BINGEWATCH
The adventures of our marathon
man: he’ll watch anything, especially
if there’s a lot of itthis month:
PSYCHO
WORDS SIMON CROOK
ILLUSTRATION PETER STRAIN“WE ALL GO a little mad sometimes,” goes
the notorious Norman Bates quote. Well, after a
nine-hour binge on the Psycho feature franchise,
I am, indeed, feeling a little mad. Not crazy mad,
but angry mad. Anthony Perkins’ brittle,
stammering, nervy Norman is such a perversely
sympathetic creation you can’t help feeling oddly
protective of the homicidal, cross-dressing
fruitcake. The abuse Bates gets from Mother?
That’s nothing compared to the torture inflicted
on Norman by the diminishing sequels.
First stop: Hitchcock’s rule book-ripping
Oedipal slasher. This is my wazillionth viewing of
Psycho, and it never disappoints. Prime your
cine-radar and fresh, dark details always ping up.
Ever noticed that Norman wears black after each
kill? That Janet Leigh’s night-drive through lashing
rain doubles as a shower-death premonition? Or
that knife never meets flesh during the bathroom
shredding scene? (He actually misses, twice.)
Perkins’ inhibited hysteria is spot-on, but what’s
endlessly striking is how Hitch uses light and
shadow to visualise the internal turmoil of
Norman’s duelling schizophrenia. Still, one detail’s
always niggled: what in fresh hell is a swamp doing
in the middle of the California desert?
Sneakily, Universal waited until Hitchcock
died to kick-start the Bates saga. How do youfollow-up the most revolutionary horror ever
made? Psycho II’s surprising answer is laughter.
Sanity restored after 23 years in the asylum,
Norman’s serene return to the Bates Motel is
shattered by the mother of all copycat massacres.
Whodunnit? Psycho II’s slippery murder mystery
has a vast cast of suspects (including Vera Miles,
back as Leigh’s rancorous sister). It also goes 120
twists too far, but it’s such a wicked, winking
pastiche, I’d argue it’s the first truly self-reflexive
post-modern horror, beating Scream by over
a decade. The final act, revealing Norm’s real
mother, smacks like a shovel to the skull.
Then, everything goes abNorman. Psycho III,
directed by Perkins, is billed as “the most shocking
of them all” but really, it just has the most novelty
deaths: the Bates bait are bludgeoned by guitar,
trepanned on banisters and stabbed on the toilet.
But where Psycho invented the slasher, Psycho III
turns Bates into a Michael Myers clone with
better table manners. Aside from Norman’s new
’80s hair, the character has nowhere to go other
than ricochet between good and evil.
Psycho III was such a flop, Perkins’ final
outing was a made-for-TV whimper. Like
Hannibal Rising and Dominion: Prequel To The
Exorcist, Psycho IV: The Beginning is a prequel
that over-explains. Bates’ backstory, alreadyexplicit in Hitch’s original, is dug up like a dusty
corpse with the clunkiest of plot-spades. On
parole (again), Norm calls up a radio station
hosting a matricide phone-in. Cue abusive
flashbacks to his 1950s childhood with E.T.’s
Henry Thomas as Young Norman, hinting at
a Son Of Norman sequel that never happened.
Instead, the next Psycho was a mutant twin.
I’ve avoided Gus Van Sant’s almost shot-for-
shot update since 1998, and it’s everything I
feared. Just in case Bates’ warped sexuality wasn’t
obvious enough, Van Sant throws in a wanking
Norman scene — but that’s the least of its
problems. Ditching Hitch’s stark, gothic
monochrome for full beige blandness, Psycho 2.0
is lit like a rom-com and hideously miscast.
The sole reason Perkins was so unsettling was
because he looked like he couldn’t hurt a fly.
Vince Vaughn’s Norman looks like he wrestles
pitbulls for the Mob.
As the credits roll, I picture Hitchcock, not
spinning in his grave, but churning the earth
towards Van Sant like a Tremors graboid. As for
me? I’m off for a cold shower to scrub away the
memory... Second thoughts, make that a bath.PSYCHO: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION IS OUT NOW ON
DVD AND BLU-RAY