‘Psycho’ at 60: Behind the (Shower) Curtain with Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Hitchcock and ‘Mother’

Psycho can trace its roots to real life serial killer Ed Gein, who in 1957 was arrested in the town of Plainfield in Waushara County, Wisconsin and charged with the murder of two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden right before he was caught. Additionally, he confessed to stealing recently buried bodies for two purposes: first, to create, after his mother’s death, a so-called “woman suit” so that he could “become” his mother. On top of that, they found, among many other things, a small trashcan made of human skin, human skin covering several chair seats, skulls on his bedposts and masks made from the skin of female heads.

The story of Ed Gein turned out to be an inspiration to author Robert Bloch, who would turn Gein into Norman Bates and extrapolate the true crime into Psycho. “The Ed Gein murders took place in a small town 40 miles away from the one I lived in at the time,” said Bloch. “I knew few details, but the idea that a man could become a mass-murderer in a little rural village where people had known him all his life but never suspected his activities — this immediately suggested a story plot. Psycho was the result. I invented my Norman Bates character, not learning until years later that what I imagined was close to the reality of Ed Gein’s personality pattern. Once I had a clear understanding of my character, the book came easily, in perhaps six weeks or so of actual writing.”

Hitchcock’s people obtained the film rights to Bloch’s novel. In turn, the Master of Suspense met with screenwriter Joseph Stefano about adapting it. “I told him that I didn’t like the character of Norman Bates,” said Stefano. “The other thing that bothered me about it is that a woman gets killed and the rest of the book has to do with this killing. I didn’t even know who she was and I wasn’t interested in her as written. He said, ‘What do you think if you wrote the Bates character so that Tony Perkins could play it?’ I said, ‘Now you’re beginning to talk sense.’”

In 1954, Anthony Perkins garnered attention by replacing John Kerr on Broadway in Tea and Sympathy, and then, two years later, for his role in the film Friendly Persuasion, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year. “I accepted the part before I saw the script,” the actor explained. “Hitchcock and I got along very well and he let me make several changes and suggestions. He also had an appreciation of how much the actor can contribute. He used to find me at the end of the working day and thank me, even though it sometimes meant he had to take a car journey to do so. I haven’t had that sort of treatment from many people. I think the comment about him and actors as cattle had been read by him too much, and in Psycho he was trying a different approach by stepping down from his remote position and actually working with an actor. He was wonderfully understanding and interested in what actors came up with.

“At the start of production,” added Perkins, “he gave me a couple of hundred dollars and said, ‘Go and buy the sort of clothes you think Norman would wear.’ That kind of thing always mades the actor feel like he’s a part of it.”

It was the prestige that Perkins brought to the mix that excited Stefano. From there, the writer came up with the idea of starting the movie with Marion in a hotel room with Sam, giving the audience the opportunity to get to know and connect with her. “I didn’t want to do a murder story,” he noted. “I felt that I would really like to feel some grief about this person, and Hitch agreed.”

In an interview conducted by filmmaker Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained, “The public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts. The more we go into the details of the girl’s journey, the more the audience becomes absorbed in her flight. When Anthony Perkins tells the girl of his life in the motel, and they exchange views, you still play upon the girl’s problems. It seems as if she’s decided to go back to Phoenix and give the money back, and it’s possible that the public anticipates by thinking, ‘Ah, this young man is influencing her to change her mind.’ You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another. You keep him as far as possible from what’s actually going to happen. Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.”

Despite the fact that Marion disappears about 20 minutes into the film, it was the shock of her death, according to Leigh, that has resonated with viewers for all these years. “Here’s a woman who had come to terms with what she had done,” she detailed. “What I thought about was the inevitability of comeuppance. She was a victim of the time, the situation, her passion and, yet, her morality. It was really a very unconventional role, if you think about it. She was taking the shower and it was like a cleansing. She was going to go back and face the music. And to have that kind of ending was so against what the audience wanted or expected.”

The actress herself was not shocked at the turn of events for the character, having been sent the Robert Bloch novel the film was based on, with Hitchcock explaining that Marion would be a little different in the script. “Then, I read the script. If you think about it, and I don’t mean this egotistically in terms of Janet Leigh, I’m talking about the character of Marion Crane, she’s all you think about in the picture. The first third — maybe not even a full third — her story was almost in pantomime, because she had very little relationship with anyone else, except the establishing one with John Gavin. And then the one with Perkins, but then it was over. The rest of the picture was devoted to what happened to Marion. All you talked about or thought about the whole picture was Marion, because everyone kept thinking they were going to see her again. How could anyone argue with that kind of a part?”

When the completed script was brought to Paramount Pictures, they balked at it and initially turned it down, though they were eventually convinced to serve as distributors. Australian director Richard Franklin, who would direct 1983’s Psycho II, commented, “The point was that Hitchcock was going as far as he could in 1960. The shower scene is a tour de force piece of cinema, but it’s also a real tease, because he was combining sex and violence into one thing. In 1960, sex was a naked lady, so to have a naked lady in a shower being stabbed to death was really an impossible scene. In fact, in the original Paramount notes it said, ‘An interesting concept, but because of the shower sequence, totally unfilmable.’ That obviously is what appealed to Hitchcock. What I’m saying is that he had a challenge with the shower murder, which was how to not show someone being stabbed to death in the shower.”

While Hitchcock was determined to raise his film above the shockers of the time, it was the now famous shower scene that elevated Psycho to the status of art. This 45-second sequence, which took a full week and over 70 set-ups to achieve, is as numbingly effective today as it was 60 years ago. Said Hitchcock, “We had a torso specially made up with the blood that was supposed to spurt away from the knife, but I didn’t use it. I used a live girl instead, a naked model who stood in for Janet Leigh. We only showed Janet Leigh’s hands, shoulders and head. All the rest was stand-in. Naturally, the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the montage.”

“At the time,” Janet detailed, “there was still the ‘Hays Code,’ which was a censorship program. It was not possible to really show what you’ve got. The fact that I was in the opening scene in a half-slip and half-bra almost caused them to go crazy. So when the shower scene was done, I wore moleskin over my vital parts. And as much as you think you saw something, you never saw anything, because you could not show it back then. It was literally against the law. Now, I’ll tell you when they did use a nude model: when Norman goes into the bathroom at the end of all this and drags the body out wrapped in the shower curtain. That’s the only time I knew of a nude model. But, again, with me you don’t see anything. A bellybutton, and, because the cutting was so fast and accompanied by that music, you’re, like, ‘By God, I saw her nude.’”

There is also a shot — that seems to go on forever — where the camera is locked on Marion’s dead eye, and Janet somehow never blinks. Not once. Some have suggested that this was a still photo that had sprinkles of water applied to it. “That is not true,” she said. “About three weeks before we shot it, Mr. Hitchcock and I went off to the optometrists. He wanted me to put in those lenses that would give me a scary look. At the time — remember, we’re talking late 1959/early 1960 — for me to wear those lenses would’ve taken six weeks for my eyes to get used to them. And if I didn’t, it could have damaged my eyes. Mr. Hitchcock said, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘No, we can’t,’ and he replied, ‘You’re just going to have to do it on your own.’ So I held that look. It’s not a photograph!” She broke into a smile. “I will say it wasn’t easy.”

And neither was the aftermath of Psycho for her. For starters, she could never look at showers the same way again. “I stopped taking showers and I only take baths,” she said without humor. “And when I’m someplace where I can only take a shower, I make sure the doors and windows of the house are locked. I also leave the bathroom door open and shower curtain open. I’m always facing the door, watching, no matter where the shower head is.”

Amusingly, Anthony Perkins actually had nothing at all to do with the shower scene. “I was in New York rehearsing for a play when the shower scene was filmed in Hollywood,” he explained. “It is rather strange to go through life being identified with this sequence, knowing that it was my double. Actually, the first time I saw Psycho and that shower scene was at the studio. I found it was really scary; I was just as frightened as anybody else.”

“It’s actually a very chaste scene,” he continued. “There is no violence in that scene; it’s all implied. It’s all good angles and clever music and very artful intercutting. It’s very discreet and I think that’s one of the reasons it’s been a famous and successful scene; it doesn’t grab the audience and shake it by the throat. All the violence in it is really more what one brings to it as an audience, rather than what is actually on the screen.”

When Psycho was released, the critics were torn, many of them put off by the then-unprecedented violence. Nonetheless, the audience went for it in a big way, the film quickly grossing over $20 million (a huge sum at the time). “Psycho might have become a classic since, but it wasn’t well-received by the press,” said Richard Franklin. “Most people thought it was a real mistake by Hitchcock; that he had lowered himself in some manner to have made so cheap and, generally, nasty a film. Most people viewed the film as an obscenity, but the interesting thing is that while nowadays everyone talks about the restraint of the film, at that time most reviewers talked about the shockingly gory shower sequence.”

Reflected Perkins of the film and the experience, “Working on the picture was one of the happiest filming experiences of my life. We had fun making it, never realizing the impact it would have. When I meet with people, they always have reacted with pleasure and the anticipation of being able to talk to someone about a picture that they enjoyed and a character that they remembered. I’ve never encountered anyone who hasn’t recounted their Psycho stories without a smile and it’s always been in a good-humored way. That they were taken in by the movie, they enjoyed the movie, they passed the movie on to others — just wonderful.”

To hear Mother’s side of things, learn much more about Ed Gein, the inspiration for Norman Bates, and get a quick look at the other Psycho films, please scroll down. 

And Now a Word from Mother

One of the strongest personalities of the first three Psycho films is “Mother,” or, more accurately, the version of Mother living inside of Norman Bates’ mind. That is the one who we frequently hear arguing with Norman. Bringing her vocally to life was actress Virginia Gregg, who discussed the part in an exclusive interview back at the time of Psycho III‘s release. “I’d been in the movies Operation Petticoat and Body and Soul, and I did a lot of voice work for Hanna-Barbera,” she said in what was an exclusive interview. “When the voice of Mother came up, Hitchcock was, of course, alive and he hired me. I did my work in the recording studio; I never appeared on the stage at all. I hadn’t met Tony Perkins yet. Then Psycho II came up and they called me back, and it was, again, in a recording studio. Now this time, with Psycho III, because of the way it’s set up, he talks directly to her. Tony Perkins apparently felt that he would like me behind the camera so he could talk to me.

“She’s the same old bitch she was in the other two,” she added with a laugh.

In sharing her feelings about who Mother was, she described, “I think she’s a very obvious woman. A dominant, mean, nasty, rotten dame. In my vocal inflections, I don’t find a redeeming thing about her. There really aren’t a whole bunch of ways that you can play her. You can’t give her a broad range of feelings; she’s a dreadful woman from the time she opens her mouth until the time she closes it.”

One question she was often asked was whether or not it was bizarre to provide a voice to a corpse. “No!” she smiled. “I’ve done so many weird things in my career. It’s like doing a TV show where you die one way or the other. I’ve been drowned and killed in various ways over and over. It doesn’t bother me; I’m used to it.”

More About the Real Norman Bates, Ed Gein

True crime writer Harold Schechter, who specializes in serial killers, took an in depth look at the inspiration for Norman Bates in his book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho and Ripped From the Headlines, The Shocking True Stories Behind the Movies’ Most Memorable Crimes.  As to what drew him to the subject, he explains, ”

In 1980, I was working on a book about movie special effects (this was in the long-vanished pre-CGI past).  While researching my chapter on horror films, I stumbled upon the then little-known fact that both Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre — the two scariest movies ever made, as far as I was concerned — had both been inspired by the same real-life case, that of Wisconsin farmer, Edward Gein.  (Silence of the Lambs, whose serial killer character Jame Gumb was also based on Gein, had yet to be published.)   I did a little digging around and discovered that the only book on the Gein case was a not-very-compelling one written by the judge, Robert Gollmar, who had presided over Gein’s trial (and whom I later interviewed at his home).   I pitched the idea to my editor and was off and running.  What intrigued me was the way the facts of the Gein case had been transformed — mythicized, really — in the two movies.  Or, to put it another way, how both films used the Gein case to create stories that reflected their respective eras: Psycho (released in 1960, but clearly a product of the 1950s) deals with the hypocritical duality regarding sexual matters characteristic of the Eisenhower era, while Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a pure product of the Vietnam era, a parable about America turning its own kids into chopped meat.”

It would seem that Gein’s actions could be viewed as more horrific than his movie counterparts. “Gein’s crimes are so over-the-top grotesque that nothing compares to them, either in the movies or in the annals of actual U.S. crimes.  It’s really hard to process them.  Interestingly, however, they were, in a certain way, less horrific than the murders portrayed in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs.  The homicides in those films — the slaying of Marion Crane in the shower, the butchering of the luckless teens by Leatherface, the various atrocities of “Buffalo Bill” — were extremely savage and sadistic.   Gein’s two known murders were more in the way of swift executions.  He was not a sadistic serial killer.    Basically he was a necrophile — he needed dead bodies to fulfill his bizarre perversions, but he wasn’t into torturing his victims.”

“Actually,” he adds, “I don’t regard Gein as a serial killer in the way that, say, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer were.  In fact, the phrase appears nowhere in my book on Gein, Deviant.  Serial murder, as I understand it, is what used to be called “lust murder,” a form of extreme sexual sadism whose perpetrators can only achieve erotic fulfillment by torturing and killing a string of victims over a prolonged period of time.  As mentioned above, Gein doesn’t fit that profile.   As for the response to the discovery of Gein’s crimes, it generated intense nationwide fascination.  Life magazine — which could be found in the vast majority of U.S. households back then — covered it extensively in December 1957 (that’s where Tobe Hooper first encountered it).  But again, Gein wasn’t seen as a “serial killer” (a phrase that did not gain currency until the early 1980s), but rather as a kind of monster out of a Gothic horror story.”

As previously noted, one of the things about the Norman Bates character is that through all the horrific acts he commits, he somehow remains sympathetic. Could the same be said of Gein? “Good question,” notes the author. “There is something sympathetic about Gein, largely because, as indicated above, he was not a sadistic killer who got off on torturing victims but someone in the grip of a bizarre mommy-complex that drove him to try to resurrect his mother by dissecting the corpses of middle-aged women and decorating his farmhouse with their body parts (as well as making a skin suit he could dress up in).  He wasn’t, in that sense, irredeemably evil in the way that Gacy or Bundy or Albert Fish were.”

‘Psycho II’ (1983)

‘Psycho III’ (1985)

‘Psycho IV: The Beginning’ (1990)

‘Psycho’ (1998 Remake)

‘Bates Motel’ (TV Series, 2013 to 2017)