This is part of the Film Preservation Blogathon. A somewhat different version of this piece originally appeared on my old web site.
The archetypal serial killer is a man named Ed Gein, a handyman from Plainfield, Wisconsin, who was a grave robber, necrophile, and cannibal. He was also a transvestite of sorts, who, unlike his most famous screen descendant, didn’t dress in mother’s clothes, he dressed in mother herself. There have been several books and an avalanche of movies based on the Gein case, and even more movies and books that have incorporated elements of Gein’s crimes. As an archetype, Gein has eclipsed Jack the Ripper during the last part of the 20th century as the prototype for the mad killer. Part of this is because of Psycho.
The book on which Psycho was based was written before the details of the Gein case came to light. Its author, Robert Bloch, had a knack for getting inside the minds of criminals and psychopaths and during the 1950s, he wrote a series of pulp crime novels that are among the best of their types. The roots of Norman Bates and his terrible mother can be seen in novels like The Scarf (with its dynamite first paragraph: “Fetish? You name it. All I know is, I’ve had to have it with me.”), The Dead Beat, and The Firebug. Bloch built his story around the broadest details of the Gein case, knowing nothing of its particular details. The idea of a monster lurking in a mundane setting appealed to him, and it is this aspect that probably most appealed to Hitchcock. It is entirely likely that, like Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs, Bloch would have been rescued from the obscurity of the pulp fiction ghetto by later literary academics who are more broadly receptive to popular fiction. The process was already in process by the time Bloch wrote Psycho. The Scarf had already been filmed, as had a number of his short stories (adapted for, among other productions, Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the Lights Out radio show). This, of course, is no guarantee of a literary reputation, but it’s evidence that Bloch was already on the cultural radar screen. Psycho changed all of that. It was a shortcut to the cultural mass mind. Bloch would forever after be known as “the author of Psycho.” Ironically, when the rights to Psycho were purchased by Alfred Hitchcock, Bloch was very much of two minds about the project. On the one hand, it was a LOT of money compared to the rates Bloch was earning in the pulp market, but on the other hand, it meant that he would have to continue to live with Psycho, and this was difficult for Bloch. By the time the movie was made, the details of the Gein case had been made public, and Bloch was greatly disturbed that he had been able to so closely approximate the specific psychopathology of the man who was the most notorious monster of the day. It seemed more than coincidental, and Bloch wondered what it was in him that enabled him to imagine such a ghastly worldview.
Of course, that insight is part of the brilliance of Psycho, a brilliance that makes the book worthwhile in itself beyond its role as the progenitor of Hitchcock’s movie. There are plenty of critics who will tell you that Psycho is one of those rare movies that improves upon its source material, but I’m not one of them. There is a raw power to Bloch’s novel that the movie approximates, but does not match. But then again, the movie has pleasures all its own. Although the book and the movie are significantly different, Hitchcock never shied away from giving Bloch’s novel the share of credit it deserves. But Hitchcock elaborated on the novel in ways that were unique to his own worldview.
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