Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed.
--Psycho (1959), Robert Bloch
NOTE: Spoilers to Psycho, both novel and film, if, improbably, you have neither read nor watched.
The short novel Psycho, author Robert Bloch's sixth published novel, first appeared 66 years ago in 1959. It made a decided hit with impressed newspaper critics, who applauded the book as a nail-biting pageturner not to be read while sitting alone in the house in the dark of the night. One of the most interesting reviews of the book came from author August Derleth, a noted horror and mystery writer himself, in the pages of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times, where he was the lead book reviewer.
Of course Derleth loved it. Psycho, which was published by Simon & Schuster's Inner Sanctum mystery imprint, "ranks well above the average whodunit or suspense novel," Derleth pronounced, before enthusiastically concluding: "Lovers of the mysterious and horrible will not want to miss Psycho."
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| accomplished trickster Robert Bloch |
Most interesting about Derleth's review, perhaps, is his having taken the time, in praising Psycho, to bury Agatha Christie's classic detective novel, then 33 years old, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Christie's novel received criticism before World War Two from detractors like S. S. Van Dine, who pronounced the mystery "unfair" because of certain narrative slights of hand on the part of the author. In 1959 Van Dine was long dead, but Derleth was still waving the bloody hatchet at Ackroyd.
"The psychosis on which [Bloch's] novel turns," declared Derleth, "is credible and acceptable--unlike the famed trick, illegitimate and unfair to the core, Agatha Christie pulled on her readers in THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD...."
As if to show his disgust for the Christie mystery, Derleth proceeded to reveal, immediately before disparaging it, just what the so-called "Roger Ackroyd trick' was. Poor show, Derleth! But was he right?
Personally I've never taken issue with Christie's novel on this count, but certainly Robert Bloch in Psycho has sound psychological basis, as we shall see, for his book's trickery. I have no problem with the book there.
As a novel, however, Psycho's legacy will always be complicated by the Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation which followed it the next year. Barely more than a dozen months separated the publication of the novel Psycho in 1959 from the release of the film version in 1960, which was a huge hit and received four Oscar nominations--though not, incredibly, for lead actor Anthony Perkins in the iconic role of mother-loving Norman Bates. Generally deemed the most important trailblazing "slasher" flick, Psycho now is probably the best-known film of Hitchcock's entire stellar career, not to mention arguably the film made before 1970 that people under the age of, say, forty are most likely actually to have seen or at least have heard of.
Speaking for myself, who am not only over forty but over fifty as well (and well over it too), I can't quite remember for certain when I saw this film. I'm thinking it was 1977 but I'm not quite sure. I recall seeing Alfred Hitchcock's name on movie marquees in Texas for his final film, Family Plot, in 1976, but I didn't see that one at the theater. I think I saw it when it first aired on TV, probably in 1977 too. (My older sister said that the male lead, Bruce Dern, looked like the late Daryl Dragon from the Captain and Tennille.) Around that same time I also saw The Birds. So I was definitely familiar with Hitchcock, who was still alive at the time, though his health was failing. I remember when he died in 1980.
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| "Mary was not inclined to smile at the quaintness of it all and even the inevitable hand-crocheted motto on the wall seemed appropriate enough. God bless our home." |
Seeing Psycho, along with watching Scooby-Doo and Agatha Christie film adaptations at a young age, was one of my formative childhood screen mystery experiences. Happily I went into it cold; I don't even think I knew about the infamous "shower scene." Everything unfolded as a surprise to me. I think my Mom, bless her, worried I would be traumatized by the violence; she thought the same thing a couple of years earlier when I saw Jaws.
I certainly wasn't, however, though like others I had a phobia about taking showers for a while. Basically though I was just plain mesmerized by the artistic flair, thrills and audacious trickery of the whole affair. Psycho (like Jaws) was one of the films that taught me how amazing films could be.
As mentioned above Hitchcock died in 1980; tributes and documentaries followed and then came...Psycho II in 1983, 23 years after the original film, with Anthony Perkins, now 51, back as a middle-aged Norman Bates, ostensibly restored to mental health by two decades in a mental institution and rehabilitated. (Nine years earlier Perkins had been in another fave of mine, Murder on the Orient Express.) After two decades of struggling with being stereotyped on film as unstable neurotics, Perkins finally just embraced it in the last decade of his life. (He died of AIDS-related causes at the age of 60 in 1992.)
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| Oh, no, Mother's at it again! Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960) |
I saw Psycho II at the theater and enjoyed it on its own merits, but I thought it wasn't any patch on the wonderful original and it simply seemed unnecessary. (I agree with this take.) The film famously opens by reshowing the infamous "shower scene" from its predecessor and, compared to contemporary slasher films from the period (late Seventies into the Eighties) it is relatively restrained and tasteful (at least till near the climax). I do feel, however, that it gives us one twist of the screw too many. Three years later I saw Psycho III as well (not bad), but after that I checked out of the franchise as it continued to appear on film and television screens in various incarnations. I thought the 1998 color remake of the original Psycho was an abomination.
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| Psycho 2 |
With all these screen Psychos, it's not surprising that the book would tend to take a back seat on people's murder buses. Bloch himself published his own Psycho sequel, a meta satire on modern slasher films, in 1982, which the film studio wanted nothing to do with when it made its own Psycho II. Bloch also published Psycho House in 1990, his last novel before his death at age 77 in 1994.
Bloch was a much-admired horror and crime writer, something of a prodigy who was a protege of horror icon HP Lovecraft, who died in 1937 when Bloch was only 19, and a friend of August Derleth. Before he published Psycho at age 42, Bloch published numerous short stories in the weird pulps as well as five novels, all but one of them, I believe, paperback originals.
When he wrote Psycho Bloch was familiar with the horrific case of Fairfield, Wisconsin's mother-fixated necrophiliac murderer Ed Gein, which made news late in 1957, when it was discovered that the barmy farmer had murdered a couple of women, disinterred multiple corpses from graves, and lavishly redecorated his home with ghastly repurposed female body parts. As the wags said Gein took the word armchair literally.
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| Gein farmhouse of horror outside Fairfield, WI |
Bloch actually lived with his wife and daughter in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, a town about 150 miles north of Fairfield at the time that news of the Gein horrors broke. Bloch claimed he didn't follow the ghoulish details too closely, a claim which, despite this having been the pre-internet era, is a little hard for me to credit. My parents, who were then students at the University of Wisconsin, certainly knew all about them, though admittedly my Mom sold Cap Times newspaper subscriptions so she literally had her nose in the news at the time. But it's hard for me to imagine that this would not have been irresistible copy to a horror writer like Bloch.
Earlier this month the third season of the Monster series, which focuses this ghastly go round on Ed Gein, premiered, largely to horrific reviews. Lurid exploitation dressed up as serious drama! They always say that of horror. Sadly, Ed Gein was not a subtle man in his field.
Will the series despite its critical pannings lead to a recurrence of interest in the Psycho franchise, or perhaps that of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which also derived inspiration from our good farmer Gein? We shall see. But for my part I at least decided finally actually to read Psycho, which Overlook Press reprinted last year in a no frills but nicely-designed 65th Anniversary Edition. Herewith my take.
*******
Psycho is a short novel, by my count about 50,000 words, and a very quick read indeed. I think it's a good book, the slight-of-hand well done, but I do feel its impact is undermined by the film, which to my mind is a masterpiece.
It's actually one of the rare source novels which Hitchcock bothered to follow closely in terms of the plot. Even the names of the major characters are mostly kept.
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| Mary/Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) on the lam with $40,000 |
The book starts off with a chapter introducing us to the menage of Norman Bates and his mother, countryside motel keepers on a stretch of highway now largely abandoned due to the building of a new road. There follow two chapters in which Mary--Marion in the film--Crane makes her entrance and exit.
We learn that from her employer Mary/Marion has stolen $40,000 (about eleven times that amount today in case you wondered) to run off and marry small-town hardware store owner Sam Loomis, her boyfriend in another state. (She's going to tell him she inherited the money from a relative.) Having lost her way in a storm, however, she checks in at the Bates Motel. But she doesn't check out.
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| not the Norman we know and love an accurate book illustration of Norman Bates from the 2023 suntup edition |
The film of course opens with the story of Marion's impulsive folly. The book takes place in Fort Worth, Texas and the environs of Fairvale, a small town set vaguely in the Midwest (Chicago is mentioned). How close Fairvale sounds to Ed Gein's Fairfield! Meanwhile the film takes place in Phoenix, Arizona and the environs of Fairvale, now a small town in California.
Book Norman rather differs from film Norman, in that film Norman, played as mentioned above by matinee idol Anthony Perkins (then just 27 years old), is boyish and handsome, if nervous and awkward ("sensitive," you might say), while book Norman is "fat," we are repeatedly told, bespectacled and middle-aged, essentially of no appeal sexually to women whatsoever. (We even learn for good measure that he's impotent, which kind of seals the deal.)
Where film Norman draws sympathy from the viewer, book Norman is repellent. It doesn't help that he repeatedly tells himself women like Marion are all bitches, tempting and teasing men with their worldly wiles, just like his mother always warned him.
The real world Ed Gein, if you can set aside all the grotesquerie, actually may not have been a bad-looking guy and naturally the Monster series has him played by former Queer as Folk heart (and other organs) throb Charlie Hunnam, now 45, in a performance which even many of the critics who hate the series have praised. But he's still no Anthony Perkins in my opinion.
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| the real Ed Gein at the time of his arrest in 1957 he died almost three decades later in a mental institution |
In the book Marion and Norman have a scratch meal in the kitchen of the Bates' Victorian house behind the motel, while in the film they dine in the office of the motel. Their conversation is essentially the same, though the dialogue in the film much improves upon that in the book. The pregnant line "I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times" is still there, however!
I think I have heard that Marion is dispatched from the film about 40% of the way through (I have to check this), where in the book she appears in just two of the seventeen chapters, just 25 out of 167 pages, or 15% of the book.
Like Anthony Perkins, 32-year-old Janet Leigh as Marion makes a stronger impression than the book's Mary Crane, with a more, um, developed story and a terrific performance. In the book Mary Crane mainly seems desperately worried about being 29 and unmarried. (Thirty is just around the corner, or so she thinks.) Both versions though are like characters out of a noir novel, one by Jim Thompson perhaps, who to their horror suddenly find themselves in a slasher story.
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| the infamous shower scene |
If you've seen the film, and surely you have, it's with a definite frisson that you read in the book the line "And that's what she was going to right now, take a nice, long hot shower." Of course Janet Leigh's "shower scene," in which we see her horribly stabbed to death with a butcher's knife by a maniacal older woman, is one of the most famously edited scenes in film history, but even taking that into consideration, the book description falls a bit flat, I think:
....It wasn't a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman.
Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.
And her head.
Well, that's certainly direct! I guess this might have been really shocking at the time. But the death by seemingly a thousand brilliantly edited cuts in the film seems more credibly horrifying.
I must say the famous final line, "Why, she wouldn't even hurt a fly," does come from the book, though of course the virtuoso visual merging of Norman's face with his mother's, um, rather more bony visage, can't be replicated in print. Another reason that I just don't believe that the book can compete with the film. The novel is workmanlike horror fiction; the film is an unforgettable frightmare.
I do not feel the same way, incidentally, about Daphne du Maurier's short story "The Birds," which is every bit as much a masterpiece as Hitchcock's film version.
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| Happy Halloween! But don't worry I'll be back a few more times in October. |
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