On December 4, 1998, Psycho was released, a film with a script as precise as a Swiss watch and masterful direction full of sequences and shots that are studied in every film and art school in the world as an example of cinematic virtuosity. Shortly after, it appeared on the list of the worst films released that year. The reason for this is that there was already a psychosis, a world-famous and revered one. Critics and the public felt it was pointless to make another copy. The film was a failure. This article could end here, but it is the footnotes that make this failure the most interesting and valuable experiment in the history of cinema.
To understand how we got to this point, you have to go back about ten years. In 1989, director Gus Van Sant (Kentucky, 71 years old) released the critically acclaimed film “Drugstore Cowboy,” which enjoyed a small success on a tight budget thanks to the dubbing. The director said on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron that when a film industry executive asked him what he wanted to do next, he replied: “I would like to shoot ‘Psycho’ again in the same way, frame by frame. The executives laughed. They continued to laugh for years until his 1997 film “Wild Will Hunting” became a huge success and earned nine Oscar nominations. When they asked him the question again and he gave the same answer, they told him it was an idea. Brilliant and she gave him $60 million to do it (today it would be more than $113 adjusted for inflation).
More information
A Psycho update made sense when it was announced in 1998. The masked killer genre had a resurgence thanks to the Scream saga and all its illegitimate daughters, and Psycho is considered the mother (ha!) of them all. Adapting a classic to a new generation, with stars from that era that the youth adored (Vince Vaughn, Viggo Mortensen or Julianne Moore) seemed like a great idea and justified the investment. It was an understandable eccentricity to film it in the same way: who would dare touch this very film, probably the most iconic in the history of cinema?
Vince Vaughn as the modern, well-dressed Norman Bates in Psycho. Photo: MPTV.net
Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of the original, blessed the project and rewrote the script. Well, he not only wrote but also added a few things. There are very few changes, but they require necessary modernization in two respects. One is economic in nature: your protagonist Marion doesn’t steal $40,000, which wouldn’t have gotten her very far in 1998, but $400,000. Another is a sensitivity adapted to the times: in the final sequence, in which a psychologist explains to the protagonists (and the audience) what happened, the observation of one of the police officers towards Norman: “He’s a transvestite!” is omitted. For several months, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was one of the most talked about and anticipated films of the year. Then it came out, people saw it and everyone hated it because it was exactly what the director said it would be: a copy.
Not everyone hates them. “This experiment with psicosis is proof that Van Sant is a great artist, since he allowed himself the freedom to jump into the void without a net, at the risk of being stoned by critics.” This is what Diana Larrea (Madrid , 1972), an artist who worked with Hitchcock’s appropriationism in several of her works. “With Psicosis, Gus van Sant could pursue the same goals that guide us as appropriationists as artists, when we want to evoke a timeless icon in the mind of the viewer, to transcend the concept of originality and deconstruct it. It is about proposing a discourse on the very postmodern concept of the copy, which demystifies the modern idea of the original in order to elevate that of the replica.”
Gus Van Sant copies on the set of Psycho (Psycho). Photos International (Getty Images)
Perhaps the punkiest thing about Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho” is that the opening credits say “Directed by Gus Van Sant.” The director admitted to Marc Maron that there had indeed been a violation. “It wasn’t really about learning from Hitckcock. Rather, there was a joke in the ’90s that executives would rather make a sequel than an original film because there was less risk. “They preferred to continue a story that was already known to the public and were constantly looking for ways to do so.” Whatever the case, “Psycho” is neither a joke nor a parody: everyone involved took it extremely seriously (and few fund $100 million jokes). Van Sant has never explained what exactly his psycho is: one would say that he wants to keep this experiment secret, and one would say that he is doing it well. Everyone has an opinion about why they did it. Perhaps most interesting is this from specialist website SlashFilm: “He just did it to show he could do it.”
“We must not forget that Gus van Sant has always been a strange director, able to mix the classical with the experimental,” says Andres S. Paredes (A Coruña, 1989), author of one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject Psicosis saga. In Spanish I am Norman Bates (Applehead Publishing). “He had just made one of the big Oscar winners in Wild Will Hunting, then he made the real Finding Forrester, two years later he returned with a very strange film as Gerry… My conclusion: Van Sant is a clear example of a director who makes a film for the audience and critics and then makes a more experimental one for himself. Sometimes things get better, like in Elephant, and sometimes worse, like in Paranoid Park. The Psycho remake falls into the category of strange films made for themselves.” Larrea adds: “The faithful recreation of a work of art, on the one hand, shows a deep love for what is being reproduced, and at the same time evokes a very strong feeling in the audience Déjà vu feeling when we recognize it, which takes us away in our memory of another time and place and brings us back a feeling from the past. Furthermore, I believe that the more a myth is used, the more it retains its essential meaning and its power in the world of our collective illusions.
Julianne Moore with her “Walkman” in “Psycho.” Photo: MPTV.net
The experiment leaves a strange feeling. First, in an era where remakes and sequels are flooding the box office (the previous year Scream 2 came out, the following year Scream 3 came out, and the same year Hitckcock was also reprized in a new version of Crimen Perfecto), Psycho falls like a bucket with cold water and seems to ask the viewer directly if what they are seeing makes any sense to them. It seems to confront the entire audience with the absurdity of watching a film that has already been seen before and that they could have turned around without needing to. That no one would shoot it again. “Film audiences are not used to such mental games,” says Larrea. “[Psicosis de 1998] It is a contemporary artistic piece that fits better in a museum than a cinema. However, I believe she is a daughter of her time because she is very postmodern.”
“I think Van Sant is trying to create chaos and disorient the viewer,” adds Paredes. “If you look, this happens throughout the entire film. There are small details that aren’t exactly the same, sound effects that are out of place, gestures that don’t make sense where they are… Van Sant forces the machinery over and over again to make the viewer uncomfortable prepare. If we remember him, it is because he did well.” Indeed, this psychosis [extrañamente titulada en España como Psycho (Psicosis), con su nombre original y el nombre traducido] It is not completely copied from the original. There are a number of shots, winks and situations that are different and crucial to understanding.
Although the film is set in the present (that is, in 1998), the rhythm, the sets, the dialogues and the morals of some characters are still set in the sixties (the script, as you know, is the same). Anne Heche dresses and speaks like a woman from the 1960s, while Julianne Moore dresses and speaks like a woman from the 1990s. Marion asks her lover to meet “in a respectable way,” “with my mother’s photo on the fireplace,” which evokes an outdated morality, but then Van Sant shows Viggo Mortensen’s naked body in a deliciously gratuitous way, bringing us back to the sexual Liberation from the gift. And although Vince Vaughn, as Norman Bates, displays a much more elegant and explicit flair, which at first makes us believe that Van Sant approaches his protagonist as a tortured and armed homosexual, suddenly in the scene in which he spies on Marion he goes himself even an (audibly explicit) handjob through a hole.
Anne Heche and Viggo Mortensen in “Psycho”: She lived in the sixties, he in the 2000s. United Archives/Impress (United Archives/Cordon Press)
Van Sant’s most talked-about additions are the film’s two key scenes: the insertion of a stormy sky into the murder in the shower and a blindfolded woman with a sheep in a cart into the murder of the private detective On the Stairs. Some critics at the time said contemptuously that these were “pictures to satisfy an audience accustomed to MTV.” Van Sant never made it clear what they were. The closest thing it comes to is the documentary Psycho Path, a detailed and hilarious chronicle of the filming: “As we worked on the film, it became increasingly clear that it was not about following logic, but rather about the uncontrollable and symbolic logic of one. ” Nightmare. “. And that’s it.
Technically, the film also plays both sides: it begins with a spectacular flight over the city of Phoenix, invading a hotel room from the sky (something Hitchcock wanted to do but didn’t have the means to do it). However, when he shows characters driving, he resorts to the rudimentary technique of an actor in a car standing in front of a screen that projects a moving road (and also ensures that it is very noticeable). Paredes talks about the film as “an experiment in meta-cinema. After the success of Scream, which parodies horror cinema itself, Van Sant decides to go one step further and not only talk about horror cinema from the outside, but also make the film itself an analysis of this terror. The documentary “Psycho Path” shows how all the actors and technicians continuously follow the original Psycho on a monitor installed on the set of the new Psycho, which undoubtedly has comic undertones. Editor Amy Duddlestone offers the most honest and valuable statement about all this: “I didn’t know what to do. Should I copy the way everything was put together in the original? And when you do it, when you drive it the same way you did the first time, you look at it and say to yourself: How slow it is!
Vince Vaughn welcomes Anne Heche to Psycho without admitting he wants to murder her. United Archives/Impress (United Archives/Cordon Press)
He’s right, and that’s the most valuable lesson this Psycho leaves behind: the same film changes when we place it 40 years apart, because the ones who have changed are us as viewers. 1998’s “Psycho” seems much slower than the original, even boring at times, even though they last the same amount of time and the same thing happens. There’s an explanation for this: The 1960 original had to give its audience time to breathe after each horrific scene to come to terms with what had happened. This explains the existence of a sequence longer than a day without bread (almost eight minutes) after Marion’s murder, in which Norman thoroughly cleans the bathroom. Hitchcock used this sequence to allow the impressionable audience of the 1960s to recover from the brutal death of the film star. But by 1998, when the public had already seen countless gory scenes in which stars and strangers alike died, there was no sensibility left to offend. This makes the scene significantly longer and more incomprehensible than in the original.
“I don’t think it’s a good film and I don’t think the final product makes its intentions clear,” says Paredes, “but it is an important film in understanding horror cinema and an example of how time changes everything takes its place.” . No one remembers the Perfect Crime remake that came out the same year, but every self-respecting horror fan at least knows about the existence of the Psycho remake. And if someone sits down and looks at it carefully, they will appreciate the differences, the innovations and the pulse between modern and classic that Van Sant produces.”
“Psycho” is ultimately a failed film and an impressive experiment. It shows how excellently constructed and written characters are nothing without actors with the right charisma, how a black and white film changes completely in color and gives the viewer a slap in the face of reality by confronting him with the eternal vice the entertainment industry: telling the same story a hundred times. It goes to show that there is no use in following the exact steps of a genius if the genius is not you. That with Psicosis they stole an idea to show how ugly it is to steal. The mistake was to bring this very expensive performance to the cinema. His place is at MoMA. That same year, Robert Downey Jr. threatened to remake Vertigo. I hope they dare.
You can follow ICON on Facebook, XInstagram, or subscribe to the newsletter here.