Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #3

Halloween season simply isn’t Halloween season without a regular dose of golden age Universal horror (1923-1963). Every day this October, I’ll be giving you a steady IV drip of it by counting down Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors!

#3. Psycho (1963- dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

As I said in my discussion of The Birds a few days ago, Hitchcock’s horrors of the early sixties didn’t as much wrap up an age of horror as they launched a new one. With the possible exception of Franju’s gory Le yeux sans visage, Psycho was the ultimate shot across the bow for horror’s new age. After subsisting on years of vampires, ghosts, giant spiders, and other humbugs, 1960s audiences must have been utterly rattled by this unsparing portrait of a human monster. The film’s sexuality, the viciousness of the attacks, the grotesqueness of Mother’s corpse, and the sympathetic way Norman Bates is presented surely reconfigured the minds of movie audiences and made them capable of digesting even hardier stuff such as Night of the Living Dead, A Clockwork Orange, and The Exorcist. Hitchcock maximizes his film’s shocks with tricky, bait-and-switch storytelling, and Anthony Perkins aids and abets that assault with his completely ingratiating portrayal of Norman Bates. As far as I’m concerned, horror cinema’s two greatest decades are the 1930s and 1960s, and Universal was responsible for setting both of them in motion.

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 19

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974- dir. Brian Clemens) ****

At a time when Hammer was doubling down on its exploitative rep, the studio produced this comparatively light-hearted romp in which a swashbuckler trots across the countryside looking for vampires to stab. Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter may be Hammer’s freshest film of the seventies. James Needs’s editing is very stylish (a pub swordfight is pricelessly executed), and Horst Janson is reasonably appealing as the vamp slayer (though his penchant for violent sex is a gratuitous capitulation to the era’s nastier ethos). Caroline Munro and John Cater as Kronos’s more personable sidekicks are better. It’s too bad this did not lead to the series it was intended to because it would have been great fun to watch this dynamic trio swashbuckle their way through other adventures.

Blair Witch (2016- dir. Adam Wingard) **

Review: 'Pretty Poison' Blu-ray

Tony Perkins is a creepy dude with mental issues who spies on and obsesses about a beautiful blonde, but it’s not the movie you’re thinking of. Eight years after Psycho, Perkins flirted with being typecast and Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison. Perkins is Dennis Pitt, a young arsonist recovering from delusions and recently discharged from an institution, who sets his sites on Weld’s high-school drum majorette Sue Ann Stepenek. Dennis seduces Sue Ann by pretending to be a secret agent, spying on her mother’s hated boyfriend, and giving her acid.

With his free love, free drugs, and environmentalism (he schemes to expose toxic dumping at the chemical company where he works), Dennis is a sort of countercultural stand in— a more unhinged Benjamin Braddock. However, it’s hard to place where we viewers are supposed to stand on Dennis. Are we supposed to find his whacky spy fantasies charming? It’s tough to watch an older man ply a high-school girl with drugs and fantasies and find it anything less than distasteful, but Pretty Poison performs a clever turn of the tables when Dennis’s lies lead Sue Ann to perform an unexpected act that puts her in the driver’s seat and reveals some serious twists in her own psyche.

Pretty Poison is a noir at heart with Perkins ultimately playing the dupe and Weld playing the femme fatale, but it is subtle humor that fuels the picture—no surprise considering that one of the era’s funniest writers, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., of TV’s Batman, adapted Stephen Gellar’s novel She Let Him Continue for the screen. Production values are strictly small-screen and Noel Black’s direction is often a bit flat, though it does take off whenever something starts blowing up on screen to underscore Dennis’s horniness or mental unspooling, and Semple’s smart script and the effortlessly magnetic presences of Perkins and Weld make Pretty Poison an effective minor cult classic.

Pretty Poison comes to blu-ray from Twilight Time, and the picture is heavy with grain and a touch soft but totally clean. Extras include a text-only scene that appeared in the script but not in the film and a three-minute commentary from Black about the scene. It is available to purchase from Twilight Time here.

July 20, 2010: Psychobabble recommends ‘Psycho II’

Psycho II is a movie I avoided for a long time. I’d never seen a great sequel to a great director’s great movie that wasn’t made by that same great director. The non-Kubrick sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey? An unimaginative, dated trifle. Part 2 of Spielberg’s Jaws? My two-word review simply reads “shit sandwich.” Why should I expect any more from a sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest movie made three years after Hitch died? Robert Bloch, author of the Psycho novel, was not involved either because Universal execs supposedly hated his own literary sequel published in 1982. Anthony Perkins, however, is back as Norman, who is finally being released from the mental institution in which he’d been imprisoned since committing his—errr—youthful indiscretions. So is a tough-to-recognize Vera Miles, who reprises her role as Lila Crane, sister of the showering woman Norman knifed in 1960.



That Psycho II begins with an extended clip of that original murder is not a good sign. A bit of advice to director Richard Franklin: when making an unauthorized sequel to the masterwork of one of cinema’s legendary filmmakers, don’t actually include footage from that filmmaker’s film; it will only make it easier to draw comparisons that place you on the losing end (editor’s note: Richard Franklin is too dead to actually take this advice). It was also a bad idea to shoot a shot-by-shot remake of that shower scene with Meg Tilly, who plays Norman’s co-worker and would-be girlfriend Mary, even if you do toss in a lazy bit of ‘80s body-double boobs.




So, yeah, there are some major problems with Psycho II (I haven’t even mentioned the bad-taste violence that might be kind of funny elsewhere but feels really out of place in this picture. Oh, wait a minute… I just did). Yet this is actually a pretty good flick. Surely it suffers in comparison to Hitchcock’s movie. That’s a given. But Tom Holland, who went on to write good stuff like Fright Night and Child’s Play, put together a script that remains true to the spirit of the original while also taking the story in some interesting new directions. About an hour into the picture I thought I had the inevitable twist all figured out, but Holland keeps playing games right up until the final scene. He even includes an ingenious parody of the most notoriously clunky scene in Psycho.

Equally important, Anthony Perkins never misses a beat; Norman is just as twitchy, uncomfortably sympathetic, and way creepy as he was 23 years earlier. I also like the fact that director Franklin was actually an associate of Hitchcock, who supposedly schooled his protégé about the ins and outs of German Expressionism. I would have liked it better if he’d used more of what Hitch taught him. Aside from a small handful of distorted shots, the direction is too straightforward. And though it is interesting to see all those iconic sets and props from the original film in full color—and Franklin really luxuriates over them— I think this sequel would have been much better in black and white. Still worth a view, though, even for skeptics like myself.

June 16, 2010: Anatomy of a Psycho: 50 Years of Hitch’s Masterpiece

“First customer of the day is always trouble…”


Psycho was a first in many ways, and has been causing tremendous trouble for fifty years. If there is a single film that ultimately legitimized the horror film, it is Psycho, even if there were well-crafted, artful, serious horror films before it. But such films—Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People for example—did not make the impact Alfred Hitchcock’s low-key slasher did. Along with Terence Fisher’s Dracula, Psycho essentially mapped out the way horror would develop throughout the ‘60s, but Dracula glared over its shoulder as Psycho fixed its glassy eyes on the future. Even with its new-fangled fascination with blood and sex, Dracula was still a remake, an adaptation of a 63-year old novel, and a period piece reliant on decrepit Gothic castles and supernatural hokum. These are all elements that made the film wonderful, but they do seem more in step with the cinema of 30-years prior than the contemporary world. Regardless, Dracula held massive appeal for a generation of youngsters who’d discovered Tod Browning’s original on late night TV and spent their days thumbing through Famous Monsters of Filmland and constructing their Aurora Monster model kits. Fisher’s Dracula (more so than his somewhat less memorable Frankenstein from 1957) was successful enough to lead British Hammer Films to fashion a string of similar— though increasingly bloody and sex-fixated—hit Monster movies. It inspired American producer/director Roger Corman to make like-mindedly retro Gothic horrors by plundering the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It inspired American TV producer/Dan Curtis to adapt Stoker to the small screen for his smash series “Dark Shadows”.

Yes, old-fashioned Monster stories, creaky castles, and rubber bats had not gone out of style during the sophisticated ‘60s, but another breed of horror was born as well. In sharp contrast to the traditionalist Hammer and Corman pictures, Psycho was based on a new work (Robert Bloch’s novel was published a mere year before the film’s release). The movie and its progenies were contemporary in setting, Gothic castles being replaced by Gothic motor lodges, Gothic apartment buildings, and Gothic suburban neighborhoods. Supernatural monsters were passed over in favor of seemingly ordinary, innocuous human beings harboring monstrous inner selves. The fang is replaced by the kitchen knife. For every bloodsucker that popped up in response to Fisher’s Dracula, there was a gritty, realistic, psychological horror that never would have been born if not for Psycho. Hitchcock’s film established a