Psycho II (Richard Franklin, 1983)

[Mr Sausage]

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[Mr Sausage]

I think this is the first time we've had both original and sequel appear on the Film Club.

[Altair]

Keith Phipps on The Reveal blog had a good recent review of Psycho II

[therewillbeblus]

Alright, since I just rewatched this, I'll rephrase my comment in the voting thread in the form of a question: Domino said the sequel is superfluous, which like many sequels, it certainly is! But how does it justify itself as either separate from or built off of its renowned and untouchable predecessor?

For me it's the premise, and how that premise is reflexively conceived based on the idea behind the trick of Hitchcock's viewer-effect of stopping the car in the swamp in the original: Franklin and Holland devise a plot revolved around an insane person, but not just any insane person. This is Norman Bates, who has infamously become a cultural icon of duplicitous insanity in our collective consciousness. So any 'car-stopping' effect should be muted by now- how could it work twice? How could an audience be enticed into feeling for this guy by now, at least in a way that humanizes him beyond irreparable mental illness? Especially given the irreversible information at the end of the original that still haunts us today, and which alienated us from Norman completely after tricking us into feeling for him in a morally compromised position; which transformed the lonely familiar vehicle of "him" we were feeling for into a confounding "them" and further alienated by ostracizing this character off screen, with a clinical explanation on his pathology by the introduction of a new character - now more important (because he's more sane) than the man we felt for?

The outlet is found by making them the main character as a 'straight-man', dancing on a line between surrogate for the viewer and alienated person-of-study, where we and they both doubt their own sanity, which plants us on the same 'team', since Norman is just as perturbed at the possibility that he's a killer without knowing it as we are- potentially even moreso! What we see is essentially a reflexive replication of Norman's mind, which channels a lot of empathy for that broad feeling of not having a bearing on our reality; a more universal fear and one we can relate to as pervasive in some of the most unsettling horror films. Then we also have our knee-jerk fear of the insane, and a disturbance in aligning with a known-delusional killer at all, working in contrast to that empathy! But the film never loses us- it forges and sustains this balance in an unrelenting fashion, aided by its forward narrative thrust and absurd twists and turns, and, well, drawing all tertiary characters as unknowable next to Norman's more-felt protagonist. All of them are suspicious- are they duplicitous, potentially insane, or are we only seeing them as such due to narrative withholding mimicking limitations seen through the eyes of a mad surrogate!?

[Orlac]

I saw Psycho II before the original, when I was 11 - purely because it was on TV first - and showing the shower scene (though minus the plughole-eye transition, oddly enough) spoils the original if nothing else.

Also, seeing PSYCHO II first really makes one prejudiced to Lila in the original.

[Mr Sausage]

For a sequel about film's most infamous serial killer, Norman Bates is a curiously passive character. He does very little; he floats through the narrative like a puzzled alien while all these other characters react to him. Bates descends increasingly into paralysis, mostly acquiescing to whatever character has power in a given situation. So while Norman is technically innocent throughout the movie and to all appearences sane, from nearly the beginning he's been regressing into the fatal passivity that led him to be taken over by the stronger mother persona. When he fires Dennis Franz, that's a good sign; when he refuses to attack Franz for the note, what seems to be another good sign, that he's not crazy, is actually a sign of Bates succumbing to passivity again. The Bates persona never had a murder problem; a heated or even violent exchange with Franz would've been a healthy moment of assertion for a subordinate personality. So I did like that the thing that makes us suspect Norman to be innocent, his meek, gentle passivity, is actually the main evidence of his regression into the old madness.

[Orlac]

Bloch's own rejected PSYCHO II script, which is more a weird satire on Hollywood, was turned by him into a novel. It's been 20 years since I last read it, so this thread has prompted me to dig it out. I've still to read his later PSYCHO HOUSE.

[Mr Sausage]

The original is my go-to instance of a movie adaptation being better than the book (really better), so I'm not hopeful about Bloch's own imagined sequel.

[Orlac]

The original is my go-to instance of a movie adaptation being better than the book (really better), so I'm not hopeful about Bloch's own imagined sequel.

The big improvement from the book to the film is Stefano's dialogue. You can't beat lines like "Sometimes Saturday night is a lonely sound."

[Orlac]

The original is my go-to instance of a movie adaptation being better than the book (really better), so I'm not hopeful about Bloch's own imagined sequel.

I just re-read Bloch's sequel and...yeah, it's a poor read. Bates is absent from most of it, none of the characters are engaging, and the attempts at parodying Hollywood are feeble.

The guy who got his first boner as a kid when he saw his mother killed by the Gestapo was so cringey I wonder if Guy N Smith helped Bloch with the writing.