Chuck JordanModify

2026-04-28 08:42:41

I first heard about The Primevals via Letterboxd, so all I knew about it was that it was about tracking a Yeti in the Himalayas, it contained a lot of stop-motion animation combined with live actors, and it was released in 2023.

So watching it, I figured I knew exactly what it was: a movie from the 2020s made in homage of the kinds of adventure movies that came out in the early 1980s, which were themselves homages to movies from decades earlier. And while The Primevals was a little too slow and kind of inert to really wow me, I had a huge amount of respect for just how fully they committed to the bit.

It was only after I finished that I discovered the real story behind it: it was released in 2023, but had been a passion project for animator David W Allen as far back as the 1960s. He’d gone through several attempts to get it funded and completed over the decades, and the original teams included legendary animators like Phil Tippett. Filming for the live action segments took place in 1994. Allen passed away in 1999, but his friends and collaborators took the work and released in posthumously, over 20 years later.

And it’s pretty remarkable that all of that legacy is visible in the end product, but it also is completely believable as a 21st-century homage. The image quality is good enough, and the compositing between live actors and animated characters seamless enough, that I just assumed it must be a modern movie painstakingly recreating the look of an older one.

In retrospect, I should’ve been much more suspicious. The lead character is played by Juliet Mills, who I knew as the witch Tabitha from the underrated soap opera Passions. It should’ve occurred to me that she looked exactly same age as she did during that series. And all of the other performers have that late 90s/early 2000s look that is difficult to describe exactly, as if they’re all familiar as guest stars from an episode of Murder, She Wrote or Star Trek The Next Generation.

The end result is that the movie seems completely unstuck in time. The stop motion calls back to Ray Harryhausen if not older, the effects work and sets evoke the fantasy adventures of the early 1980s, and the actors and overall script seem to be working in the golden age of the SciFi channel in the late 90s or early 2000s.

It’s also a little racist, in a way that feels more dated and thoughtless than genuinely malicious. Our few Nepalese characters are quickly either killed or relegated to the background, and the main characters are all white. Including a safari leader with the impeccable name of Rondo Montana! Also, a brief scene in a street that’s supposed to be Kolkata¹ has the only presumably-Indian characters be murderous thugs and thieves.

I have to say, though, that it was a pleasant change to see a story where all the conflict was external. Everybody in our team of protagonists are all nice and respectful to each other, without much attempt to stir up drama. I didn’t realize how much I missed watching a story about a bunch of characters without having to reach the inevitable point where they start turning on each other.

The story is little more than a loose framework designed to showcase a bunch of different stop-motion sequences. It’s got an awful lot of the live actors either walking from one place to another, or staring at something off-screen in disbelief. For an adventure story about tracking a live Yeti, there’s not a whole lot of action.

But if you’re a fan of classic stop motion, this has a ton of it, all excellently nostalgic. At the time I’m writing this, it’s playing for free with ads on Tubi. Fans of old-school stop-motion probably are way ahead of me on this one, and have already seen it. But if you like the style of Ray Harryhausen movies and haven’t yet seen The Primevals, it feels like a kind of undiscovered treasure.

2026-04-24 05:02:32

So much of our interaction with computers in 2026 is having to come to terms with everything getting more intrusive, more annoying, more time-wasting, and generally breaking the contract between companies and their customers. As loath as I am to use a Cory Doctorow-coined buzzword, I have to admit that he nailed it with “enshittification.”

But yesterday the internet made me throw a “why can’t we have nice things?!” tantrum — I finally deleted Instagram from my phone, after a couple of weeks of feeling like it was giving me psychic damage every time I opened the app. There’s been such a long, slow degradation of that platform that it took me a while to put my finger on exactly why it was bothering me so much. Eventually I realized that they’ve finally abandoned any pretense of being anything other than an advertising platform that occasionally and randomly shows you a photo from someone you might know.

I actually counted, for science, and saw that the stories¹ were actually 8:1 ads vs entries from accounts I was following. And as for the real posts, the ratio was 6:1 ads or “suggested” posts vs followed accounts.

I’m still amazed that a company that’s put as many billions of dollars into social engineering as Facebook has could be so lackadaisical about blatantly destroying the user experience. Like they got impatient waiting for us frogs to boil and just took a flame thrower to the whole thing.

So I could use a win, and I’m trying to procrastinate instead of being productive anyway, so why not look for something to be optimistic about? And I found it when I sat down at my computer and realized I’d left it on all night, with several apps and browser tabs all open in the middle of doing stuff.

Actually, I realized I’ve been leaving it on all the time for the past week, if not longer. And yet everything was still running fine, with nothing slowing it all down or generating any zombie processes (as far as I could tell).

Which probably seems completely unremarkable for most people, but I can’t stress enough how alien this is to me. Even this many years into the iOS era, I still close apps when I’m done with them. No matter how many times I hear people insist that I don’t need to, I worked in app development just long enough that I don’t trust leaving anything suspended. And I’ve always shut my computer down when I’m done with it for the day, even if I frequently forget to turn off the monitor.

My brain is now so corrupted from decades of programming, in fact, that I get low-level anxiety when I’m in a conversation and someone suddenly changes the topic without finishing the last one. It’s like pushing items onto my mental stack, and if we don’t pop everything off, my mind will end up leaking.

My desktop computer, for the record, is an M3 MacBook Pro that’s now 3 years old, so it’s not as if it’s struggling. But there, too, I’m often having to balance my frustration with many of Apple’s business decisions against straight-up marveling at how good the computers are. I almost never use it as an actual laptop, but I’ve never once had the feeling that I’m sacrificing utility or performance for (theoretical) portability. It’s still way overpowered for anything I try to throw at it.

Back when Apple introduced the M1 MacBooks, I made the switch as soon as I could. It was genuinely amazing on its own merits, but even more impressive in comparison to the last several iterations of the Intel-powered versions. I’d just started to take it for granted that laptops simply run uncomfortably hot, and there was no way around it. Of course you don’t actually try to put it in your lap, what a silly, fanciful idea. And don’t touch the area above the function keys unless you want to get burned, but why would you want to do that, anyway?

Apple’s marketing is so hyperbolic in general that I didn’t realize until later that they’d been underselling the switch to their own chips. It genuinely feels like a huge company saying, “it doesn’t have to be like this, you know,” and “computers can actually be good.”

Again, this is all stuff that might seem inconsequential for anyone who’s not as terribly, terribly old as I am. But I’m typing this on a super-responsive bluetooth keyboard that I rarely have to charge, using a wireless ergonomic mouse that requires charging even less often. And I’m sitting next to my handheld PC (the Steam Deck) docked and connected to the monitor, which doesn’t run Windows but can still run 99.99% of the games I’m interested in playing, using the same keyboard and mouse.² Every bit of this would seem weird if not outright impossible to me from 2016.

So occasionally it’s a good thing to realize that the boiling-frog syndrome happens both ways. Obviously, there’s a ton of stuff that’s deliberately weighing us down, making everything more annoying, more wasteful, more expensive, or just plain more unpleasant. But we’re also surrounded by things that are getting better without our really taking notice of it.

2026-04-22 01:00:00

I like Jack White, but sometimes the man has been his own worst enemy. For instance, he “Fell In Love With a Girl,” and thought it was significant enough to warrant repeating multiple times and hiring Michel Gondry to depict it in Lego.

But dude. Maybe we would’ve heard you the first time if you weren’t so loud. Turn down the volume on your guitar, ask your sisterwife to lay off the drums a bit, calm down, use your words, maybe stop affecting that weird pseudo-accent. At a certain point, our inability to understand stops being an us problem and starts being a you problem.

But also: I get it. Sometimes when you’re crushing hard, you just want to make absolutely certain that everybody knows about it.

Like say you’re just a simple guy from Liverpool who’s infatuated with a girl from the continent. And you try to say the only words you know that she’ll understand, so you write the song “Michelle” with your band. But she’s still not getting it for some reason. The only answer: repeat yourself, but in French. (Psst Paul, I don’t want to tell you your business, but it’s “je t’aime.”)

2026-04-21 09:24:33

I mentioned that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the movie whose reputation terrified me the most as a kid. A very close runner-up was Phantasm. Just the idea of it was enough to give a little boy in the 1970s nightmares.

Which, as it turns out, is appropriate, because the movie was inspired by a nightmare and plays out like one. It follows its own weird dream logic, jumping around between ideas and surreal scenes in a way that seems to make sense to the characters acting them out, but is nonsensical to anyone watching or trying to piece it all together afterwards.

And it’s all kind of charming, even if it’s charming in spite of itself. It’s the kind of movie where if it were any better, it’d be much worse. For most of it, I was thinking that if they’d just tweaked it a little bit to make it a surreal horror-comedy, it would be brilliant. After thinking about it some more, though, I think the ambiguity of whether you’re laughing at it or laughing with it is an essential part of what makes it enjoyable.

Personally, I was immediately charmed by the late 1970s hair. It starts out showing us a guy making love with a lady behind a gravestone in a cemetery, and for some reason he’s removed exactly one shoe. We only see extreme close-ups of their faces and her breasts, and he’s rocking the kind of mustache and soul patch you could only get away with in the 70s, or into the 80s and 90s if you worked in a guitar shop or comic book store.

Shortly after, we learn that he was part of “the trio” along with the Hasselhoffian Jody, and Reggie, a guy with the male pattern baldness tonsure and a long ponytail. Reggie can get away with this because he doesn’t GAF about what you think. He works as an ice cream man and spends most of the movie in a white shirt with black bowtie plus a leather vest.

I wanted to know more about these people and their lives.

Turns out that Jody is the older brother of our main character Mike, a 13 year old boy who reads a lot of science fiction and is also really good at fixing engines. Jody’s also Mike’s guardian, since their parents died a couple of years earlier. Jody is also kind of a douche.

That’s based on his leaving Mike alone in the house for long stretches of time while he goes to the local bar to pick up the one woman who hangs out there. And dismissing Mike’s concerns about weird creatures trying to attack him while he was snooping around the cemetery, by saying it was probably just the kid up the street, using a slur for the mentally disabled. Plus, the guy can’t park worth a damn. He drives around in a black Barracuda that his brother has to maintain, and he pulls right up to the front door of every place he goes. Even though the bar clearly has a sign that says “parking in rear.”

Mike idolizes his older brother anyway, which is probably all that matters, since this is Mike’s movie. He visits the local fortune teller, who communicates via telepathy with her creepy granddaughter, and they both have a little star on their face. The fortune teller reassures Mike that he doesn’t need to worry about Jody abandoning him, and then does a shamelessly blatant rip-off of the gom jabbar scene from Dune.

Mike’s adventures involve creeping around and into the local funeral parlor, being pursued by small cloak-wearing monsters, seeing a graphic murder, and being threatened by the Tall Man who serves as the funeral director. After a night of poor decisions and narrow escapes, he takes a piece of evidence back home. To his credit, Jody looks at it and immediately says, “I believe you.” He formulates a plan that begins with assembling a surprising amount of weaponry for a suburban home, and teaching Mike the basics of Gun Safety According to Charles Bronson.

It’s remarkable that Jody goes so quickly from dismissing Mike — even after finding him in a garage pinned underneath the car that had fallen on him — to believing him, because if there were ever a movie that could keep coasting on none of the adults believing what was happening, it’s Phantasm. It’s all over the place. Who are the bad guys, how many different forms can they take, what is the extent of their powers, what can destroy them? It all seems to be based in the same weird dream logic.

The only consistent thing is that it’s all stuff that a 13-year-old boy in 1979 would think was cool and weird and creepy and bad-ass.

Which is why the killer Phantasm balls in the movie are such an iconic horror movie image, even though they’re disappointingly under-used in this one. I’m sad to report that after 47 years of being scared of this movie, it only uses the ball for one kill.

It’s pretty impressive, though! And one of the scenes (along with a later scene involving a giant fly creature) that made me wonder whether it was intentionally comedic. There’s an effect like blood pouring out of a garden hose, and then a pool of yellow liquid forming around the body, which I thought was doing the victim one final indignity by showing us that he’d pissed himself. (I think it was actually these creatures’ blood, maybe?)

A couple of times, Mike or one of the other characters will deliver a short bit of exposition explaining bizarre things they couldn’t possibly know, as if they’d just figured them out, and everyone else reacts with, “Yes, that makes sense!” And the fact that it doesn’t actually make sense seems all but irrelevant for this movie. None of it makes sense, but that doesn’t seem to matter much.

I’m still not sure how much of the charm is similar to that of Suspiria, where you roll with it because it’s trying something original and also the music is pretty great. The music feels more “inspired by” Goblin than as good as Goblin, but it still contributes a ton to the vibes of “late 70s weird” instead of “clumsy and amateurish.”

Phantasm is a little bit like Reggie himself: you’re tempted to say, “dude, you’re not pulling any of this off at all,” but it just seems like even if he did care, you’d be missing the point entirely. All the wooden performances, disorienting editing, baffling dialogue, moon logic, wacky plot developments, all get smoothed over by the sense that an independent filmmaker is making something sincerely weird and sincere.

2026-04-20 06:31:33

I’ve been pretty open and honest on here about my fraught relationship with horror as a genre.

During my prime adolescent years, when you’re supposed to be building a solid foundation, I was either not allowed or too scared to be seeing any horror movies. So my adulthood has been mostly spent playing catch-up. Trying to see the most well-known landmarks, acclimatizing myself to Halloween events, making more of an effort to desensitize myself.

Part of the reason is just because it’s always felt like a huge pop cultural blind spot. It’s a drag thinking that there’s an entire genre shut off from me on account of I’m so scared. Also since moving to Los Angeles, where the locals go hard into horror stuff for months every year — it’s the closest we get to having seasons here, I guess — it seems like I’ll never have a chance of belonging here unless I get caught up.

More than any of that, though, I just want to be a horror fan. When it hits with me, it hits hard, and several of my all-time favorite movies are either straight-up horror or hybrids. And even among the ones that don’t aspire to be much more than fun, there have been more hits than misses.

Watching the two Psycho sequels back to back over the past couple of days reminded me that there have been tons of movies over the years that I either dismissed entirely, or mentally filed into the “I’ll get around to it someday” category. They were both such a pleasant surprise that I realized I should probably go back and reassess more of the movies that had inescapable pop cultural impact, but which I’d immediately written off as being either too scary, or not worth my time.

It also reminded me of the first time I watched the original Psycho, which was probably in my late teens or early 20s. It was already so well-known by that point that I’d seen countless references to it, I knew roughly why it was considered significant, and of course, I had heard all about the shower scene. When I did actually watch it, my heart was racing in anticipation of it… and then it just kind of happened. I’d waited too long, so I was never going to be able to get the full effect. (The same thing happened with Alien).

That also meant that a later murder scene in that movie took me completely by surprise, and it’s still the most viscerally memorable part of that movie for me. I now wonder whether that scene has been referenced so often as “the part that most people don’t remember about Psycho” that it doesn’t have any surprised for people younger than me. It’s a movie that feels like its bones have picked clean by pop culture. Future video essayists will have to fight over the gristle, doing deep dives into the rich symbolism of Sam Loomis’s suits.

Another movie that’s always had an aura around it, and an oversized presence in pop culture my entire life: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

When I was little, it was the ultimate in forbidden terrors. A film so full of filth and depravity that just knowing about it would mark a stain onto your soul. As a sensitive kid who’d been terrified by episodes of Fantasy Island, I thought it had to be the most horrible thing. It’s right there in the title: they’re murdering a lot of people! With a chain saw!

In Texas!

It’s kind of funny to think that even as an extremely impressionable kid, who was a prime target for hype and propaganda, I still had some limits. The even more forbidden movies were the Faces of Death series, which kids would dare each other to watch. Occasionally reporting back in hushed tones about how they’d been forever changed, more often saying “eh, it’s probably fake.” I do have to wonder how many of them grew up to become Facebook content moderators. In any case, there was never any aura of attraction around those for me, because I could never even imagine what was the point.

But I still imagined that at some point, I’d be an adult who was finally able to accept the challenge and watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

By the time I went to college, the movie was already being rehabilitated into an art film. In a film class I took as a freshman, the teaching assistant showed us the opening crawl and first scene of the movie before the credits. Ostensibly, it was to encourage new film students to look for influences outside of the narrow set of accepted classics, and to appreciate how artful composition and cinematography could be found in otherwise unexpected places. The more I think about that class, though, I think it was just a guy in his early 20s wanting to screw around with a bunch of freshmen. He’s the one who also dropped Un Chien Andalou on us one morning without any preparation for what we were going to be seeing.

In the years since, that conception of the movie has solidified, with the consensus being “everything you’ve heard about this movie is wrong!” and that it’s a horror classic. It’s frequently mentioned as one of the most influential horror movies, and images and individual shots are praised for their cinematography and called iconic. I’ve seen the shots of Leatherface swinging his chainsaw around futilely while the sun sets behind him, tons of times. And I’ve gotten into the Dead Meat podcasts recently, and every one opens with the shot from the back of the pickup at the end.

So last night I thought, I’m finally that adult I was imagining, I’ve done a good job of desensitizing myself to horror movies, and the consensus seems to be that this was never the gore-filled splatter movie it had been made out to be, so tonight would be the perfect time to finally take on the challenge. I would watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I got around 20 minutes into it before I said, “Nah, I don’t need to watch this.” Instead, I watched the Kill Count video that I’d been avoiding so as not to spoil it, and then went back to the movie and just watched some of the key scenes in context (including the ending).

It actually left me feeling deflated, and wishing that I hadn’t watched it. Not because it was too disturbing, and not because it was too tame, but because it was just unpleasant. It does immediately evoke the feeling of being in the south in August in the 1970s. As someone who was there, I can tell you that’s not a good thing.

And since I was involved in some community theater productions around the time, I’m also familiar with the feeling of being suffocatingly hot and sweaty while surrounded by other amateur actors, delivering lines with varying degrees of inert lifelessness, or committing to weird choices that are just off-putting instead of interesting. All those years, I’d been imagining that the most disturbing stuff would be all the murders and cannibalism, but it was actually just the part that I’d been living through.

Intellectually, I get that the lack of polish is part of the appeal, making it more “raw” or whatever. But for me, it simultaneously felt too artificial to have any sense of realism, but too real to feel like grindhouse. I had the you are actually there! sensation of being dragged around on a low-budget movie production with filmmakers who were more interested in talking about slaughterhouses than in any kind of character development.

So it’s not for me, and I have to admit I already miss having that unopened door that’s been looming for so many years, making me wonder about what exactly was hidden behind it. The aura around the movie is so much more interesting than the reality of it, for me.

But it is at least a sign that I’m entering the “discernment” phase of my horror journey. I don’t need to see everything, because I probably won’t get much out of it, anyway. Whatever appeal there used to be in the challenge itself — the lure of a movie that is supposedly so extreme that it has an oversized aura in pop culture — is long gone. I’ve never seen any of the Saw, Hostel, or Terrifier movies, I don’t intend to, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. A younger version of me might’ve been eager to satisfy his curiosity, or just be able to declare that I’ve done it. Now, it just seems like it’d be a complete waste of time, since I don’t have anything to prove.

And it’s a reminder that I’m not really charmed by low-budget or unpolished filmmaking for its own sake. I’m such a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that I started to assume I must be, but I’ve watched scenes from a couple of those movies without the jokes, and they’re just dreadful.

The idea that appreciating schlock is a core prerequisite for appreciating horror is built in to the whole genre, for a ton of reasons. The most interesting one to me is how much of the appeal of a horror movie is in having a visceral reaction, bypassing the intellectual and making you really feel something. A lot of fans are so bored with the mainstream that they gravitate to B-movies and very low budget productions simply because they feel less slick and more “honest.”

But a key part of that is getting the sense that the filmmakers are being earnest. Ultimately, that’s what immediately turned me off of this movie; it didn’t feel like the filmmakers were earnestly trying to do any kind of storytelling apart from getting the characters into a murder house for the most shocking kill scenes they could think of. For all I could tell, that’s either the entire point, or it’s missing the point completely, like complaining that the characters in pornography don’t have sufficient motivation.

I think I’ve been harboring this idea that I need to learn to appreciate schlock, as an essential part of rejecting snobbery and expanding my taste outside the mainstream. And to avoid being one of the squares who reacted with complete revulsion to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by clutching their pearls and claiming that there was nothing but depravity contained within, that its mere existence was deeply offensive.

So I guess I can at least appreciate finally being able to say that there’s nothing contained within for me. Some of the shots are genuinely iconic; I just wish they felt like jewels in an under-appreciated horror-for-the-sake-of-horror classic, instead of just happy accidents from filmmakers inventing torture porn.

If nothing else, I’m finally ready to tackle other movies whose reputation scared the shit out of me when I was younger, like Phantasm. Wish me luck!

2026-04-19 02:00:00

Going into Psycho II, I made sure to make clear how much disdain I had for the idea of even trying to live up to such an undisputed classic. I gave it a pass only after it was clear that they were showing proper reverence for the original, and that they were more interested in continuing the story than trying to live up to it in terms of filmmaking.

Watching Psycho III, I was reminded of Hitchcock’s extended trailer for the original movie. It takes full advantage of the persona that had been well-established on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, starting with a jaunty theme and his style of straight-faced opening narration of each episode, that almost always included some macabre gag. He deadpans his way through a tour of the murder scenes, teasing the horrific events that took place at each one, stopping himself just short of saying too much.

In other words: I have a tendency to take Hitchcock way too seriously, concentrating on the Master of Cinema bit and forgetting how much he was also a showman and master manipulator.

So while Psycho II was a pleasant surprise, both for having clever ideas on how to continue the story and for being careful to pay homage to the original, Psycho III feels like it really gets the original. Not just how it felt to audiences 20 years after its release, but how it might’ve felt in its original context. And most surprising of all was how much I enjoyed it.

The movie picks up just a months after the previous one, and it’s about Norman Bates’s obsession with a young woman who arrives at the Bates Motel and by a bizarre and unfortunate coincidence, happens to look nothing like Marion Crane.

Maybe that’s not being fair to Norman¹, because the opening of the movie does an extended riff on Vertigo, priming us to take it in stride when a guy falls hard for a doppelgänger.

In any case, she looks similar enough for Norman to get imprinted on her, at least. And his new real mother doesn’t like it one bit.

The situation isn’t helped at all by his new sleazy assistant manager Duke, played by Jeff Fahey with the idea of “What if H.I. McDunnough, but hot?” and frequently shot like this:

Duke is trash. He’s also perpetually horny and he mistreats women, so it’s a good thing he’s in Psycho III, which is a very horny movie. But while Psycho II just seemed to be hinting at psychosexual frustration in an outdated and almost even TV-safe way — everyone calling it “making love,” implications of the kinds of lurid things that are going on in the motel now that it rents rooms by the hour, a doomed teenager sneaking into a murder house with his girlfriend and only making it to second base — the third movie is eager to go there and explore it.

It’s pretty hilarious when we get to see how Duke has transformed his room of the motel into a sex palace for one-night stands with local barflies. He’s been hard at work making collages from nudie magazines and pasting them on the walls, and somehow he’s managed to find colored bulbs for all the lamps. Women can tell he’s bad news, but they still can’t resist the temptation to enter his den of passion, where he’s always playing cartoons on the TV for some reason.

Having Duke at the Bates Motel sets up this interesting dynamic that plays with the audience’s sympathies, and even turns Norman back into a kind of anti-hero. Psycho II started with the baseline assumption that everybody would constantly be thinking of Norman as one of the most famous horror movie murderers, so it milked the ambiguity of “has he really reformed, or is that impossible?” for everything it was worth. Psycho III can’t really do that.

We know from the start that the hasn’t reformed. His introduction leans hard into images of the motel and the house in decay and neglect, with Norman surrounded by death. He’s poisoning birds so he can taxidermy them, and as far as I could make out, eating peanut butter from a jar with the same spoon he uses to stuff the insides. All while having visions of when he stuffed the body of his mother, who’s now residing in the upstairs bedroom. He’s unambiguously unwell, and it’s really driving home how hard Reagan-era budget cuts limited the availability of social workers to be assigned to recently-released serial killers.

But Duke is such a piece of garbage — and unlike Toomey from the last movie, he’s surface-level charming, instead of instantly unlikeable — that the contrast makes you think of Norman more like the way he thinks of himself: a quiet, awkward, and repressed, but overall polite and respectful man. An identity completely separate from his insane and domineering mother.

Because Psycho III comes right out of the gate with the weirdness turned to maximum — the opening shot is a black screen with a woman screaming, “There is no God!!!!” — a lot of it plays out like a surreal coming-of-age story starring a man in his early 50s. The relationship between Norman and not-Marion plays out like a budding romance between two shy and awkward innocents, instead of two deeply repressed people who are mentally unwell. At a dinner after they get tipsy from having wine that neither of them have been allowed to drink before, Norman invites her to dance and teaches her the box step.

Even the pianist can’t help but be charmed by the sight of them, and the movie cuts away to show him looking on approvingly, in what is my single favorite shot in all of Psycho III:

The core relationship in Psycho II never felt sexualized to me, for several reasons. The most obvious is that Mary (Meg Tilly’s character) is introduced as a co-worker with boyfriend troubles, both of which immediately put Norman in the friend zone. In the original, we’re introduced to Marion in her underwear after a rendezvous with a still-shirtless Sam Loomis, inviting the audience to think of her as an adult woman who has sex out of wedlock!

Did audiences really still think that way in 1960? Or is that just a modern interpretation, which invariably infantilizes previous generations as being repressed and naive? People have spent so much time analyzing Psycho that I spent years being told that even the sight of a flushing toilet was shocking and risqué for the time, so it’s near impossible for me to tell how much of that is accurate and how much is like the stories of people fainting at the sight of an oncoming train.

In any case, Psycho II was less interested in exploring sexual repression as it was in building up the suspense and tension around people in danger. Even in the scene where someone is watching Mary’s body double coming out of a shower, it feels set up to emphasize how physically vulnerable she is, instead of sexually vulnerable. The nudity seems more like a movie from the early 1980s playing around with how much they can get away with showing now, instead of actually digging into what any of it means.

Both of the sequels are filled with notes to Norman from his mother, calling women sluts and whores. And yet in Psycho II, they somehow always read as general-purpose gendered insults instead of sexual ones. It’s always ambiguous where the notes are coming from, or even if they actually exist, so they seem to be written more for shock value than to actually mean anything. “Don’t take it personally. Mother calls every woman a whore.”

But when Norman’s mother in Psycho III calls a woman a slut, she really means it.

It’s really interesting, because the easiest take on Psycho III is that it’s just lurid, melodramatic, trash. Dispensing all of the manipulative craftsmanship of the original, and the clever whodunnit twists of the first sequel, in favor of turning the franchise into a weird mid-80s slasher movie. Everything that was suggested in the original is now made explicitly obvious, all of the subtext is now exploitative text.

And yeah, Psycho III was undeniably capitalizing on the trend in slasher movies — the Friday the 13th series, which was also about a murderer with an unhealthy relationship with his mother, already had five installments by this point — but I think it was clearly commenting on them as well. I don’t think it’s simply a case of clumsily making implicit ideas more explicit, but using them as a baseline to take them further.

As a counter-example: in Gus Van Sant’s awful and truly unnecessary remake of Psycho, he made sure to add sound effects to the scene where Norman is looking at Marion through a hole in the wall, to make it clear that he was masturbating. That’s a case of making the implicit explicit while adding nothing.

When there’s a similar scene in Psycho III, the camera spends a long time lingering on Norman looking at the creepy painting that’s covering the hole in the wall. It shows two dark, brutish men abducting a nude woman in the forest.² As he stares at it, it transforms: the men look even more sinister, and they’re looking more directly at out of the painting, at him. The woman’s expression of distress has changed into a smile, an image suggesting not just consent, but temptation.

There’s a tendency to interpret horror movies, and the entire genre of slasher movies in particular, as cases of filmmakers unwittingly telling on themselves. All of their prejudices and hang-ups are encoded into the movies, ready for modern audiences to come in and decode them into the various symbols and cliches like “the virtuous final girl” and “horny teens punished for their transgressions.” And then turn them into self-aware riffs on those ideas, like Scream and The Cabin in the Woods.

Psycho III feels like it was commenting on those while they were still happening, before they were being regularly deconstructed. It makes it clear that its targets are repression, and the objectification and mistreatment of women, while also making it clear that it’s condemning them, not just indulging in them. It’s still manipulating the audience’s sympathies — because by this point that’s become a key part of the franchise — but it also includes enough outsiders to remind us how none of the residents of the motel or the house are the “normal” ones.

For one thing, there are simply enough women characters, and they’re given just enough agency, that they’re allowed to remain distinct personalities instead of collapsing into symbols. (“Personalities” instead of “characters,” since this is still Psycho III, after all). Even the characters that come right out of a slasher movie, and who might as well have “VICTIM” written on their foreheads, are given enough time to establish how completely random and unprovoked the violence against them is.

The movie seems to make a point of distinguishing between a healthy attitude towards sex, vs repression, sexual violence, and exploitation. For a lot of the runtime, the motel is being taken over by a bunch of loud, rowdy adults in town for a homecoming event. Like this woman, who thinks it’s hilarious that her bear boyfriend just invited her to twirl on his baton:

And one of the VICTIMs that I mentioned earlier would seem to fit perfectly into the horror movie cliche of “woman punished for the sin of being sexually promiscuous,” but I had a hard time reading the movie as being complicit. She’s the most explicitly sexualized of any character, but the scene doesn’t seem to blame her, so much as it emphasizes how much Duke is an asshole for treating her like a prostitute. And her nudity afterwards seems so matter-of-fact that it’s treated like an inconvenience. Unlike the nudity in the previous two movies, for instance, which felt like the filmmakers were experimenting with just how much they could get away with.

It’s possibly the oddest thing about this very odd movie, because I’m so used to slasher movies serving up simultaneous sex and violence with a shrug of, “we’re just givin’ the people what they want, and you’re complicit, or you wouldn’t be watching.” And this whole sequence looks like it should be exactly that. But in the context of this movie’s overt theme of sexual repression, it ends up feeling like a vehement rejection of the whole idea. It doesn’t feel like indulging your voyeurism, but rejecting it. Essentially equating you with Norman’s mother, for seeing any sign of sexuality in a woman as sinful and something that deserves to be punished.

Because Perkins was directing, it’s tempting to theorize that the reason I didn’t find the female nudity in Psycho III as pandering as most slashers, is because all of the Male Gaze was focused on Jeff Fahey. And I admit I like to imagine that Perkins was slyly playing on the way Hitchcock was infatuated with Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren by filming Fahey the same way. But the obvious fact is that it simply wouldn’t work the same way, even if he weren’t introduced to the movie in a scene that ends with his sexually assaulting a woman. The baseline for what’s considered acceptable male sexuality is just different.

But even if that wasn’t part of the intent, I do firmly believe that Perkins knew exactly what he was doing with this movie. I really like this quote that was included with the Wikipedia entry on the movie:

“I liked how wild the script was, and how tight it was at the same time. It’s the perfect blend of the reasonable and the unreasonable. I’ve always been looking for a project to direct with which I have an affinity with the subject and characters. I felt this would be a good script for an unknowing director to take on because the scenes were so well written, they directed themselves.”

It’s unnecessarily self-effacing for Perkins, because the script absolutely would not have worked for anyone who didn’t fundamentally understand the original Psycho, the character of Norman Bates, and the reason that movie was such a phenomenon.

A quick shot of Norman’s mother warning him of impending danger, for instance. Psycho II would never have included something like that, because it was playing it too safe. It’s funny how quickly I went from accusing that movie of the most outrageous audacity for even trying to continue the classic original, to concluding that it didn’t go far enough.

Part of the reason I’m including so many screenshots from the movie³ is because it so frequently feels like it’s trying to present an original, surreal image. And it’s full of homages to Hitchcock, but it’s more interested in getting across how they felt, instead of just doing a simple remake.

A huge part of why it feels so weird is the amazing soundtrack from Carter Burwell, full of odd electronic noises, creepy chanting, 80s rock, and even turning into a bouncy synth pop tune over the end credits. This was in the middle of doing music for Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, and proves how Burwell is a master at recognizing how the lines between suspense, horror, surreality, and comedy are all blurred. It’s a reminder of how much Bernard Hermann’s soundtrack for the original is memorable just for being so weird.

It’s an essential part of how Psycho III mashes it all up and has fun with it, without it ever quite descending into camp. I’m not going to claim that it’s a multi-layered masterpiece; it doesn’t have anything that works with as much restraint and nuance as the “we all go a little mad sometimes” from the original, for instance.

But it does embrace the entirety of the original, the parts that make it a classic and the parts that Hitchcock was eager to have fun with. It was never intended to be a deep and thoughtful examination of repression and mental illness⁴; it was intended to be shocking and surprising and pull people into the theaters to see what all the fuss was about. I love the movie, but I frequently forget how it was basically “elevated trash,” and not the least bit ashamed of that.

Psycho III understood that bringing the original into the 1980s meant preserving both the experimental filmmaking and the lurid exploitation. I was surprised that the previous movie was any good at all. I’m even more surprised that the third — and as far as I’m concerned, final — movie is not only a fascinatingly weird horror movie on its own merits, but made me have a greater appreciation for the original, by being less reverent of it.