarkably violent) body-count slasher, but these two visiting strangers stand out amongst the mayhem almost as physical manifestations of Norman’s internal conflicts. In the runaway nun, Norman initially sees another Marion Crane, but eventually comes to know her as a kindred spirit whose religious piousness similarly prevents her from non-violently engaging with her own sexuality & thirst for human connection. The drifter, by contrast, is an exaggeration of Norman’s weakness for misogynist violence; he’s cruel to all women in his seedy orbit in a way the polite motel owner never would be, yet Norman himself is even more of a danger to women despite his air of civility. In tandem, their residence in the motel might as well be them literally occupying the opposing sides of Norman’s brain, which is constantly tearing itself in half in these pictures as he fights back the thoughts & kills of his Mother persona. Their dual intrusion on the story is a heightened, dreamlike manifestation of what’s always eating at Norman from the inside, and it’s fascinating to watch Perkins carve out enough space for that incorporeal conflict to fully play out while also satisfying the more pedestrian criteria of a generic mid-80s slasher.

The least interesting aspects of Psycho III are its dutiful ties to series lore. Clips of the iconic shower scene, echoes of the original’s exact frame compositions, repetition of lines like “We all go a little mad sometimes,” and further complications of who was really Norman’s mother (an issue the sequels can never seem to agree on) all distract from Perkins’s directorial inventiveness by making the picture appear more safe & familiar than it truly is. I’m much more interested in the new, fresh distortions Perkins warps this familiar material with, the exact kind of volatile mutations of the source text that were missing in the personality-deficient Psycho II. A bisexual man, Perkins objectifies both his nun and his drifter in equal leering measure – most notably in a scene where he dresses Jeff Fahey in nothing but a tableside lamp that protrudes skyward directly from the actor’s crotch (as a compromise when Fahey didn’t want to commit to full-frontal nudity). The director also hoists Norman Bates to the level of a Biblically iconic figure – explicitly so in a Ken Russellian sequence where the suicidal nun hallucinates Norman’s Mother persona as the Madonna, referring to the incident as a visitation from The Virgin. The way that religious ecstasy clashes with Earthly “hungers of the flesh” elevates the material above most Psycho descendants & other cheapo slashers by making the conflict out to be an eternal morality crisis instead of merely the immediate terror of a knife-wielding maniac. When the Mother voice in Norman’s head scolds him for failing to overcome his “cheap erotic imagination,” it feels like the movie vocalizing the exact religious-hedonist turmoil that’s been driving it mad the entire runtime.

In a better world, we might have gotten to see Anthony Perkins further pursue these themes & aesthetics in original projects that weren’t dampened by their obligations to the Psycho brand. He even admitted in an interview shortly before his death that he felt as if he were “not up to the task” of directing the film at the time, feeling his “technical knowledge was too limited” to fully express what he was going for. Still, I’ll always be more eager to champion an imperfect expression of pure personal id like this sweaty flop than I would a carefully adequate brand custodian like Psycho II. Even if we never got to see Perkins at the height of his wicked powers as a Coens & Russell-inspired auteur, at least he found a way to use the franchise that defined his career as an opportunity to take a stab at that lofty aspiration.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #62 of The Swampflix Podcast: Psycho Sequels & Don’t Look Now (1973)

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Welcome to Episode #62 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our sixty-second episode, James & Brandon discuss all four sequels to the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho (1960). James also makes Brandon watch Nicolas Roeg’s psychological/supernatural thriller Don’t Look Now (1973) for the first time. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Young and Innocent (2017)

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When Gus Van Sant attempted a shot-for-shot remake of the Alfred Hitchcock proto-slasher Psycho in the late-90s, he found it frustrating that recreating exact moments from the original frame by frame zapped the magic from the horror he was staging. Early on in the process of remaking Psycho, Van Sant had to abandon the shot-for-shot gimmick to allow his actors more freedom to perform and his film more room to stand on its own. It was a smart decision, as the more interesting aspects of the 1998 Psycho were where it strayed furthest from the Hitchcock original: the vibrant colors, the in-stereo Danny Elfman score, the surrealist dream imagery that invades the various kill scenes, etc. The main problem with Van Sant’s Psycho is that it didn’t deviate further from Hitchcock, that it was precious about being blasphemous to its source material. The no-budget indie Young and Innocent plays much, much looser with the Hitchcock roadmap in its own Psycho revisionism, to the point where it even transforms the original’s genre from horror/thriller to lowkey romcom & coming of age drama. Young and Innocent obviously can’t compete with the slickness of Van Sant’s production, considering the scale of its financing, but its willingness to play around with the basic components of their shared source material instead of letting them be is much more artistically admirable & worthwhile.

Although it cribs its title from an entirely different Hitchcock thriller, Young and Innocent’s debt/homage to Psycho is apparent fairly early in its first act. A teenage girl named Marion is spurned by a summertime fling, who happens to be a counselor at her Emily Dickinson writing camp. Miffed, she makes off with the camp’s debit card and takes the first available bus out of town. If you’re not already seeing the Psycho parallels while Marion listens to imagined catty criticism of her character & her poetry on this rebellious bus ride to nowhere, they should be unignorably blatant by the time she rents a motel room from a young weirdo named Norman, who makes incessant small talk about his mother & offers her dinner in his office (this time pizza delivery instead of sandwiches). The movie keeps you guessing from there, teasing the infamous shower scene & heavily implying that Norman might just be the murderer you’d expect, but allowing Marion to live far longer than she did when she did when she was played by Vivian Leigh. A lot of the same elements from the original Psycho persist even as Marion continues to be alive, including investigations from her sister & local law enforcement. Mostly, though, Young and Innocent plays like a summertime hangout film that finds awkward comedy in an unlikely romantic spark between Norman & Marion, so it’s actually not like Psycho at all.

Young and Innocent is a little stilted by its student film production values & depends heavily on audience familiarity with Hitchcock’s original film, but it plays so loosely with Psycho’s basic DNA that it generates a tense sense of mystery & dread all of its own. More clever than outright hilarious, Young and Innocent’s awkward romantic tension is endearingly cute, while still maintaining the original film’s sense of impending doom through surrealistic violence in its dream imagery and the basic vulnerability of following a runaway teen protagonist through a series of risky decisions. It’s interesting to see how much it differs from 1998’s much higher-in-profile Psycho remake, especially in terms of tone & genre, while still capturing the spirit of certain details from Hitchcock’s original more accurately. Gideon Shil’s Norman Bates stand-in, for instance, is much more convincing as a nervous weirdo than Vince Vaughn’s estimation of the same Anthony Perkins role, despite his status as a crazed killer being much more of an open-ended question. By dwelling on Marion’s vulnerability in a world full of potentially dangerous men for a much longer stretch of time, the film also feels more revelatory of Hitchcock’s original intent than the more faithful carbon copy of Van Sant’s efforts. Young and Innocent finds endearing, quirky coming-of-age humor in a classic work that should not be able to support that light of a tone, which is a very admirable distinction for a film with its undeniably meager means.

-Brandon Ledet