“Oh Norman, you’re mad, don’t you know that? Mad as a hatter.”
The Psycho movies, much like with the Amityville Horror films, are often overlooked when it comes to the subject of favorite horror franchises. While not your typical slashers or gore fests, each sequel is thoroughly entertaining in its own charming, demented way. Writer/Director Mick Garris helmed the pre-Bates Motel series prequel, Psycho IV with E.T.’s Henry Thomas as Norman in his formative years leading up to eventual matricide. The impeccably cast Freddy Hightower (Charlie & the Chocolate Factory) would eventually also play a young Norman in the television show. Psycho III may be the darkest in terms of brutality, featuring perhaps the creepiest ending. And then there’s the seldom mentioned TV movie Bates Motel starring Godfather of Goth, Bud Cort from Harold and Maude. Bud is Alex West, fellow patient and friend of the recently deceased Norman, who’s just inherited the infamous roadside motel.
Directed by Richard Franklin and written by legendary horror scribe/actor Tom Holland, Psycho II is a sequel on par with the original with a plot twist that rivals the most popular modern psychological horror. Even formerly deranged, mother killers/taxidermists are deserving of a second chance. After all, he wouldn’t even harm a fly. 22 years later, Norman’s redemption looks like a job at the local diner while renovating the now sleazy, rundown motel. Vera Miles returns as Lila, Meg Tilly, Academy Award winning sister of slasher genre queen Jennifer, is a down on her luck coworker and new friend of Norman’s in need of a place to stay. With the help of his doctor (Robert Loggia), Norman seems to be functioning well as he integrates back into society. That is, until Mother begins to resurface from the recesses of his mind. Or is she? Who’s responsible for those randomly placed notes? And the phone calls? It sounds like Mother…
Like its predecessor, Psycho II was filmed at Universal Studios Hollywood. The reconstructed Bates residence and motel, remain features on the Universal Backlot Tour, with different incarnations of Norman attacking guests daily. Fun Fact: the tour also passes Alfred Hitchcock’s onetime office which still bears his signature silhouette line drawing by the door.
Originally, this was intended to be just a fan’s write up about 40 years of an underappreciated sequel. However, thanks to fellow Mad Monster Peter Morton, I had the esteemed pleasure of speaking with writer, Tom Holland. Providing insight far beyond what I could read or research, and without further ado, here’s my afternoon chat with the Master of Horror himself:
BEWARE! I DID MY BEST TO AVOID IT, BUT THERE ARE SPOILERS WITHIN. I REPEAT, SPOILERS ALERT!!!
Phantasm420: Thank you so much for taking the time.
TH: Well, I’m buried because I’m putting the word out about Child’s Play: A Visual Memoir. And you can go to Terrortime.com and you can see it. Cause that’s sort of buried me, but what I’m running into, everybody I talk to about the Child’s Play book wants to talk about Psycho II cause it’s the 40th anniversary.
Phantasm420: Oh, goodness.
TH: I think it’s because it’s the 40th anniversary. But I mean over and above anything else I’m doing, like the Fright Night book or the visual memoir of Child’s Play, I’m getting all these questions about Psycho II. The script is a hard cover on my website if you wanna purchase a signed copy. You know, so I’m absolutely thrilled that I’ve had people asking me why we didn’t, or I didn’t or someone didn’t do something for the 40th anniversary. But you’re sure as hell not gonna get anything out of Universal, you know? (Laughing) They hardly know their catalog, much less from 40 years ago.
Phantasm420: Right, right.
TH: I’m trying now to gather what material there is on Psycho II, and I’m gonna try to put together some kind of a book on it. Ya know, a photo book but also with text. And I had something really incredible happen: a documentary filmmaker from Australia named Mark Hartley, he was involved with the 4K for Cloak & Dagger down there. “Not Quite Hollywood” is the documentary that he did a few years ago with Richard Franklin who directed Psycho II.
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: That’s where Richard came from and how he got Psycho II at Universal because of his success with Road Games and Patrick, Down Under. Do you know all this?
Phantasm420: I did read this, yes. But I prefer hearing it from you directly.
TH: Well, so anyway, when Mark Hartley told me- Richard died of prostate cancer. It also got his father. And I went through that with him, and his wife and they would visit here. My cousin had gone through it too. So, I put him in touch with my cousin and that led to visits to Stanford Hospital. Anyway, the cancer got him and all of a sudden, he’s going- this is not probably the kind of happy stuff you want for your readers, but he wrote several thousand, many thousand- I don’t know what, 20,000 words maybe. 15, 20 thousand words and his memories of making the movies. And in there, the largest chunk is his memories of Psycho II. Including hiring me, and how I came to get the job and the story about the tension between Tony and Meg Tilly. So I went and I got permission from his widow and I’m gonna write his version of the making of Psycho II, which is comparatively detailed but not enough to make anything like a book. But still, it’s a good sized article. Then I’m gonna put down the view from my eyes, now remembering it from 40 years ago. And I’m gonna have to get photos of Psycho II. I have photos that I took with a Polaroid, which are mine, and some of em are great. Like Robert Loggia, me sticking a knife into Robert Loggia-
Phantasm420: Oh!
TH: From when we were shooting the stairwell. And I own those. So, if you have to license production photos from Universal, they’re famously expensive. This is for me and for fans. If I cover costs, I’ll be happy. But I don’t know if we’ll afford enough money to get very many production stills. But I’m just at the beginning of this and it’s been- I wasn’t even thinking about, all I was thinking of was Child’s Play: A Visual Memoir because we just released it. And that just appeared today in Bloody Disgusting! It’s the lead article on BD, so that’s why I’ve been so busy. But anyway, at the same time it brought up all this. It started me thinking about Psycho II because of the 40th anniversary. That’s the film that really got my career started; you know?
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: So, and again, I have to tell you, reading Richard Franklin’s memories- cause it’s not a memoir. It doesn’t go to that. It would be a great article for American Cinematographer or something. It’s like going back 40 years and thinking of myself then. I mean, I was in my thirties, you know? I mean, it brought back all kinds of memories. And so that’s what I’m thinking about where I am. What can I tell you about your questions?
Phantasm420: Oh yeah! I really, really would look forward to reading it and so, I’m gonna keep an eye out for it.
TH: One of the questions you asked, I remember, was about the Psycho house. My memory is there was no house there! There certainly was no motel there. And whatever it was, it was a total ruin. Because I remember going with Robert Boyle who was the production designer on the original Psycho in 1959-60 and going with him to the production offices. Robert Boyle was the head of production design, ok? And getting the original architectural plans for the Psycho house and taking them and giving them to the head of whoever was doing it. And we put the stairway in and the motel. Now, when we had finished that it was at the same time that they were just starting that tram that went around with visitors, charging them money.
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: Whatever they call it. They were just starting that! And that’s when the Psycho house became part of the tour, after we had finished shooting it. And the few times they appeared while we were still shooting it, we cursed them because they were interrupting shooting. But by the time we did Cloak & Dagger, which was 3 years later, it was a built-in feature of the studio, and they were developing it. When we did Psycho II, all they had up there, where Universal Walk is now, all they had was the Amphitheatre for outdoor music acts. I don’t even know if that’s there any longer.
Phantasm420: It’s not. That’s been gone for a while.
TH: It was the success of Psycho II that cemented the house. And tip of the hat, that was in Richard’s original conception of it. When he got the opportunity to do the sequel, which remember, this was a couple of beats before sequels. It was originally a cable movie. If you look in the end credits, Oak Communications, that was the cable company because it was a low budget cable movie. And what happened was the problem that I had was how to get a script that would be so compelling, or have such a juicy part, that it would get Tony Perkins. And Tony at that point was lukewarm if not totally cold to redoing Norman again. Because he had an ambivalence about it, he felt in a way that it had damaged his career or typecast him. Before Psycho, he was a young romantic lead- I don’t know if you know this or not, and he just had finished, he’d starred in some Hollywood movies including Shenandoah and westerns and he had been a star on Broadway in Look Homeward Angel. Then he did Psycho and he turned from the boy next door to the killer next door. And he felt that made his career difficult.
Phantasm420: Ohh…
TH: So, I had to write a script that was strong enough that he’d come back and play Norman Bates again. Because if I didn’t, if we didn’t get Norman, Richard and I knew that if I didn’t write a script that would get Norman, we would end up being a cable movie, a TV movie. We would never get a theatrical release.
Phantasm420: Wow.
TH: That was a huge challenge and that’s a long story in itself. I forget how long- I think I worked harder on that script than anything I’ve ever done.
Phantasm420: It’s very apparent. I love the movie so very, very much. As far as sequels, it’s one to me that rivals the original. It’s so fantastic. The ending is (boisterous TH laughter) one of the best endings in all of horror. I love that ending so much. And one of my questions is even about, kind of the ending. I wanted to ask in a way where, I have no intentions of including spoilers (SPOILER ALERT!!!) with my article, so is Mrs. Spool actually Norma’s sister? *Phantasm420 note: Additional spoiler in re: Norman’s parentage removed to maintain suspense.*
TH: Yes.
Phantasm420: Yes?!
TH: That was my intention. That’s the last scene that it explains it all. We shot it and we looked at it and we realized that we didn’t have a cherry on top of it. What I had done was I had written he poisons her and she dies of poison-
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: But it needed something. And that’s when I said, let’s have him pick up the shovel and Bang! And by God, he did it and I think it was one take in a wide shot and with the audience it worked like dynamite, yeah.
(SPOILER ALERT!!!)
Phantasm420: It’s so perfect. I watched it again recently since I’m working on this, probably another 4 times. And every time it still is just shocking to hear that plonk and thud of the shovel. But like, it’s so good, all the way up to when he carries her up the stairs and then, you know, places her as Mother and then he starts talking with her again. It just, wow. It always blows me away. Like, I keep expecting something different. It continually shocks me, so thank you for that. It’s brilliant.
TH: Well, yes, thank you. The whole movie worked better than we ever knew. I never had another experience like it. The closest I had was Fright Night and I was directing that, which helped the writing. Psycho II was everybody coming together. It was the last gathering of the people who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock for real. The line producer, who really made it sing and hum, he had been Hitchcock’s AD, first AD on Psycho. The script supervisor had been the supervisor on Psycho. The makeup lady, I mean it was a bunch of people coming back to make it like, you know? And we did it all in the backlot, just like you had said, Hitchcock had done Psycho. And the actress took off. Tension between Tony and Meg. And I don’t even know if she-, she was so young, you know?
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: I don’t know. And I was there, and I lived through it and everybody was in a panic. So I don’t know if I ever really clearly understood what Tony was so upset about.
Phantasm420: You know, I had asked Mick Garris once, of course who directed Psycho IV. Which is another one that I really- I really like all the movies in this franchise. I’ve even seen the Bates Motel-
TH: I just did Post Mortem! *Mick Garris’ podcast*
Phantasm420: Oh nice!
TH: Coming soon. Like I said on Thursday. And you know we talked about it. And I said to him, we should just do a podcast on the 4 Psycho movies!
Phantasm420: That would be great. It’s like an almost understated franchise series of movies that I feel nobody really talks enough about. Even part 3! Part 3 to me is the darkest and the grittiest, that one is almost sinister in a different type of way. And then 4, oh I love the prequel. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that. Because it kind of does reference Norman being young and when he does kill them.
TH: I think it’s just; Stefano wrote it. It’s gotta be like canon you know? Robert Bloch was very upset. I did a symposium at the Writer’s Guild after Psycho II came out with Robert Bloch. What he did, he wrote the sequel to the book, and he killed Norman off on page 13.
Phantasm420: OH!
TH: It was like he’d written it to make sure nobody would ever make it. And so it was a tense symposium, and of course he thought it was too graphic violently. Which he had, which is an argument. Richard didn’t have to put the knife through Vera Miles mouth. But that was what was going on with the movie at the time. (Laughter) We wanted to be comparative. Then the teenagers were making out in the basement, and they tried to get away and they get slashed up-
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: That was the continuation of the “have sex and die” history of horror movies.
Phantasm420: Exactly.
TH: To complain about those two being gratuitous but nothing else…you know, as far as I’m concerned.
Phantasm420: No, especially when you consider what’s going on now. I’ve reached my point where, I don’t know maybe it’s my age or something where to me it’s like, sometimes there’s too much. You know what I mean? It doesn’t necessarily have to be so graphic. Nuance is nice as well.
TH: I think they’re having trouble; there are no taboos left to be broken that I can think of. When they did Winnie the Pooh as a murderer, I knew it had gone as far as it could. Oh my God! (Laughing)
Phantasm420: It’s like that phrase or term “Jumping the shark”.
TH: Yes, that’s right!
Phantasm420: Ok, I am curious about if you did have another storyline in mind had Tom Gavin been available to reprise the role of Sam Loomis?
TH: No, he wasn’t available. He was the ambassador to Mexico at the time I think, appointed by Reagan.
Phantasm420: Right, right.
TH: So, he was not available. But if he had been, yes I would have brought him in but it never came up because he wasn’t available.
Phantasm420: Right, ok. I was curious-
TH: I would’ve loved to have had that. To have had him. The more people I could’ve brought back from Psycho the original, would’ve been just great. Vera Miles is incredible! You know how good those people were? How brilliant Tony Perkins was?! Oh my god, you know!
Phantasm420: Yes!
TH: Major actors! Major actors in a little horror film, sequel to boot, that nobody believed in and nobody thought would do any business. And what I did is I wrote a part where Norman starts out perfectly sane! And by the end of the movie, he’s totally mad and no one knows it! That’s a character arc!
Phantasm420: Yes!
TH: That’s how I got him. Because I gave him a great part to play. A great emotional arc. And he did it.
Phantasm420: Yes, absolutely!
TH: I was then 37, if you think back, I was scared to death that this was the job that would end my burgeoning career. You know? I mean, everybody was saying it was a career killer. To have the temerity to try to make a sequel to a classic movie. I mean, that’s how we thought of it at the time.
Phantasm420: Right.
TH: (Chuckling) So I was scared to death.
Phantasm420: By the way, I also happen to love the Hatchet movies and you were great as Uncle Bob.
TH: Hah! Thank you, thank you, thank you! And now I’ve got one called “Tarot” that’s out there. The trailer just went up on YouTube. Peter Hyoguchi, It’s called Tarot. And I’m playing an uncle again I think except I’m the bad guy.
Phantasm420: That’s fun.
TH: Yeah, yeah yeah. I’ll tell ya, all this is making life more interesting. I never in a million years woulda thought this would have happened. You know?
Phantasm420: Really?
TH: I mean, we’re talking about a movie that’s 40 years old!
Phantasm420: Yup! I was 5 when this came out. Well, we kind of already covered pretty much everything here that was of serious importance. Like, we even talked about the final scene. Was the “execution” (no pun intended) of this scene as you had envisioned it? That fantastic scene, is that how you pictured it when you wrote it?
TH: Yeah. Yeah. What made Psycho II amazing was it was exactly how I had written it because I was working with Richard. What Richard and I did was we went to an extended school of graduate lecture in Hitchcock. We ran every one of Hitchcock’s movies, from his silents up to the last one which was the cemetery: Family Plot! And we pulled out all of the visual set pieces and we took out, I forget how many, but I wrote those set pieces. We were trying to use a number of the same camera shots as Psycho but also put Hitchcock’s oeuvre in Psycho II. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the suspense plays so well, because we were trying to do Alfred Hitchcock.
Phantasm420: And it was so successful! I love the parallels! And that was another thing I had commented on in the email I sent. The parallels I loved them matching up with the original movie. Even down to Robert Loggia’s descent there on the stairs. It was reminiscent of Mr. Arboghast.
TH: That’s Psycho.
Phantasm420: Exactly.
TH: That’s Arboghast. That’s an example of it. Yes! Richard knew that it had to play at the Psycho house and the motel, ok? So, to get the visuals that he wanted cause he thought the image of that house was so famous after the first one that he had to bring it back in II. So we’re forcing a shape in the movie, if that makes any sense. And everything worked! Not only that, everybody was sane. Richard was sane. He wasn’t always sane but on that one he was sane. Tony was just terrific, and he had that edge that was Norman, you know? He had a material temperament hiding underneath it, if that makes any sense.
Phantasm420: Ok.
TH: There was some small, small part of him that was always Norman I thought. He could go from being the juvenile next door to being Norman Bates.
Upon expressing my profuse thanks to this maestro of the genre, we ended our conversation. Of course, post chat, I was flooded with the questions and comments I’d forgotten in my awestruck state. Like about Dean Cundey’s amazing camera work and the fact that Oz Perkins, son of Anthony, has a cameo as younger Norman. But in the presence of a storyteller like Tom Holland, sometimes you just need to sit back, shut up and take it all in. I did have the pleasure of meeting TH in person days later at the Home of Horror in Burbank, Dark Delicacies, during a signing where I picked up my personal copy of Child’s Play: A Visual Memoir.
HENDOWEEN PRESS RELEASE
Mad Monster Film Fest Screening: Sunday 8/25/24
