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Is Psy­cho II the most mis­un­der­stood sequel ever made?

31 Jul 2017

Words by Anton Bitel

Middle-aged man in navy t-shirt stands on porch, looking at camera with a serious expression.
Middle-aged man in navy t-shirt stands on porch, looking at camera with a serious expression.
Richard Franklin’s fol­low-up to the Hitch­cock clas­sic is a chill­ing hor­ror in its own right.

See,” Mary Samuels (Meg Tilly) reas­sures Nor­man Bates (Antho­ny Perkins) after she has per­suad­ed him to enter his mother’s bed­room in the house on the hill above the Bates Motel. No ghosts.”

It’s 22 years since Nor­man was put away for sev­en mur­ders, which he had com­mit­ted while dressed as the moth­er whose own mum­mi­fied corpse he kept with him in the house for con­ver­sa­tion. Found not guilty on grounds of insan­i­ty, he has spent all this time locked away in an insti­tu­tion, but has now, thanks to the work of his psy­chi­a­trist Dr Bill Ray­mond (Robert Log­gia), been judged fit to return to soci­ety. And to return home, where he has tak­en in Mary while she seeks more per­ma­nent accommodation.

It’s also 23 years since Norman’s last killing spree appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho, chang­ing the his­to­ry of hor­ror by trans­gress­ing all man­ner of then fixed moral bound­aries, and ush­er­ing in the slash­er sub­genre that would tru­ly hit its stride in the ear­ly 1980s. Now Nor­man is out again, and strug­gling to break free of the shack­les of his­to­ry – maybe even to forge him­self a new future with the younger, sym­pa­thet­ic Mary. Yet even as Mary insists that there are no ghosts, we see one: the shad­ow of Hitchcock’s famil­iar pro­file clear­ly cast (though unno­ticed by either Nor­man or Mary) over the long depart­ed Nor­ma Bates’ clos­et, in a posthu­mous ver­sion of one of the director’s famous cameos.

Of course, there are oth­er ghosts of the past haunt­ing poor Nor­man. We can see the con­flict in his face when­ev­er he is con­front­ed with the tools of his past killings – the key to Room 1, a knife, a tin of poi­soned tea – and in his smile, at once shy and warm but also con­spic­u­ous­ly crooked, as Perkins, back after so many years in his most (in)famous role, invests his char­ac­ter with a stut­ter­ing, awk­ward humanity.

Yet this time around, the tena­cious recur­rences of Norman’s trau­mat­ic his­to­ry are not mere­ly inter­nal. They come in the exter­nal form of Lila Loomis (Vera Miles, return­ing from the orig­i­nal), deter­mined that Nor­man should not get away with the mur­der of her sis­ter Mar­i­on Crane (whose noto­ri­ous death in the show­er is replayed in this sequel’s pro­logue); and of scuzzy motel man­ag­er War­ren Toomey (Den­nis Franz) who, when fired for turn­ing the estab­lish­ment, in Norman’s absence, into a drugs den and bor­del­lo, does not hes­i­tate to bait Nor­man with reminders of his sta­tus as a loony’ and psy­cho’.

And then there are the let­ters and phone calls that Nor­man receives, pur­port­ing to come from the moth­er who he knows is not only dead but also buried, yet whose pres­ence in the house even Mary starts to sense. It is clear that some­body is mess­ing with Nor­man. But then Nor­man is not the sort of per­son any­one should want to push back over the edge of sanity.

When­ev­er Nor­man, in answer­ing the tele­phone, realis­es (or per­haps imag­ines) that it is his moth­er on the oth­er end of the line, he can be seen switch­ing the receiv­er from one ear to the oth­er. It’s as good a visu­al sig­ni­fi­er as any that there are two sides to Nor­man – a man whose per­son­al­i­ty is split between his old mur­der­ous self from the 60s, and his reformed self in the 80s. It also marks a strange dual dynam­ic that Psy­cho II uses to divide its own viewer.

For while a part of us hopes that sweet, sen­si­tive, sin­cere Nor­man can stay on the straight and nar­row, and keep resist­ing those mur­der­ous urges and mater­nal fix­a­tions still clos­et­ed deep with­in him, the oth­er part – the depraved, voyeuris­tic, per­verse part – sim­ply wish­es to see the old Nor­man back, dressed in drag and stab­bing with aban­don the way he did when we first fell so dark­ly in love with him. The beau­ty of the film is that its ten­sions play both sides simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, leav­ing us unsure which way Nor­man will turn, or indeed which way we want him to turn. As the twist-heavy nar­ra­tive bends us this way and that, it also con­fronts us with our own errant desires.

In 1982, Robert Bloch pub­lished a sequel to his 1959 nov­el Psy­cho’, which had inspired Hitchcock’s film. Bloch’s Psy­cho II’ kills Nor­man off ear­ly, and focus­es most of its ener­gies on satiris­ing Hollywood’s love of exploit­ing real-life acts of rape and mur­der to sen­sa­tion­alise its cin­e­mat­ic pro­duc­tions. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures baulked at the direc­tion in which Bloch had tak­en the prop­er­ty, and hired writer Tom Hol­land to cre­ate an entire­ly sep­a­rate film sequel.

The result is Psy­cho II, direct­ed by Ozploita­tion lumi­nary Richard Franklin, which the stu­dio expect­ed to be a small made-for-cable pro­duc­tion, with Christo­pher Walken under con­sid­er­a­tion for the role of Nor­man. But no soon­er had Perkins read Holland’s screen­play than he insist­ed on repris­ing his part, at which point the film’s pro­file was raised inestimably.

Like its con­fused pro­tag­o­nist, the Psy­cho fran­chise is essen­tial­ly a prod­uct of the rel­a­tive­ly gen­teel post­war peri­od that had been put away for decades and then released, dazed and blink­ing, into the very dif­fer­ent age and ethos of the 80s, afford­ing us a glimpse into how times and val­ues had since changed. Hitchcock’s mono­chrome (seen in the open­ing sequence) here gives way to full colour. There is, in the din­er where Nor­man briefly takes a job under kind­ly Emma Spool (Clau­dia Bryar), the incon­gru­ous sight of our old-world anti-hero walk­ing past Bat­tle­zone and Ms Pac­man arcade machines.

Psycho’s on-screen flush­ing toi­let, with­out main­stream prece­dent when the film was released in 1960, is here replaced by one that mess­i­ly pours gey­sers of blood all over the bath­room floor. The show­er scene, edit­ed as a game of peek-a-boo that painstak­ing­ly avoids show­ing either Mar­i­on Crane’s parts’ or indeed any actu­al pen­e­tra­tion of phal­lic blade into flesh, is here vogu­ish­ly updat­ed to reveal explic­it flash­es of Mary’s T&A – and the deaths, when they come, are graph­ic and gory in a way that would not have been pos­si­ble in 1960.

Yet in many ways, Psy­cho II stays true to Hitchcock’s orig­i­nal. It is not just the return of Hop­kins and Miles, and those icon­ic sets of motel, house and swamp, but also Jer­ry Goldsmith’s dra­mat­ic score (pay­ing respect­ful homage to Bernard Her­rmann), and DP Dean Cundey’s love of dutch tilts, swoop­ing cranes and god’s‑eye-view high-angle shots, set­ting our view of every­thing off kil­ter as though we are observ­ing events from a per­spec­tive dreamt up by Nor­man him­self (who fan­cies that he is always under the watch­ful eye of his mother).

And of course there is the way that the plot inex­orably manoeu­vres Nor­man, so eager for improve­ment, alter­ation and mod­erni­sa­tion, right back to where he was when we first met him in Hitchcock’s film. Last­ly there is Franklin’s con­sum­mate han­dling of sus­pense, black humour and sev­er­al par­a­digm-shift­ing twists, mak­ing this a wor­thy sequel to the orig­i­nal, and a con­vinc­ing evo­ca­tion of the old master’s ghost.

Psy­cho II is released by Arrow on Blu-ray on 31 July, 2017.

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