The most curious object I inherited from my late father is a skeleton key attached to a round metal tag that reads “Bates Motel,” along with the room number 1. I’m not sure how he came to own this movie memento, although his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock – they shared the same first name – predated the 1960 release of
Psycho by at least two decades, with big-screen thrillers such as
Suspicion (1941).
Beginning in 1955, every Sunday night Dad was glued to our black-and-white Zenith with a round picture tube for the half-hour anthology program
Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS. A year later, he began subscribing to the legendary director’s monthly
Mystery Magazine.
My father would have been happy to learn that there’s a plan afoot for a film based on the 1990 nonfiction book by Stephen Rebello,
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Anthony Hopkins reportedly is in talks to star as the portly filmmaker; Sacha Gervasi (
Anvil! The Story of Anvil) might direct from a script by John McLaughlin (
Black Swan). An earlier attempt to launch this project, with Helen Mirren playing Hitchcock’s wife Alma and Ryan Murphy (
Eat Pray Love) at the helm, failed to come together for some reason.
If it hews closely to Rebello’s research, any cinematic telling of this tale could prove more grisly than
Psycho itself. Joseph Stefano‘s 1959 screenplay is based on a novel with the same title published earlier that year by Robert Bloch, a Wisconsin author. He, in turn, had decided to pen his tome after reading November 1957 news reports about a series of mind-boggling mutilations and murders in a nearby rural town: The killer was Ed Gein, a hermetic loner with a bizarre attachment to his Bible-thumping mother, who died of a stroke in 1945. The previous year, his brother’s suspicious demise was purportedly due to a brush fire.
SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENCE ARE TOO DISTURBING FOR YOU:
 |
| Ed Gein |
According to the web site,
prairieghosts.com, “Some local kids, peeking in Gein's windows, spread rumors that they had seen shrunken human heads in his living room. Ed laughed and explained that his cousin had served in the South Seas during World War II and had sent the heads (to him) as souvenirs.” Local officials never bothered to investigate. But after some local women disappeared, police discovered parts from at least 15 different bodies scattered throughout Gein’s farmhouse. He had even turned many of them into artifacts, such as lampshades, and supposedly was assembling a “suit” to pass as female in lieu of a desired sex-change operation. And worse. Some of the corpses were recently deceased cadavers resembling his mother that he had unearthed from local graves. He also reportedly was responsible for a string of murders that dated back to 1955, though eventually tried and convicted only for two of them.
It was the most perfectly hallucinogenic day of my life. I had been more stoned on previous occasions – it was the 1960s, after all – thanks to a variety of experiments with consciousness. In early April of 1969, however, magic mushrooms and a certain song transformed my world while tripping in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And we all shine on/ like the moon and the stars and the sun...,” John Lennon was singing in the headphones covering my ears. I had ingested two little brown, wrinkled pieces of fungus that rendered the music extraordinary. The lyrics were speaking to me; I suspected they might contain the most important message of the 20th century: “Instant karma’s gonna get you/ Gonna knock you off your feet/ Better recognize your brother/ In everyone you meet...” Although I easily could have continued listening to Lennon again and again, my three similarly wasted friends persuaded me to accompany them on a walk. Outside, everything looked even more beautiful than could reasonably be expected. I smiled at every stranger we passed and they all appeared to smile back.
