SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Time once again for Films You Missed out on, our series that reviews films that listeners, friends and colleagues have in some way handled to avoid. Today …
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “PSYCHO”)
ANTHONY PERKINS: (As Norman Bates) All of us go a little mad sometimes.SIMON: …”Psycho,”the 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh and a lot of great character actors who don’t make it all till the last reel, if you catch my drift. Cathy Wong, a college student at MIT, which is not the Michigan Institute of Taxidermy, joins us now. Have you, like me, been avoiding it? What was your reason?CATHY WONG: Oh
, my God. Yeah. I have actually been preventing this film it nearly seems like my entire life. Practically everything that I understand about “Psycho” comes from – we must double-check this with my mother – however my particular memory is that we remained in the Acme supermarket and we were walking actually through the watermelon area. And apropos of practically absolutely nothing, my mother relied on me and said, there’s this film called “Psycho,” and a lady in it is stabbed. And the way that they make the sound is that Hitchcock himself stabbed this watermelon.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “PSYCHO”)
JANET LEIGH: (As Marion Crane, yelling).
WONG: And. Then she was so specific about it, she was like, you understand, this lady remains in the shower. She’s shouting. There’s all this stabbing. There’s this disturbing violin string noise. And then you see her blood decreasing the shower. I do not understand why she knew so much about this. She was like, however it’s in fact chocolate syrup. And for months, I could not take showers. And if I was in showers, I would simply shower with my eyes open, letting the hair shampoo …
SIMON: Oh, my word.WONG: … Run into my eyes due to the fact that I was so terrified.SIMON: Obviously. Of course.
You have to look out every moment you remain in the shower, right?WONG: And I was shocked when I in fact saw the film. It
was so funny. It was so campy. I could hardly even hear the watermelon.SIMON: I was avoiding it, too, until today.
And, all right, let’s talk about it. Can you sum up the plot for us?WONG: I think it opens with sort of a red herring including a lady who is having what seems like a torrid affair and makes a series of paranoid and spontaneous choices. And she end up in this innocuous-seeming motel run by a bird taxidermist and is violently murdered, and a series of sort of extra violent murders unspool from there.SIMON: Well, what did you think?WONG: I mean, I found it overwrought. There’s sort of a comic aspect to the method
that everybody staggers through their death over a number of seconds. But I actually-I was seeing it with a group due to the fact that I’m such a wimp about horror. I was, like, in fact simply horrified of seeing this. You understand, all of us understood there was going to be this sort of climactic stabbing. However then there were a lot of more, which none people knew about. And individuals just viscerally shouted. Like, there was a lady beside me, and when the violin picks up, I simply heard her scream.SIMON: Let me ask you about a few of the production aspects. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates -what did you think?WONG: I enjoyed Anthony Perkins. I was actually truly rooting for him. I-the only individual that I wished to translucent on his stuffing objective was Anthony Perkins. And I do know some features of Anthony Perkins. I mean, I was watching this motion picture with, like, an extremely queer group of good friends. And all of us-our association with scary is that villains in a motion picture are sort of frequently coded, I think, with different features that are type of ascribed to their sexuality or their gender presentation. And so I was, like, type of feeling this like, oh, my God. Wait a 2nd. Is this going to be, like, a mom’s clothes dressing thing? Is that”Silence of the Lambs”? Is it both of these? However also, I believed Anthony Perkins-I resembled, he’s the only person talking typically in this movie. Everyone else is type of deep in their trans-Atlantic accent. And Anthony Perkins is like -you understand, he’s fantastic(laughter). SIMON: Well, great -and I suggest, we’ll note, biographically, lived type of a closeted life.WONG: Right. There have been times when I have actually seen movies-like, I seem like “Pulp Fiction”was among those where I resembled, oh, I’m seeing type of the archetypes of this thing that has ended up being so deeply enmeshed in my understanding of movies. And I felt that enjoying Anthony Perkins. I was like, I can just see this cascade of motion picture bad guys from”American Psycho”to “Silence of the Lambs”that have all-even much like, you understand, approximate serial killers on television today. And they all simply feel like replicas of this, like, very particular sort of stuttery, deranged, captivating person.(SOUNDBITE OF BERNARD HERRMANN’S”PSYCHO STYLE “) SIMON: Cathy Wong has actually seen” Psycho”for us. Thank you so much for being with us. And-OK, everyone listening, struck the showers.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERNARD HERRMANN’S “PSYCHO THEME”)
Transcript offered by NPR, Copyright NPR.
Source: https://www.wrkf.org/2022-08-27/movies-you-missed-psycho