Remakes are perhaps the most reviled form of movies. Though it’s true that they can be good (The Talented Mr Ripley, Ocean’s Eleven and True Grit are good examples) and maybe even improve on their source of material, often they can be mere cash grabs from studio executives who have little to no creativity in their brain and just serve to be sorry footnotes to the legacy of the original classics. In my opinion remakes often work best when they remake films that were so-so, so there is material to improve on (which is why it is pointless for Disney to remake classics like The Lion King, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin etc but let’s not go down that rabbit hole) yet the remake on offer here is a remake of one of the most iconic, influential and greatest films ever made.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) changed the game in so many ways that I really don’t have time to list. It pushed boundaries for sex and violence in film, essentially invented slashers as a subgenre in horror and the shower scene and its encompassing twist changed film forever. It’s not exactly a film that you would remake lightly and Gus Van Sant entertained an extremely intriguing prospect, attempting to remake the film shot for shot and it’s such an interesting question to ponder: can a film ever truly be remade? And the answer is no, even if you got every shot in the book all of the actors and their delivery would be slightly different even by a millisecond and despite all of this I want to make a case for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho as not the equal of Hitchcock’s masterpiece but a fascinating and unique experience of its own creation.
Friday December 11th 1998, 2:43 PM in Phoenix, Arizona is where and when our story begins and the same day we meet Marion Crane and Norman Bates. Janet Leigh’s performance as Marion Crane and Anthony Perkins’s performance as Norman Bates are some of the most iconic performances in horror cinema and cinema in general and Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn do not equal those performances (how could they?!) but I love the different take that they offer on each character. Janet Leigh always had an innocence in her eyes that endeared you to her even when she did some pretty stupid things like steal $40,000 from her workplace ($400,000 in this version) but Anne Heche (RIP.) plays the character with a flustered nature, she almost seems like she is a person who rarely considers the consequences of her actions and seems to wander into places blindfolded. Heche herself said in a contemporary interview “I looked at the character and thought, what a lamebrain. She pays no attention to what she’s doing. She doesn’t think about the consequences. Who is this doofus? So I kind of went with that. I went with her flightiness.” and I think Heche succeeds the best out of the whole cast of creating a different character even with the same script.
Vince Vaughn is maybe the weirdest casting of the whole lot, a straight bro comedian taking on a historically queer coded role that is one of the most iconic in horror history and while generally I’m not Vaughn’s biggest fan I quite like the touches he adds to this character. While the first thing that most people know about this remake is that yes he does masturbate to Marion through her room peephole, before that I think Vaughn understands that Norman is kind of cute and supposed to be perceived as warm and cosy, a good kind of mamma’s boy and Vaughn adds in this kind of high pitched laugh that makes him seems very childlike. I think Vaughn is less successful at being menacing and threatening yet I think his performance (maybe inadvertently) endears more sympathy for Norman, more than anything he seems like a boy who is lost within himself and doing it all for his mother.
The rest of the ensemble establishes my thesis that this is an ensemble that could have only come together at this very exact moment in 1998 and I very much like that! William H. Macy probably gives my favourite performance in the whole as Arbogast, the private investigator as I think he is probably the least conscious of his predecessor (in his case Martin Balsam who later won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for A Thousand Clowns) and seems to be generally looser and giving a very William H Macy performance which is always a delight in my book. Julianne Moore (Vaughn’s costar in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) the previous year for all you Lost World stans out there) is probably consciously the most different from her predecessor (Vera Miles) and I love like *love* Julianne Moore, I think she’s genuinely one of the greatest actresses ever to do it but I’m not the biggest fan of her performance. It’s not really anything to do with her performance in a vacuum, it’s more that everyone else despite the new time period is playing their characters relatively era ambiguously but Moore’s performance feels very much 90’s riot grrl1 and that’s very cool but it feels a little out of place (though the line “Let me get my Walkman.” is worth all of it.)
Psycho was made in 1960 when The Production Code was still in place but starting to fall apart as Some Like It Hot was released the year before Psycho without the approval of The Production Code and was a runaway smash hit anyways and I think this Psycho uses the newfound boundaries that the original couldn’t quite well. There’s a really funny visual joke where in the original Marion says to Sam in the opening scene to put his shoes on and that’s genuinely all he needs to do but here Sam is naked and it just works well and I think that is when the film works best when it is playful and kind of aware that is a remake of one of the most iconic films ever made. The cinematography by Christopher Doyle is bright and colourful, its colours are so electric and vivid it’s almost reminiscent of a 50’s melodrama. It’s also self aware for example when Norman is guiding Marion through the motel and the bathroom is lit with almost obnoxiously bright light like they know that the audience is anticipating to luxuriate in the shower scene which has a deliberate sort of artifice I like (Arbogast’s murder is very similar and I love it!) that I think kind of epitomises as a piece of pop art, taking something very familiar and adding this new sheen or new layer to it and I think that really works best with Gus Van Sant as a queer director taking historically queer coded material and not exactly making it stated but once again adding a new layer. Vaughn’s choices (that he maybe made unconsciously2) making Norman seem slightly more sympathetic and more overtly queer and Doyle’s brightly lit cinematography teasing elements of camp shows that despite it being shot by shot Van Sant did emphasise a lot of queer 3differences in his version.
In conclusion if you think that Psycho (1998) flavour is one of the worst movies ever made and a prime example of pointless remakes, that’s fine and I can see why you might think that but to make overblown statements like it’s an affront to Hitchcock’s legacy (In fact Pat Hitchcock, his daughter said he would be honoured by the remake) are kind of ridiculous and ultimately missing the point. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is a magnificent piece of pop art, showing that even by attempting for a shot by shot remake of a supposedly unimpeachable classic you can create a unique vision all of your own. It may not be Hitchcock but I think that’s a good thing.
Rating: 4.5/5
Psycho (1998) is available to rent from YouTube, Apple TV+ and Amazon.
this movie is also very lilith fair coded for reasons I can’t quite explain.
In fact in a behind the scenes documentary Van Sant is asked “Is Vince playing him fruity?” and he says no. Also original screenwriter Joseph Stefano is interviewed and seems fairly open to queer interpretations of Norman which was nice to see from a straight man of that era
Also by removing transvestite from Robert Forster’s conclusive monologue making it a little less problematic!