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.
2026-04-18 01:30:00
The most startling thing about Psycho II is that it’s not completely terrible.
I actually don’t remember when I first saw Psycho; 1983 (when Psycho II was released) seems a little young for me, but it’s not entirely out of the question. But I do remember that I had less than no interest in the sequels. Even before my cinema snob tendencies kicked in, it seemed like a very bad idea to try and carry on from a classic. Once they did kick in, I’m sure I made analogies to trying to dig up Hitchcock’s corpse and keep it in the fruit cellar.
The sequel starts with the old-school Universal logo1, followed by the shower scene from the original movie. (You might have heard of it). The thing that immediately jumped out at me was that it was an abridged version. The most memorable shots were all there, but it was edited way down, showing enough to remind audiences of what happened, without giving the full impact of how it felt so violent and seemed to go on for so long because of all of the jarring cuts (pun intended).
Except here’s the thing: it wasn’t, actually. I just compared it to the original2 and they’re about the same. The only difference is the long shot of water in the drain and the slow pull back from Marion’s eye. Which all gave me an even greater appreciation for how good the original is, because the scene is actually kind of unremarkable now when it’s taken out of context. In my memory of it, everything that makes it so impactful is contained in the scene itself; in reality, it’s the result of being perfectly placed at the turning point of a long, slow, carefully-controlled boil of intrigue and tension.
Not used as a cold open, and not transitioning into color and set to a Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack. I don’t mean any disrespect to his work, but few things feel more like getting a cold plunge directly into a movie from the early 80s than hearing his music.
I didn’t know what to make of the opening, and I’m still not completely sure. Surely even teen audiences in 1983 would’ve been familiar enough with one of the most famous horror movies ever made that they didn’t need to be reminded of its most famous scene? And on the off chance you weren’t, then the scene doesn’t make much sense out of context. Especially the shot focusing on a rolled-up newspaper on a nightstand. I was left thinking that it just had to be an homage. An acknowledgement that yes, they understood the hubris of making a sequel to a classic, and just bear with it.
That’s the only explanation that makes any sense to me, since most of Psycho II is so devoid of pretense — or if you’re less charitable, devoid of ambition — that it rarely feels like they even aspired to living up to the original. Instead, it seems like any other early 80s suspense thriller, with the same pacing, cinematography, dialogue, and music you’d expect. At times, it feels more like a TV movie, or an episode of Night Gallery, than a feature film.
Which was almost certainly the right choice, honestly. Any attempts to Art This Mother Up would’ve just drawn attention to how much this isn’t as skillful as the original. So it’s probably better to make it clear that they’re more interested in continuing the story than in living up to a classic.
There are several scenes that feel more experimental, but they’re all direct homages to scenes or moments from Psycho. The most famous scenes all get a reference, with a beautiful young woman in a shower, a surprising kill in the house, a car being pulled from the swamp, a swinging light in the fruit cellar, and even a couple of quiet sandwich-focused scenes. There are even a couple of dolly zoom shots, because why not throw some Vertigo in while we’re at it?
But it’s mostly a whodunnit suspense thriller, where the questions are Is someone trying to drive Norman Bates crazy? and Is it working? And again, the biggest surprise is how well that all works. It knows what your assumptions and suspicions are, and it keeps playing with them past the point that you’d think it’d stop being effective. You know what you’re supposed to think, but then that seems too obvious, but then does the movie even know that’s too obvious? Is it a fake-out, or is it a double fake-out, or am I supposed to suspect that it’s a double fake-out, and is a movie like this even clever enough to have that many levels of subterfuge?
And it’s fitting that since Psycho is remarkable for executing a rug-pull on the audience, bumping off the protagonist and making you scramble to find another sympathetic character to follow, Psycho II spends most of its runtime leaving you questioning who’s the good guy in this movie.
I don’t want to suggest that Psycho II is a brain-bending masterpiece; honestly, I think a lot of what kept me second-guessing was simply that it does read so much like a straightforward suspense thriller. It gets a ton of mileage out of just making Norman Bates the protagonist, and having Anthony Perkins know how to be sympathetic while still being unmistakably off. Not just awkward like in the first movie, but like someone just barely keeping it together, and always making you wonder whether he’s snapped.
There are also hints of self-awareness throughout, like he’s spent the past 20 years being defined by this character, and he’s embracing it as much as if he were signing autographs and posing for creepy pictures at a horror convention. I often felt like he was screwing with the audience as much as someone in the movie was screwing with him.
Vera Miles is making the most of it, too. I got the sense that she’d spent the previous couple of decades being most known for the movie in which she essentially had to play the straight man, and she was finally getting to have some fun with it.
For a lot of the movie, I had trouble figuring out why it was working at all. It’s got strong early-80s vibes, where it’s simultaneously prudish and also trying to get away with as much as it can. We get a shot of Meg Tilly coming out of the shower that seems to be saying — look how much we can show now!3 But there’s also a sex motel with drugs and kids who sneak into a murder house to smoke marijuana cigarettes and make love. Everybody still calls it “make love.”
And the kills are weirdly inert. Just distractingly stiff and fake, with a knife going into what was clearly a latex mask, a prop body part, or just a close-up of somebody’s clothing. You’d think that they would have gotten better at it simply due to repetition, but every time it was like a stage hand weakly poking a knife into one of those big Barbie Makeup Heads.
Also, people work on movie logic, the basis of a big part of the plot is just too implausible to make sense, and the climax is entirely a case of the movie wanting specific things to happen, no matter whether they’re motivated or believable.
But for everything corny or cheesy about Psycho II, there’s something else that I genuinely liked. Its twists never felt like the movie being two steps ahead of me, but more like, “You go on ahead, we’ll catch up in a bit.” It doesn’t drag out its shocking secrets for too much longer after you’ve figured them out, and even though I knew how it was going to end, I still thought it was well-executed and oddly satisfying.
If you accept at the start that you’re never going to be able to live up to one of the most famous classic horror movies, why not pay homage to it with a surprisingly solid 80s thriller with a few genuinely clever ideas?
2026-04-15 13:00:31
The video game Exit 8 is essentially a straightforward spot-the-difference puzzle game, with a clever concept and an ingenious presentation. You’re trapped inside an endlessly-repeating hallway in one of Tokyo’s labyrinthine train stations, and you’re just trying to walk forward to find Exit 8.
At the start, you see a sign pointing to Exit 0, and a simple set of rules: look for anomalies. If you don’t see any, keep walking forward. If you do see any, turn back the way you came. Every time you do it correctly, the number will advance by one. Every time you get it wrong, you’ll be reset back to the start.
When I heard that it had been adapted into a movie, I thought it was a brilliant idea. I continued to think that as I made a reservation, drove to the theater, parked, and went inside to my seat. It was only at about 30 seconds into the movie that I spotted the anomaly: wait a second, this is a terrible idea for a movie, actually!
How could a movie adaptation possibly add anything? Best case, it’d be just like a play-through of the game. Worst case, it’d have all the repetitiveness of the already played-out time loop genre of movie, but with no stakes because nothing that happens is permanent. “Losing” in Exit 8 just means frustration and wasted time, which isn’t an issue in a movie because you’re not the protagonist. And everything that time loop movies mercifully cut out to show how the protagonist is learning but without feeling tiresome — that’s the entire substance of Exit 8 the game.
At the start of the movie, it strongly suggests that it’s just going to be a straight adaptation of the game. Everything is filmed (and heard) from first-person perspective. It even does the frequently-used video game trick of having the main character see their reflection, to establish the person you’re playing as. It continues like this for several minutes, introducing you to a rough idea of who the protagonist is, and setting up the scenario that’ll be waiting for him once he exits the station.
I was prepared for an entire movie delivered in first-person, and I was already speculating on how they could possibly pull it off and make it interesting.
But part way down the initial corridor, as we’re starting to suspect something is weird and getting our first hints of the premise, the camera leaves first-person mode and rotates around to show our protagonist. This was my favorite bit in the movie, because not only did it establish how this movie was going to deviate from just a play-through of the game, but it also signaled the start of the weirdness. Above the protagonist, we see the back of the already-familiar Exit 8 sign, and unknown to him, it reads, “Turn back Turn back Turn back”.
I’d been wondering whether the movie would play better or worse for people who’ve never been inside a Tokyo train station. Would it be like, “what a strange and unusual concept to base a movie and/or game around!” Instead of, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what it’s like. Realizing you’re in purgatory, and you will be trapped in here for eternity.”
But the bigger question is probably how well it’ll play for people who’ve never played the game. The game is far, far creepier, with a variety of anomalies that range from hard-to-spot discrepancies, to eerie did that just move? moments, to more dramatic that-shouldn’t-be-there changes that affect the entire space. I was hoping that the movie would take them further, but I didn’t catch any anomalies in the movie that weren’t already in the game. (To its credit, it did include what I think are some of the best ones).
But then again: I’m not sure how a movie could have taken them further? The rules of the game are that the moment you see something weird, you nope out. It’s basically a series of jump scares, or more accurately, jump creeps. Again, there don’t seem to be any real stakes, since there’s never real danger beyond wasting your time and having to start over.
The movie does suggest some real repercussions, though, in a way that I won’t spoil. And it’s in the deviations from the game that the movie is strongest. Most interesting is the suggestion of what happens when you fail. But the bigger deviation is giving enough of an introduction to the main character that it’s more explicit what the experience represents.
Which I say is a good thing, since the game doesn’t mean much of anything. At least, it doesn’t invite interpretation. It’s an interactive nightmare, made to appeal to The Youth by giving them the Liminal Spaces they crave. It doesn’t ask any questions larger than “you know what would be really creepy?”
The movie gives its main character a specific nightmare and leaves it ambiguous as to whether the events of the game are the result of a mental breakdown or extended panic attack. For this specific character, it represents his going from being lost and directionless to choosing a purpose and being determined to fulfill it.
But I think it also pretty cleverly adds a more universal theme, that ties even more directly into the game. The idea of passing through life in a dull routine treating everything and everyone as incidental and unremarkable, as typified by a dehumanizing commute on a Tokyo train during rush hour, instead of being present and making an effort to be aware of everything and everyone around you.
Ultimately, I think the game and movie are similar in that they’re really effective in the moment, but feel emptier and simpler the longer you spend away from them. It’s a pretty fascinating example of how to make a movie adaptation of a video game, being faithful to what people love about the game while still recognizing the aspects that inherently don’t work well when they’re not interactive.
It’s admirable that it aspired to do more with its narrative than make a framework for a bunch of creepy stuff. But I also wish they’d spent less time with its anime-style surreal introspection, and more time just showing us a parade of creepy stuff. Really leaning into the things that can work even better in a movie where you have complete control over the timing and the framing.
2026-04-15 01:30:00
I’ve never been a particularly big fan of R&B, and actively disliked the only Fast & Furious movie I ever saw1, so I have to say I haven’t been familiar with the work of Tyrese Gibson.
But while searching for a different song on Apple Music, I stumbled onto “Get Up On It” from his album 2000 Watts, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not going to be an all-time favorite or turn me into a super-fan, but it’s pretty catchy. I like the early-2000s strings + drum machine combo, and how the whole thing feels like what you’d hear over the end credits of the kind of movie that makes you say, “Huh, that wasn’t that bad.”
The problem is that it’s so frustratingly vague. Sure, yes, I’m all on board with the idea of Getting Up On It, but how?
Thankfully, we’d already gotten instructions from The Chemical Brothers a few years earlier, with a track that is one of my all-time favorites: “Get Up On It Like This“. And it’s a little early, but thanks anyway.