Note: This focus will be on horror/thrillers that have featured the LGBTQIA community and/or have themes as June is Pride Month.
In Scream VI, they discuss that Psycho II is an underrated horror classic and I agree. I must admit when I first watched it back in 1980s, I missed a few things I caught a second time. I actually watched the whole franchise in a reverse order. Pscyho III premiered on HBO in the summer of 1987. Then, I caught Psycho II one night back on TBS or one of the Atlanta stations that would feature heavily edited for TV movies on weekday evenings. I didn’t see the 1960 classic until it was on AMC back in the day when they showed mostly older movies without commercials in the early 1990s.
Anthony Perkins was in his early 20s when he started acting and had a boyish charm to him in the early movies. His tale lanky body and perfectly groomed haircut made him a cover boy and teen idol. After Fear Strikes Out, he was called the next James Dean. During this time in the late 1950s, he was involved in a relationship with Tab Hunter. From 1964 to 1971, he was reportedly dating Grover Dale, who would go on to marry actress/singer Anita Morris and give birth to their son, actor James Badge Dale.
Psycho was one of those movies that caught a lot of people by surprise. After making the big-buget suspense thriller North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock wanted something different. Joseph Stefano who wrote the screenplay said he read it to Hitchcock who calmly said after hearing the part where Marion Crane is killed, “We could get a star.” Janet Leigh was hired for the role of Marion. Perkins only appears in the second act and people probably felt Norman Bates would have a different role.
Psycho was based on an obscure book written by Robert Bloch that Hitchcock even tried to get bought at any and all stores that carried it. He and Universal Pictures pleaded with theater owners to refuse to allow moviegoers to be about to purchase tickets and be allowed in after the movie started. And this was for a movie Hitchcock shot in black and white, as it was going out of style, using the crew from the TV show Alfred Hitchock Presents. It’s a movie that has the look and the feel of a B-movie with an A-list cast and crew.
When Marion steps in the shower and is stabbed to death about 47 minutes into the movie, it changes the whole movie. Norman cleans up the hotel room of Bates Motel and puts her body and possessions in her car and pushes it into the swamp area behind the motel. It’s later revealed that Norman suffers from split personality or what is now called DID (dissociative identity disorder). He poisonedd his mother years earlier but has since acting out her her personality whenever Norman has sexual urges. He has kept his mother’s corpse in the house for years.
Psycho II opens with Norman being released from the mental hospital he’s been at for 22 years after being found not guilty by reason of insanity. However, Lila Loomis (Vera Miles), Marion’s sister, is objecting to his release to no avail. Norman’s doctor, Bill Raymond (Robert Loggia) is supportive and takes him back to the house he lived in overlooking the motel in the fictional California town of Fairvale. The motel has been under the operation of the sleazy Warren Toomy (Dennis Franz) who uses it for people to have sex with prostitutes or affairs while he supplies drugs.
Norman gets a job at a diner nearby on the advice of the elderly waitress, Emma Pool (Claudia Bryar). Here he meets the young and fidgety Mary (Meg Tilly) and they become friendly. Eventually, Norman and Mary get closer and he allows her to stay at his house. Norman fires Toomy who is later killed by an unseen person so Norman and everyone else assumes Toomy just left.
Norman also thinks he’s sees people in the house, getting phone calls and even odd messages, including one at the diner calling Mary a “whore” and warning Norman to not let Mary back in the house. He thinks is a joke from Toomy. However no one can find the note after it spooks Norman. But is Norman’s mental issues coming back? Or is there something more sinister going on?
Mary even seems to notice some of the strange events. But she begins to see Norman as a different person from what she’s been told. She starts to sympathize with Norman and develop feelings for him as the rest of the community still sees him as a killer. Even though the movie suggest a budding romance, I would say that it’s more friendship as Norman wants to help a young woman in need rather than lust after her.
There’s a twist to Psycho II that follows more like Hitchcock’s Gaslight not to give too much away. The movie directed by Richard Franklin who wrote the script with Tom Holland (of Fright Night fame) offers a lot of twists and turns. It also makes us question whether or not a person can be fully rehabilitated. Part of the twist in Psycho was that we were led to believe Norman was covering for her murdering mother (which in a way he was.) Perkins who was in his early 50s when the sequel was released still has some of that charm and innocence he brought to the role in 1960.
We feel for Norman more this time around. Norman has always been both the villain and the vicim in the Psycho movies, but never really the hero. This is the closest he comes to actually being the hero. Following years of abuse at the hands of his mother when she was alive, he only knew violence and insults. Therefore even after he poisoned her, he couldn’t shake her memory. He needed her. That’s why he felt he was covering up for her when he, himself, physically was killing people.
Perkins, himself, had a troubled relationship with his mother which some would call as sexual abuse. Some close to him said this is what made him prefer the company of men. But even though homosexuality was still something said in whispers, Perkins had to deal with a contract dispute with Paramount Pictures as studio heads knew about it. Perkins spent much of the middle part of the 1960s making movies in Europe and would take on supporting roles when returning to America.
He famously appeared alongside Martin Balsam (his Psycho co-star) in Catch-22 with Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Art Garfunkel, Martin Sheen and Bob Balaban, whose uncle, Barney Balaban, butted heads with him as president of Paramount. By the time he was approached to return to the Norman role, Perkins has also appeared in the big-cast ensemble Murder on the Orient, directed by Sidney Lumet, and the Disney sci-fi disaster The Black Hole. He had married actress/model Berry Berensen in 1973.
Unfortunately, on the set, Perkins and Tilly didn’t get along. This was due to Tilly having a more sheltered upbringing not being allowed to watch TV, she reportedly didn’t understand the big deal with Perkins playing Norman again. Perkins would later say he was offended by her behavior as Tilly was young at 22 at the time of filming. Mick Garris, who would later direct Perkins, in Psycho IV: The Beginning would call Perkins the most difficult actor he’s ever worked with.
Reportedly, Hilton A. Green wanted Jamie Lee Curtis to play Mary as she’s the daughter of Leigh. However, Curtis like Perkins, was also worried about being typecast, so she had turned down horror roles after Halloween II. She also had a scheduling conflict. I feel Tilly does a great job as Mary portraying a young woman who wants to give Norman a second chance. Because she’s young and wasn’t alive during the events involving Marion, her gullibleness is often questioned. We also don’t know starting out if Mary is trying to use Norman or really having feelings for him.
As for Perkins, his thin lanky body and weathered face, adds to the role. He still looks like a boy who people threw away for 22 years and tried to forget. Perkins was a great actor who unfortunately couldn’t break the Norman Bates role until he embraced it during his final 10 years. Watching him as the sympathetic Chaplain Tappman in Catch-22, he is obviously the one who really seems concerned for the well-being of Arkin’s Yossarian and thinks he’s needs mental help.
Perkins would appear in horor flicks like Destroyer and Edge of Sanity, a more sexually-infused take on the Jekyll and Hyde story. During production of Psycho IV where Henry Thomas played a younger Norman, Perkins was diagnosed HIV-positive but hid the fact he had AIDS for years before he died on Sept. 12, 1992 from AIDS-related pnuemonia. In an odd twist of fate, Berenson, his widow would die one day short of the nine-year anniversary as she was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 which was hijacked by the 9/11 terrorists.
Psycho is considered one of the first movies to introduce the slasher genre, but I wouldn’t say Psycho II is a slasher. The third one is. But this is more of a story about dark secrets coming back to haunt us. Sometimes, it’s best to just let the past be the past and move on.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 