Film bros and critics of the slasher subgenre like to imagine the Psycho sequels as symbolic necrophilia against Hitchcock. It’s a strange critique, considering how many post-Sixties films owe a debt to Psycho. Its innovations inspired too many movies to name and most of them are miles worse than anything you can find in the sequels made after Hitchcock’s death. It’s a shame that some people can’t move past their aversion to these movies. What the Psycho sequels, particularly the first two, do well is engage with the rich mythos of Norman Bates.
Despite some gruesome deaths—it was a long twenty-three years in the way of boundary-pushing movie violence—Psycho II is a thoughtful and sensitive piece, aided by some genuinely good acting and writing. The eerie and plaintive keyboard-heavy score provided by Jerry Goldsmith is a winner, too. His music is an effective and appropriately dissonant substitute for Bernard Herrmann’s strings.
Set two decades after the original, Norman Bates (reprised by Anthony Perkins) is released from an institution, seemingly “cured” of his insanity. His sympathetic psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond (Robert Loggia), is concerned about his return to the house and the motel where all his troubles started, warning that traumatic memories may recur there. Norman is adamant about staying in the home he knows, although his mother’s voice haunts the hallways.
MRS. BATES: Norman… What did you put in my tea? Norman! I’m gonna get you for this! I’ll teach you what happens to bad little boys who poison their mothers!
In spite of his restless memory, Norman secures a job at a local diner as a cook's help and tries to move on. After twenty-two years out of circulation, he just wants a normal life.
Not everyone is happy about his freedom. When he realizes the motel's state-appointed manager (Dennis Franz) is turning the business into an “adult motel,” Norman fires him. The drunkard berates Norman and ends up the prey of a familiar gray-haired figure in orthopedic shoes not too long after.
Then there is the vengeful Lila Crane (Vera Miles reprises her role). As hard-nosed as she is in the first film, Lila is more of an antagonist this time around, as she sets out to “drive Norman crazy again” by calling and leaving notes pretending to be his dead mother. She is assisted in this devious venture by her daughter Mary (Meg Tilly). However, Mary grows close to Norman, and the two share a budding semi-relationship.
Once the bodies begin to pile up, Mary realizes that Norman couldn’t possibly be the murderer this time around. So… then who is?
NORMAN: It’s not your fault.
MARY: Then whose fault is it?
NORMAN: My mother’s. She’s the one who’s been doing the killing. To protect me. She told me so herself.
MARY: Oh, Norman. You’re mad, don’t you know that? You’re mad as a hatter.
Mary is an interesting figure. Meg Tilly’s wide-eyed sweetness earned her praise and an Oscar nomination for Agnes of God two years after this movie, but as Mary, her dreamy quality comes off as noncommittal. It adds to the character’s ambiguous nature, yet I can’t help but wonder what a more specific actress might have done with the role. On a generous day, I might argue that this murkiness does make her complicity in the plot against Norman seem all the more calculated.
Psycho II goes a long way in expanding Norman’s world, shading in the places and people only mentioned in passing in the first film. A “diner up the road” casually mentioned in the original fuels an entire subplot where Norman tries to handle a working life away from the Bates Motel for the first time. Peeks into Norman’s childhood with his abusive mother give us access to his emotional reality.
Director Richard Franklin and writer Tom Holland (later director of Fright Night andChild’s Play) approach Norman Bates' horrific crimes and childhood abuse with a compassion not often seen in similar horror features. The “driving someone crazy” trope is tired, but the way Holland’s script complicates it with a murder mystery is clever and dramatically rich. It keeps us doubting what we see and with good reason. We’ve been down this road before with Norman Bates, and we don’t want to be fooled again..
But the ace up their sleeve here is the returning Anthony Perkins.
I get the feeling that Perkins became Norman Bates’ shepherd. The actor shows such great care for him. Some other actors might bypass this kind of interior work in search of scares, but Perkins never stops advocating for Norman. When he does scare us or Mary, he is more like an injured animal than a knife-wielding murderer, hinting at Norman’s damaged psyche in ways that make him seem child-like, impulsive, and small.
NORMAN: You smell like... like the toasted cheese sandwiches.
MARY: What?
NORMAN: That my mother used to bring me when I was in bed with a temperature. She used to do lots of nice things for me before she went... before she became...
MARY: Shh. Just remember the good things she did for you. Only the good things.
Even the hokiest plot twist—and there is a big one—is made palatable because of Anthony Perkins’ intimate knowledge of this character.
The truth is the movie’s not as good as Psycho. It doesn’t have its richness or its simplicity. But in its best parts, it comes awfully close. This is especially true in the film’s knife-twisting climax, which finds Norman facing down a homicidal villain, who slashes at him with a knife. He has been manipulated and brought so low by Lila and Mary’s plot that he seems to believe this is his dead mother cutting him open, and he takes her stabbings like he would lashes from a belt. All the while, he intones to her through his agony that he loves her, and that he must protect her.
But of course, all is not as it seems between Norman and “Mother.” It never is.
At the end of Psycho, we understand the tragedy of Norman Bates. He is an abused child who murdered his abuser and still can’t escape her influence. He is forever doomed to look at himself through Mother’s eyes. His entire reality seems to bend around her.
Psycho II shows us what it is to live in that reality.
PSYCHO II
1983
Directed by Richard Franklin. Produced by Hilton A. Green and Bernard Schwartz. Written by Tom Holland. Based on characters created by Robert Bloch. Cinematography by Dean Cundey. Editing by Andrew London. Musical score by Jerry Goldsmith. Starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Meg Tilly, Robert Loggia, Dennis Franz, Hugh Gillin, Robert Alan Browne, Claudia Bryar, Lee Garlington. Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures. Color.
the glamorous and the grotesque, is, in effect, a list of my favorite movies. The included films run the gamut of quality, but I have an affinity for all of them. They all have their fair share of goodness and badness, beauty and trash, humanity and perversity
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