The October Nasties: Psycho (Nasty 1)

In which I waste my October nights watching horror movies

I can’t believe that I forgot Anthony Perkins’ name. Like, it was super disturbing. I was watching this incredible actor do his phenomenal work and I couldn’t come up with his name. It’s a travesty really. I had to stop the movie and look it up.

I can’t think of another modern-ish dramatic actor who performed so well in a single role, in a single film, that it obliterated the memory of everything else he ever did. Perkins is Norman Bates forever and forever until ultimately, to me, he was only and completely Norman Bates.

Psycho is such a perfect movie. And yeah, a great deal of that is because of Hitchcock and his exquisite directorial skills. A bunch of it is also because of the chilling script by Joseph Stefano. But the lion’s share of Psycho’s effectiveness is thanks to Perkins.

There’s that scene where he’s serving sandwiches in the parlor to the unsuspecting Janet Leigh, and he’s surrounded by the malevolent taxidermied birds, and he gets worked up. He leans forward — not particularly sinister, not hamming it up, not playing like a raving lunatic — and he just talks with a kind of sharp, dark excitement. And that’s all well and good, but what makes that moment is that as he talks, he doesn’t blink. Not once. Not until he leans back, smiling, relaxed again.

I mean, damn.

I love Norman Bates. I love his charm and his wildness. I love how lost he is. I love how he disappears. I love how he’s a creative. He’s a crafter. I love how he just hangs out chomping candy corn all casual-like. The only thing that has kept Norman from becoming a horror icon is that he didn’t really have a schtick like Freddy or Jason. He was a normal kind of geek.

Speaking of Jason, another thing that’s fun about Psycho is how the story is inverted in Friday the 13th. In Psycho, the audience suspects the mother as the one killing ladies in the shower, but it’s actually the son. In Friday the 13th, we suspect the son, but get the mother. Nice little twisted mirror.

And, look, I’m not going to write about the shower scene. It’s been dissected a bajillion times as one of the most visceral, yet least gory kills in all of horror. I’m not going to add anything to that discourse apart from: “hard agree.”

But Perkins? I’m so sorry I forgot his name. He deserves more. He and Norman, both.