Books like Psycho

Nowadays, it seems like every horror movie is either a remake, a sequel or the kind of vile torture porn that makes you want to puke in your bag of popcorn. Filming one of these flicks requires tens of millions of dollars for a platoon of pretty actors, gallons of fake blood, special effects and a marketing campaign. Oddly, they don’t seem to spend any money on scripts for these things.But Alfred Hitchcock only needed about nine grand to buy the rights to this book. Then it only took a blonde, a shower, and a butcher knife to create one of the defining scenes in horror history. There might be a lesson in that story somewhere, Hollywood.Legend has it that Hitchcock had all the available copies of the book bought up after he obtained the rights so that he could keep the story secret for his version. If that isn’t true, it should be. I’ve often wished that I had a way to temporarily blank out my memory of certain stories so that I could read or see them for the first time all over again and be completely surprised. Unfortunately, alcoholic blackouts are extremely unreliable at this so I just have to try and imagine what it would have been like to read this book before the story became a classic. I bet it was a complete mind fuck for those poor bastards who did read it back in 1959.It holds up remarkably well despite knowing the story and it being over 50 years old. Shifting narration to the inner dialogues of different characters was very effective, especially with Norman himself. My only real complaint is that I wished it would have been the sister Lila and not Mary who took the infamous shower because Lila is a shrill nagging harpy that annoyed the hell out of me.