Video Scripts: The First Power, Psycho (1960), Hot Fuzz
Cody shares a few more of the videos he has written for JoBlo YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; two for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and the other for JoBlo Originals.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I looked back at a movie that really disturbed me and captured my imagination when I first saw it as a child, writer/director Robert Resnikoff’s 1990 film The First Power.
The First Power script:
INTRO: You might have heard this story before. A serial killer is caught by the authorities, but becomes even more powerful after their execution. Their evil spirit has been unleashed to wreak more havoc and rack up a higher body count. That could be the description of several movies. Shocker, House III: The Horror Show, Fallen. But we’re not talking about those today. The supernatural serial killer movie we’re shining the spotlight on in this video is writer/director Robert Resnikoff’s 1990 film The First Power. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Resnikoff didn’t have many credits to his name when he went into production on The First Power. This was his feature directorial debut; previously he had only directed one short film called The Jogger. He had a couple more writing credits: a Disney retrospective called Once Upon a Mouse and the Pat Morita and Jay Leno buddy cop movie Collision Course. Which he also co-produced. And he had played a ghost in the 1977 sex comedy Cherry Hill High. This doesn’t sound like the résumé of someone you’d expect to deliver an under-appreciated but very cool horror movie, but what’s exactly what Resnikoff did with this film.
Pitched as The French Connection meets The Exorcist, The First Power centers on Los Angeles cop Russell Logan. He has already busted two serial killers before we meet him, and now he has his sights set on a third. The Pentagram Killer. A nickname the murderer earned by carving pentagrams into the bodies of his fifteen victims. He’s such a fan of Satan, the locations of his crime scenes form a pentagram-shaped pattern on a map of L.A. An anonymous phone call tells Logan where the killer is going to strike next. But the caller only gives him this information after he promises that the Pentagram Killer will not be killed by the police. The caller also wants to make sure he won’t receive the death penalty when he’s apprehended. But as soon as Logan catches up to the killer, he throws his promise out the window. He fires multiple shots at the madman and definitely would have killed him if the bullets hit their mark. He tackles the guy through a window, beats him to a pulp. And he gets a knife to his stomach for his troubles.
The Pentagram Killer, whose real name is Patrick Channing, survives his initial encounter with Logan. Then he’s sentenced to die in the gas chamber. To be fair, the death penalty ruling wasn’t Logan’s to make, but at least he could show some concern about it. And he should be concerned, instead of celebrating like he does. As soon as Channing is executed, the murders start again. This time the killer is targeting people close to Logan, taunting him. Knowing what’s going on, the person who called Logan has to reveal their identity so they can help him bring an end to this situation. The caller is a psychic named Tess Seaton, who knew Channing would return if he was killed. Now the Satanic murderer is possessing people so he can continue killing. He passes from body to body on a mission to torment both Logan and Tess, because she opened herself up to him when she established the psychic connection. Logan is an atheist and a skeptic, so this is a difficult situation for him to wrap his mind around. But Channing quickly makes it very clear that he is back. To figure out how to stop him, Logan and Tess have to work together to learn more about the man. They dig into his twisted back story. While they’re investigating and fighting for their lives, they also happen to fall for each other. By the end we’ll know that getting the help of a certain nun, Sister Marguerite, may be their only chance to kill Channing. Again. And keep him dead this time.
The First Power was produced by David Madden, who had just produced his first film the year before. That was the action movie Renegades, starring Lou Diamond Phillips and Kiefer Sutherland. Madden had been so impressed by Phillips while they were working on Renegades, he decided to cast him in this movie as well. A fan of both cop movies and horror movies, Phillips signed on. Fresh from playing the heroine in Sleepaway Camp III, Tracy Griffith, who happens to be the half-sister of Melanie Griffith, was cast as Tess Seaton. Elizabeth Arlen was cast as Sister Marguerite. Mykelti Williamson, who would go on to play Tom Hanks’ friend in Forrest Gump and Nicolas Cage’s friend in Con Air, got the friend role in this one as well. Here he plays Logan’s ill-fated pal Detective Oliver Franklin. Familiar faces like Grand L. Bush, Bill Moseley, Re-Animator’s David Gale, Brian Libby from Silent Rage, and Friday the 13th Part III’s David Katims have small roles in the film. Some of them appear so quickly, you might not have the chance to recognize them.
Singer Nick Cave was considered for the role of Patrick Channing and even auditioned for it, but Resnikoff ended up casting Jeff Kober, who was on the TV show China Beach at the time. This turned out to be the perfect choice, because Kober is creepy as hell as the Pentagram Killer. It’s no surprise that he has gone on to play killers several more times during his career. He has a very unnerving screen presence. With a smile and a simple line, usually one where he calls Logan “buddy boy”, he can send chills running down your spine.
BACKGROUND: A lot of genre movies have drawn inspiration from the crimes committed by real-life murderers. Just from Ed Gein we’ve gotten the likes of Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and more. The First Power was also inspired by a convicted murderer, but not by their actions. It was something he said. While sitting on Death Row, waiting for his 1977 execution by firing squad, Gary Gilmore was quoted as saying, “I don’t care if you kill me. I’ll just come back as somebody else.”
He believed he was going to be reincarnated. Resnikoff was inspired to write The First Power because he was fascinated by the idea of a killer being reincarnated and then continuing their killing spree. Although Channing hasn’t exactly been reincarnated. The film tells us that there are three powers God or Satan can gift someone with. The first power is resurrection. Immortality. The second is the gift Tess has, psychic powers. And the third power is the ability to possess other bodies.
Since there are three powers in play, The First Power was not Resnikoff’s first choice for the title. During production, the title was Transit. Because Channing’s spirit is in transit from one body to another. The film was even promoted in the pages of Fangoria magazine as Transit. You can see why the title was changed along the way; Transit isn’t exactly a grabber. The First Power isn’t the most evocative title itself, but at least it’s a step up, and it makes sense because it’s in multiple lines of dialogue.
The First Power was made on a budget of just under ten million. When its release date was drawing near, it was looking like it was going to be a hit. The producers and distributor Orion Pictures were starting to think franchise. A test screening went so well, some more money was reportedly pumped into the production to enhance the climactic action. If the test audience liked it as it was, the paying audience would be even more impressed by the extra thrills. Online trivia claims that the ending, which takes place in the sewer system, was a reshoot. That the climax originally took place in a warehouse. That wouldn’t make much sense, though. There are multiple warehouse locations in the movie, but lines of dialogue and character details given throughout the movie make the sewer the logical setting for the ending. Everything points in the direction of the sewer. That has been Channing’s hangout since he was a kid, and it’s where he needs to be defeated. Fangoria was on set for the filming of the sewer action, and there was no mention of this being a reshoot.
The one thing that does appear to be a reshoot is the final scene, which takes place in a hospital. What makes it stand out is Tess’s hair, which is different in this one moment than it was in the rest of the movie.
Released on April 6th, 1990, The First Power was not well received by critics… but it did turn a slight profit at the box office. It made just over twenty-two million in the United States alone. Not quite enough to get a sequel off the ground, especially with Orion facing financial issues, but not bad. The film earned a fair share of fans, and was even said to be the favorite movie of rapper Eazy E. His final album, released in January of 1996 – ten months after he passed away – kicks off with a track called “First Power”, in which he quotes lines that were spoken by Patrick Channing. Unfortunately, The First Power seems to have slipped into obscurity as the decades have gone by. It’s rare to come across a reference to it. That’s why we’re revisiting it with this video, as it deserves to be remembered as one of the best horror movies of the early ‘90s.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: At that time, Lou Diamond Phillips had recently established himself as one of the coolest actors in the business, and The First Power also ranks highly among his best movies. Russell Logan doesn’t seem like it was the most demanding role, but he has enough depth to get by and Phillips plays the role well. He’s a hero we can easily side with. Tracy Griffith’s acting career never broke out in a major way, but she made Tess a likeable character that the viewer and Logan come to care about. Elizabeth Arlen also makes a strong impression during the few scenes she has as Sister Marguerite.
Resnikoff’s goal was to make a gritty film that starts out with the street feel of your average cop movie. Then it suddenly shifts into supernatural territory without the audience realizing what’s happening. Producer David Madden said, “In recent years, the horror genre has either gone the total blood and guts route or a deliberate comedy route. (This movie) is going back to a time when exploring primal human fears was the most important statement a horror film could make.”
They achieved their goal, because the movie is effectively unsettling. Given that Logan is tracking a Satan-worshipping serial killer, it has a wonderfully dark and disturbing atmosphere from the beginning. But once Channing becomes supernatural, the creepiness factor increases substantially. As he possesses people, it’s up to him whether or not he appears to Logan and Tess as himself or as the body he’s in. He usually chooses to appear as himself, just to freak them out. Which is good for the audience, since we get to see more of Jeff Kober’s performance than we would have otherwise.
The First Power is also packed with action. Channing is relentless in his pursuit of Logan and Tess, they don’t get many quiet moments once his spirit has been unleashed. The most impressive thing about the film may be the stunt work. The stunt team pulled off some incredible things for this movie – and since it was released in 1990, you know all the stunts were real. There’s a moment where Channing jumps off the top of a building that’s over a hundred feet tall, lands on his feet, and runs away. And a stunt person really did that. One member of the stunt crew was Tom Morga, and in the scene where Channing is in the gas chamber you can clearly see him doubling for Kober. This is notable because Morga had previously played Jason Voorhees and Roy Burns in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Leatherface in the bridge scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and the bandaged Michael Myers in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. By having Morga play Channing for that brief moment, the character is brought into the world of icons.
Phillips had gotten banged up and broken a rib doing stunts on Renegades, so he told Fangoria he wasn’t too enthusiastic about doing more of that. But he did many of his own stunts on The First Power anyway. And paid the price for it. By the time Fangoria got to the set, he was once again banged up and this time had torn a hamstring. He was observed limping around the filming location.
BEST SCENE(S): One of the most spectacular stunts in The First Power comes at the end of a sequence in which Channing has taken over the body of a homeless woman played by Nada Despotovich. This is one of the rare occasions where Channing retains the appearance of the person he’s possessing. Despotovich gets to play the character for an extended sequence, and it looks like she had a blast doing this. The bag lady mixes in some acrobatic moves while beating the hell out of Logan in his own apartment. When he and Tess try to escape from her, she pops up in the back seat of his car and continues messing with them. This highly entertaining stretch of the film builds up to a car crash that sends Logan’s vehicle flying through the air. On a bridge, where the car easily could have gone over the side if the stunt crew had made a slight miscalculation. But they pulled it off, and it looks great. As a bonus, we also have more Despotovich to look forward to even after the crash.
Another standout attack sequence is set in the hallway of a rundown hotel. A mask-wearing, axe-wielding Channing confronts Logan and Tess in this hallway – but the scene gets even better when he ditches the axe. He tears down a ceiling fan, starts it up, and follows them down the hall with the fan blade spinning in front of him. Now, this makes no logical sense. Once the fan has been torn off the ceiling, it’s no longer connected to a power source. It shouldn’t be able to run anymore. It definitely shouldn’t be able to deflect the bullets Logan fires at Channing while he’s holding it. But it does. And that’s fine, because it’s an awesome idea and a cool visual.
PARTING SHOT: Whether it’s an action scene or a creepy moment that gets under your skin, there are a lot of things about The First Power that are likely to stick in your mind once you watch it. It’s the kind of movie that lingers with you. It works so well, it’s shocking that Robert Resnikoff has never made another movie. This remains his sole feature directing credit. If you look at his IMDb page, it’s like he just vanished from the entertainment industry after 1990. That’s a shame, because he showed a lot of promise here. He delivered a movie that is both scary and has thrilling action in it. It leaves you wishing there were more Robert Resnikoff horror and action movies to watch.
One person who still has an appreciation for the film all these years later is Lou Diamond Phillips. In 2018, he shared a picture of himself and Jeff Kober on Twitter, celebrating a First Power reunion. In 2021, during an interview with MovieWeb, Phillips said he would still like to make a follow-up to The First Power. That would be his top choice if he was given the chance to make a legacy sequel to one of his older films. He said, “The one I think is really an interesting possibility would be The First Power. I would love to revisit that character thirty years later. And really kind of ramp up the horror. It has a cult following. It was very scary. But I don’t think I’ve made my best horror film yet. I think Jordan Peele and Blumhouse, they have totally revitalized the genre. That is something I think would be interesting.”
In that quote, it sort of sounds like he wants Jordan Peele and/or Blumhouse Productions to back a revival of The First Power. If they wanted to team up with him to pit Russell Logan against the forces of evil again, we’d be all for it. Peele has referenced The First Power before. Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, he said he spend his youth at home watching movies on VHS. His quote was, “While other teenagers were getting laid, I was just trying to decide between DEAD AGAIN and The First Power for the third time.”
So Peele, Blumhouse, let’s do this. Call up Lou Diamond Phillips and let’s get The Second Power into production.
For the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie video series, I whittled forty pages of research notes down into a script about the making of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho:
Psycho script:
Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock had almost fifty films to his name when he decided to take on an adaptation of a Robert Bloch novel that was inspired by a grisly true crime story. The studio didn’t want him to make the movie. He was warned against it, told the subject matter was in poor taste. So he financed it with his own money. The result: the most popular and financially successful film of his already impressive career. The film was Psycho, and we’re going to find out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
The story of Psycho begins with the same real world crimes that would also inspire the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deranged, and The Silence of the Lambs, among others. In Wisconsin farmland there lived a man named Ed Gein, whose world fell apart when his overbearing mother passed away. Left alone in the home they shared, Gein boarded up the rooms his mother used the most, leaving them in pristine condition. The remaining rooms would soon be filled with the grotesque evidence of his new hobby; grave robbing. He would keep an eye on the local obituaries so he could dig up the fresh graves of older women who resembled his mother. He would take their unearthed bodies home with him and turn them into twisted art projects. Like the family in Texas Chainsaw, he would make furniture out of their bones and skin. And like Leatherface, he would wear their flesh over his own. His graveyard activities were never noticed. Gein wasn’t caught until he started murdering women as well.
Author Robert Bloch lived just forty miles away from Gein, and he was fascinated by the newspaper reports of his neighbor’s crimes. There wasn’t a lot of information available at that time, as the details of what had been found in the Gein house were too disgusting to print. Nonetheless, Bloch was inspired to write a story to figure out how something so awful could happen. Freudian concepts were popular at the time, so he imagined the perpetrator would be a man who had a twisted relationship with his mother. Just like Gein had with his mother. Unaware that Gein said he carried out his crimes while in a daze, Bloch figured that it would help deflect suspicion if a person committed their crimes while in an altered state of mind. Like being under the control of a different personality. He came up with a character named Norman Bates, who was raised by an overbearing mother – and when he snapped and killed her, he couldn’t accept that she was gone. He dug up her body, kept her in her old bedroom, and carried on as if she were still alive. He would talk to himself like he was having conversations with his mother. And sometimes he would fully slip into her personality and dress in her clothes. This isn’t so far from the reality of Ed Gein. When Bloch learned more about Gein and realized how easily he had managed to create a fictional character who was close to the truth, he had trouble looking at himself in the mirror.
Bloch made Norman Bates the proprietor of a motel, because it would allow him easy access to victims. The unlucky person who checks into Bates Motel at the beginning of the story is named Mary Crane because Gein’s first victim was named Mary Hogan. Bloch built up his Mary with a story in which she has stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer so she can start a life with her boyfriend, a man named Sam Loomis. Sam owns a hardware store not far from Bates Motel. Gein’s second victim, or at least the second of the only two people he confessed to murdering, was the owner of a hardware store. The idea was to present Mary as the heroine of the story, you expect to follow her throughout because she has issues that need to be resolved. Then she steps into a shower at Bates Motel and is shockingly removed from the story early on, murdered by Norman. In the guise of his mother.
The first draft of the Psycho novel was written in just six weeks. The finished product was published in the summer of 1959, less than two years after the arrest of Ed Gein. The film rights were quickly snatched up in a blind bid situation for the price of nine thousand dollars. Bloch didn’t find out until later that the person who had purchased the rights to his novel was Alfred Hitchcock… and he really came to regret the fact that his deal didn’t include any percentage of the film’s profits.
Hitchcock was coming off one of his bigger films, North by Northwest, and was looking to do something different when Psycho caught his attention. He had taken note of how successful low budget horror movies tended to be, and wondered if one from a major director would do even better. He saw Bloch’s story as the chance to make something along those lines – and the fact that it would give him the opportunity to shock the audience by killing off the character who was supposedly the heroine really appealed to his sense of humor. Even though he was one of the most well known and highly respected directors of his time, this project also gave him the chance to prove himself all over again. A few years earlier, a French filmmaker named Henri-Georges Clouzot had beaten him to the film rights to a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called She Who Was No More, which was turned into a movie called Les Diaboliques. That film had been a huge success at the box office and with critics, and led to Clouzot being hailed as “the French Hitchcock”. Hitchcock got the rights to a different Boileau / Narcejac novel, From Among the Dead, which he turned into Vertigo. And while Vertigo is now often referred to as one of the best movies ever made, at the time of its release it was written off as a failure. With Psycho, Hitchcock could make up for missing out on Les Diaboliques – and thrill the audience even more than Clouzot had.
First, Hitchcock had to overcome the fact that the studio he was set up at, Paramount, had zero interest in making a movie based on Bloch’s novel. They didn’t like anything about this project. They refused to finance it, and wouldn’t even let Hitchcock film it on the studio lot. Luckily, Hitchcock had back-up options, since he had a successful anthology series called Alfred Hitchcock Presents airing on television. He would mortgage his house and fund Psycho himself. Then he would use the crew from the TV series to make the movie as quickly and cheaply as possible, almost as if it were just a long episode of the show. It would be shot in black and white to save money. He even deferred his usual director’s fee of two hundred and fifty thousand. In exchange, he wanted sixty percent ownership of the film. All Paramount would have to do is distribute the finished product, which he would shoot on the Universal lot. Paramount agreed to the deal. Years later, Universal ended up owning the film completely.
The Paramount execs weren’t the only ones telling Hitchcock he shouldn’t make Psycho. Joan Harrison, the head of his production company Shamley, told Hitchcock he was going too far with this one and turned down the offer of profit points. Points Bloch would have gladly taken. Hitchcock’s producing partner Herbert Coleman helped him assemble the project, but all along was hoping it would fall apart. When it became obvious that Psycho would make it into production, he stepped away from it.
Hitchcock was undeterred. He kept Psycho moving forward at a quick pace. He hired Alfred Hitchcock Presents writer James P. Cavanagh to handle the adaptation. When Cavanagh’s script wasn’t sufficient, he tossed it out and took the recommendation of hiring Joseph Stefano. Stefano wasn’t a fan of Bloch’s novel and thought this was a disappointing choice for Hitchcock – and he let the director know this in the first meeting they had. He listed the problems he had with the source material, including how unappealing Norman Bates had been on the page. But when Hitchcock mentioned that he envisioned Norman being played by Anthony Perkins, an actor Stefano had previously written an unmade project for, the writer started to see some potential in this story. Stefano turned in a draft that went over better than Cavanagh’s had, and he and Hitchcock worked together to perfect the script. In a couple months, they had it in such good condition that Hitchcock was ready to sit down with Stefano and break down the script shot by shot. Stefano said Hitchcock seemed sad when this process was over, as he enjoyed visualizing the scenes that were on paper more than he enjoyed having to go to set and actually put it all on film.
Hitchcock gathered a strong cast to bring the characters to life on screen. Although he wanted to get away from big name stars with this film, he looked for a known actress to play Mary Crane, who had to be renamed Marion when it was discovered that there were a couple Mary Cranes living in Phoenix, Arizona. The same place the fictional character is from. The more familiar the audience was with the actress, the more surprised they would be to see her get killed off. After going through a list of candidates, which included Piper Laurie, Hope Lange, and North by Northwest star Eva Marie Saint, Hitchcock ended up choosing Janet Leigh, the wife of sex symbol Tony Curtis and mother of toddler Jamie Lee Curtis. Leigh had no prior association with the horror genre, but was about to play a major role in it.
When Marion is murdered with an hour of film left to go, her boyfriend Sam and her sister Lila become the new protagonists. These are characters Hitchcock had very little interest in, and he removed Stefano’s attempts at giving them more depth. The likes of Cliff Robertson, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Loggia were considered to play Sam, but Hitchcock ended up hiring John Gavin at the suggestion of Universal. He wasn’t enthusiastic about this hire, and wasn’t impressed with Gavin when they got on set: he even gave the actor, who actually comes off just fine in the film, the nickname The Stiff. As Lila, Hitchcock cast Vera Miles – an actress he had a complicated history with. At one time, she had been his golden girl, and after they worked together on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents he had signed her to a five year personal contract. But she wasn’t as appreciative of the flowers and telegrams he would send as he thought she should be, and she made decisions he didn’t agree with. Like getting married when they were in the middle of making The Wrong Man. Or getting pregnant and dropping out of Vertigo. Still, she had a contract with Hitchcock, so he cast her in Psycho. In a role he didn’t really care about.
Hitchcock was more interested in Milton Arbogast, the private investigator who is hired by Marion’s employer to find her. And the forty thousand dollars she ran off with. Stefano recommended that he hire Martin Balsam to play the character, and he did.
Of course, he also cast the actor that he and Stefano had both wanted for the role of Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins. Perkins was the highest paid actor on Psycho, and Hitchcock was amused by the coincidence that the actor was paid the same amount Marion steals at the beginning of the film. Forty thousand dollars. A far cry from the four hundred and fifty thousand – plus profit points – that Cary Grant had just gotten to star in North by Northwest. But in addition to earning forty grand to do this movie, Perkins also got to play the biggest role of his career. A role he had trouble shaking for a long time, as viewers only saw him as Norman Bates from this point on. He would eventually embrace his association with the character so tightly, he agreed to star in three more Psycho movies. He even directed one of those himself, while Stefano returned to write one.
Norman’s mother has been dead for years by the time the film begins, but she’s still a presence on the screen. To obscure the fact that her son is attempting to keep her alive by speaking in her voice and dressing in her clothes, Hitchcock hired at least three people to play the character in different moments, and hired at least three more to record her dialogue. A dummy of mother’s corpse was created, with the look of her rotten face being based on specifications provided to makeup artists Jack Barron and Robert Dawn by an instructor of mortuary sciences. Hitchcock wanted to be sure she’d look exactly like an unearthed corpse that has been sitting around for ten years should look. He then had fun startling Janet Leigh by setting up the mother corpse inside her dressing room.
Over twenty thousand dollars went into the construction of the Bates Motel and the Bates home, which towers on a hill behind it. Locations that are basically characters in themselves, the look of them is so memorable. The house, inspired by the Edward Hopper painting House by the Railroad, looks quite creepy, especially with the dark clouds that were added in the background of some shots. Put the corpse of Mother in an upstairs window and it really becomes the stuff of nightmares. Certain interiors of the house were constructed on a stage that was known for being used for the filming of 1925’s Phantom of the Opera.
With a budget of eight hundred thousand dollars, Psycho began filming in November of 1959. Production was supposed to last for thirty-six days, but ended up going nine days over-schedule due to some weather issues… despite the need to get this wrapped up because there was a threat that the actors guild might go on strike soon. For time and budgetary reasons, Hitchcock had to trim some complicated camera moves he had in mind. The heart-breaker of them all was the opening shot, which he had wanted to be a four mile long helicopter shot approaching the window to the Phoenix hotel room Marion and Sam are meeting in. He wanted this to rival the three minute opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. But the shot he envisioned just wasn’t possible to accomplish. He had to settle for something less, and if you’ve ever wondered why he included information on the date and time in this opening, it’s because there were Christmas decorations visible in the footage his crew brought back from the streets of Phoenix. To explain why the holidays are never mentioned in the film, he added text on screen saying it’s December 11th. Christmas is still a couple weeks away.
The opening of Psycho may not be as dazzling as Hitchcock intended, but he still managed to turn in a masterwork on this low budget. He and Stefano had a lot of fun keeping Marion around for as long as possible, getting the audience involved in her story. She’s only alive for two chapters in Bloch’s novel. In the film, we follow her for forty-nine minutes. Early scenes set up her situation with Sam; she lives in Phoenix, he lives in a small California town called Fairvale, so their relationship is confined to the seedy hotel rooms they meet in. Marion wants to get married, but Sam wants to work out his financial issues first. When a sleazy oilman brings forty thousand dollars cash into the real estate office she works at, in a scene that also features appearances by Hitchcock and his daughter Pat, it seems like the solution to Marion’s problems. She steals the forty thousand and hits the road, heading to Fairvale. The audience is invested in seeing how this is going to work out for her. We’re rooting for her to get away with this crime, even though she proves to be a terrible criminal. She’s so bad at this, she trades cars at a used car lot despite knowing that a police officer is watching the entire transaction. The cop is right beside her new car when she pulls out of the lot. She has accomplished nothing by doing this vehicle swap.
Running into a heavy rain, Marion has to stop for the night at a small motel that doesn’t see much business now that the highway route changed. The Bates Motel. She finds out from proprietor Norman Bates that she’s very close to Fairvale, but decides to spend the night there anyway. And accepts Norman’s offer of having dinner with him in the parlor behind his office. An incredible, eight minute dialogue scene plays out in that parlor, during which we get information on Norman’s life: the friendly, endearing young man – who does taxidermy as a hobby – is stuck running this dead-end motel while caring for a hateful, mentally ill, elderly mother. Norman bristles at Marion’s suggestion that he have his mother committed. But the things he says about people being caught in personal traps and everyone going a little mad sometimes makes her decide to reverse her bad choices. Returning to her room, she does some math on a piece of paper to figure out how much of the forty thousand is left; seeing how much she has to make up for. She is going to return the money. She tears up that piece of paper and flushes it down the toilet, a sight that would have been jolting for viewers at the time because a toilet had never been seen in a movie before. Seeing a toilet flush on screen was something new. They didn’t know they were about to see something even more jolting.
The shower scene. When Marion gets into the shower, there’s joy in her expression. She’s washing off the dirt of crime, returning to her normal life. Then, in one of the most famous moments in cinema history, Norman’s mother rips the shower curtain aside and stabs Marion to death. The character we’ve been following the entire time is gone. Knowing the importance of this scene, Hitchcock had graphic designer Saul Bass, who also designed the film’s title sequence, create the storyboards for it. Bass would later claim that he directed the shower scene as well, a claim that was denied by assistant director Hilton A. Green. Green says Hitchcock shot every bit of the shower scene, which took over a week to complete. Hitchcock wasn’t one to do an excessive number of takes, but it took around twenty-five tries to get a satisfactory take of Marion’s death stare at the end of the shower sequence.
Even then, this is a shot that had to be compromised. The plan was for the camera to pull back from Marion’s dead, staring eye and go over to the hotel room window to look up at the Bates house. This would be multiple shots pieced together, but in the film it would look like one long camera move. But Hitchcock’s wife noticed something he and his crew had missed: Janet Leigh blinked before the camera turned away from her. So an extra shot of the showerhead had to be added in before the camera moves over to the window.
As stunned as we are to lose Marion, our sympathy quickly shifts to Norman, who is appalled to see what his mother has done. But he has to keep mother out of trouble, so he cleans up the crime scene… and since we’ve come to like Norman and don’t want him to get sent off to prison, now we’re rooting for him to get away with this crime. And groaning when we see that he unknowingly sends the forty thousand dollars into the swamp with Marion’s car. And her corpse.
For the remaining hour, it’s up to Sam, Lila, and Arbogast to figure out where Marion has gone and what’s happening at that motel where she was last seen. Along the way, we get another terrific dialogue sequence that involves Norman interacting with Arbogast – and proving to be a lousy criminal, just like Marion was. His answers to Arbogast’s questions just bring up more questions, and the private investigator decides he needs to talk to Mrs. Bates. In another sequence that was storyboarded by Bass, Arbogast is murdered in the Bates house, on the staircase that was constructed where the chandelier fell in Phantom of the Opera. This sequence wasn’t initially shot by Hitchcock; Green had to take over that day because the director caught a cold. However, Hitchcock was back at the helm for some reshoots.
With Arbogast out of contact, Sam and Lila go to the Bates place themselves, ultimately discovering Mrs. Bates’ rotten corpse – and Norman dressed in her clothes, wielding a knife. A mind-blowing twist that Hitchcock was so eager to keep a secret, he had an assistant buy up copies of Bloch’s novel so there would be less readers going into the movie with the ending already in mind. He also had theatre owners refuse admission to movie-goers who showed up after the film had already started. Apparently people were really relaxed about going in and out of movies at various points in the running time back then. Hitchcock’s push to keep latecomers out of Psycho was the event that made people start showing up for movies at the listed start time.
According to Pat Hitchcock, there was a moment when her father considered not going through with the theatrical release of Psycho at all. She said he thought of just cutting the film down into an episode or two of Alfred Hitchcock Presents after an underwhelming screening of the rough cut. A screening Stefano walked out of feeling sick because the film seemed overlong and had no tension. Hitchcock knew there was still hope for it, though. While he would end up whittling a couple minutes out of the movie, the most important change that came after the rough cut screening was the addition of the score composed by Bernard Herrmann. One of the greatest scores of all time. Herrmann went against Hitchcock’s wishes and provided more music than the director asked for. Hitchcock didn’t want any music over the shower scene, he just wanted the sounds of water, stabbing, and screaming. But when he heard the music Herrmann came up with for that moment, the shrieking strings that are familiar even to those who haven’t seen Psycho, he admitted that he had been wrong. Hitchcock would even go on to credit Herrmann with being responsible for thirty-three percent of the film’s effectiveness. He was so appreciative, he doubled the composer’s salary.
Paramount didn’t like Psycho even with Herrmann’s music on it and didn’t expect much from it, so they went along with Hitchcock’s release strategy. As plotted by the director, the promotional campaign was entirely based on keeping the film’s secrets. Publicity stills gave nothing away. The previews didn’t contain any revealing footage from the film; the full trailer simply follows Hitchcock as he gives a tour of the Bates Motel and house locations. When he pulls aside a shower curtain to find a screaming woman inside, it’s Vera Miles, not Janet Leigh. There were no advance screenings for critics, and when the film was released there was the rule in place that no one would be admitted after the movie began. As it turned out, Hitchcock putting so much emphasis on the film being shocking and twist-filled really captured the public’s imagination. Everyone involved was stunned by how successful Psycho was. It was an instant hit.
Fans today are familiar with the image of Mrs. Bates’ skull appearing over Norman’s face in the last shot of him, but not every viewer who saw the film during its original theatrical run saw that. Hitchcock was so uncertain about whether or not he should include the skull image, some prints that were sent out to theatres included it, and some didn’t.
Psycho didn’t go over well with everyone. There were negative reviews, especially from critics who were upset they had to see the movie with a regular audience. Some viewers were disgusted by the subject material and let the world know how strongly they objected to it. But that didn’t stop the money from coming in. During its first year of release, the film made fifteen million dollars at the box office, which was a big deal at the time – and it achieved that number by breaking records in several territories around the globe. Critical reassessment quickly followed, and the film was soon viewed in such a positive light that it even earned Oscar nominations. Janet Leigh was up for Best Supporting Actress; art directors Joseph Hurley and Robert Clatworthy were nominated, along with set decorator George Milo; John L. Russell was nominated for his cinematography; and Hitchcock was up for Best Director. The work of Anthony Perkins, Joseph Stefano, and Bernard Herrmann was overlooked. But Psycho didn’t end up taking home the gold statues anyway. Best Supporting Actress went to Elmer Gantry’s Shirley Jones – who had been on the list of actresses considered for Marion Crane. Freddie Francis won Best Cinematography for his work on the film Sons and Lovers. And that year’s Best Picture winner, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, also won in the art direction and director categories. But the fact that a movie like Psycho was nominated at all was already a huge accomplishment. Hitchcock never did win a Best Director Oscar, despite being nominated five times, and even though his film Rebecca won Best Picture.
Hitchcock saw Psycho as a piece of light entertainment, something that would make the audience scream and laugh as if they were on an amusement park ride. He was horrified whenever anyone seemed to take it seriously, like the ones who were appalled by the concept. In a way, you can see why some viewers were so shaken. This sort of realistic horror isn’t something that was seen very often in those days. The things in this film could really happen. In fact, they sort of did. But as scary as it is, it was also always meant to be fun. And a lot of people have had fun watching it. Psycho was the biggest hit of Hitchcock’s career and, due to his profit points, earned the director several million dollars.
It’s no surprise that there were sequels, but they took decades to show up. Hitchcock had passed away by the time Perkins returned for Psycho II, Psycho III, and Psycho IV: The Beginning. Perkins passed away in 1992, just two years after the release of the fourth film. There were a couple attempts to bring the property to television without him as well. The 2013 show Bates Motel started out as a prequel, but in its fifth and final season also overlapped with the events of the original film. That show’s reworking of the story was the second time it had been remade. In 1998, director Gus Van Sant decided to use the clout he earned with Good Will Hunting to get an experimental remake of Psycho into production. He copied Hitchcock’s film shot-by-shot, using the same script, only altering the occasional line and dropping in his own stylistic flourishes here and there. The result of this experiment: a film that isn’t nearly as good as Hitchcock’s. None of the changes that were made were for the better, and the scenes that were straightforward replicas just didn’t work as well as what Hitchcock had done with his cast and crew. But when you try to match yourself up to one of the most legendary directors of all time, can you really expect a positive outcome?
More than sixty years after its release, Psycho still holds up as an excellent, masterfully crafted horror film with awesome dialogue, great performances, and an unforgettable score. It has rightfully been chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Film Registry as a work that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The film is regularly named as one of the best movies ever made… and it really is.
And for the non-horror Revisited series, I wrote about Edgar Wright's follow-up to Shaun of the Dead, the 2007 buddy cop comedy Hot Fuzz:
Hot Fuzz script:
INTRO: After working together on the TV shows Asylum and Spaced, director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg decided to take their collaboration to the big screen with Shaun of the Dead. They wrote that film together, crafting a comedy built on the foundation of their shared love for George A. Romero’s zombie movies. It turned out to be a well-reviewed international hit… and then Wright and Pegg had to figure out how to keep their film careers going with a good follow-up. This time they decided to channel their appreciation for action movies into the buddy cop comedy Hot Fuzz, which we’re looking at in this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: While some refer to Hot Fuzz as a spoof, that is not a description Wright and Pegg used for their own movie. Their objective was not to critique or make fun of action movies, as they had a sincere affection for them. Noting a lack of good British cop action movies, they wanted to create one of their own – and bring it to the screen in the style of an American cop action movie. Plus, audiences had loved the chemistry that Pegg had with his Shaun of the Dead co-star Nick Frost, and the buddy cop set-up seemed like a great way to put that chemistry at the center of another film. Pegg described Hot Fuzz as a Valentine to action movies. It just happens to be a strongly comedic Valentine, deriving humor from its setting, characters, and the way it comments on the genre’s clichés.
As the filmmakers pointed out, the average British beat cop doesn’t really appear to be a prime candidate for action movie stardom. They wear uniforms with funny hats and sweaters, and they don’t carry firearms. That’s exactly the sort of characters they wanted to make their film about. Then they took these overlooked heroes and put them in the kind of location you don’t often see in action movies; a small, rural town in England. Hot Fuzz starts out looking like it’s just going to be a goofy story about a big city cop being sent off to a small town where nothing ever happens, so he has to bust country folk for mundane crimes. But by the end he and his small town partner are participating in some big action sequences.
Wright and Pegg were not in a rush to get their Shaun of the Dead follow-up out into the world. They spent eighteen months working on the first draft of the script, then put another nine months into doing revisions. During that time, they did some serious action movie research. They estimate they watched something like one hundred and thirty-eight cop movies along the way. Dirty Harry, Lethal Weapon, Point Break, L.A. Confidential, they were all on the list. Even lesser Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris films proved to be useful in their research… and they found great inspiration in the overblown insanity of Bad Boys II. They saw plenty of clichés they could dig into for laughs, and Roger Ebert’s book Bigger Little Movie Glossary pointed out more they could include.
Several of the movies they watched would also go on to inspire elements of the Hot Fuzz marketing campaign. Posters for the film were created in the style of posters for Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, Magnum Force, and the 2006 version of Miami Vice.
In addition to all that movie-watching and studying, Wright and Pegg conducted dozens of interviews with real-life police officers and took tours of small police stations. Some of the stories they were told by actual cops were worked into the script. The swan-on-the-run element of the film was one of the true stories, and so was the scene where a translator is needed to decipher the unique version of English spoken by a farmer.
Frost was the first person who got to see the script once it was complete, and during the rehearsal process he was given the chance to come up with lines that could be added in. Once they were on set, Wright preferred to stick to the shooting draft of the script rather than have a bunch of improv going on.
The character written for Pegg is super-cop Nicholas Angel, by far the best and most efficient police officer working in London. His arrest record is four hundred percent higher than any other officer… which doesn’t make him popular with his fellow cops. The decision is made to promote Angel to Sergeant and transfer him. He would rather stay in London, but the higher-ups want him out of the city so he’ll stop making everyone else look bad. He’s sent far out into the country, to the fictional village of Sandford, Gloucestershire. Which is said to be the safest village in England. At first Angel has trouble adjusting to how laid back everything is in Sandford, but it soon becomes obvious that this place isn’t as peaceful and safe as it’s reported to be.
When picking the villains for an action movie, the first choices that come to mind might be drug smugglers, drug runners, human traffickers, even terrorists. But Wright and Pegg didn’t take their cop movie in that direction. The antagonists in this film are more along the lines of a Dirty Harry movie than a Lethal Weapon movie. While people around town appear to be dying in tragic, gory accidents, Angel quickly deduces that there’s actually a murderer stalking Sandford. The serial killer element of this film has its roots in a short Wright made in the early ‘90s, when he was still a teenager. Titled Dead Right, that short was about highly capable super-cops tracking a serial killer – who also happens to have an army of lackeys – in the small city of Wells in Somerset. Wright’s hometown. Which also happens to be where Hot Fuzz was filmed. Dead Right is much more absurd than Hot Fuzz, its serial killer is motivated by an intense love for cereal, but you can see the origins of the story in there. It you want to check it out, it has been included with physical media releases of Hot Fuzz and is also available online.
Feeding into the decision to make this a serial killer story is the fact that Wright and Pegg are both fans of splatter. They figured that having bloody murder scenes might also please genre fans who were following them over from Shaun of the Dead. So we get decapitations, a throat stabbing, a corpse burnt to a crisp, and – most impressive of all – a head crushed by a falling church spire. The sort of things you hope to see when you go to a horror movie. There’s also a cringe-inducing special effect where we see that even the spires on a miniature church can be extremely dangerous. A character gets one stuck through the bottom of their chin and it comes out their mouth. This doesn’t kill them; they’re just stuck there, in pain and wanting ice cream.
The other officers in Sandford brush off Angel’s homicide theory, accepting the deaths as accidents. But he has one ally on the force: Frost’s character, Police Constable Danny Butterman. A character Frost reportedly named himself. Danny is the son of the police force’s head Inspector Frank Butterman, and when Angel first shows up in town Danny is rather dopey and inexperienced. But he’s also a massive fan of cop action movies; he has a large DVD collection, with his top recommendations being Point Break and Bad Boys II. When he hears that Angel actually saw some action on the job while working in London, he becomes fascinated. He wants to know all about it – and to find out if Angel’s life has been just like the movies.
An excellent cast was assembled around Pegg and Frost. Jim Broadbent had enjoyed Shaun of the Dead so much that he asked to have a part in Wright’s next project. So he was cast as Frank Butterman. The character of supermarket manager Simon Skinner, the prime suspect in the murder investigation, was envisioned as being as a Timothy Dalton type… and then they found out they could actually get Timothy Dalton to play the role. Members of the Sandford police force are played by Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, Bill Bailey, Kevin Eldon, Karl Johnson, and Olivia Colman. There is a touch of The Wicker Man to the overall story, and The Wicker Man star Edward Woodward was cast the head of the NWA. The Neighbourhood Watch Alliance. There are also appearances by the likes of Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, Stephen Merchant, Lucy Punch, Paul Freeman, Cate Blanchett, and Peter Jackson. David Bradley plays that farmer with an unintelligible way of speaking, who has a stash of weapons. Including a sea mine. Those weapons will prove to be very handy toward the end of the film. Rory McCann, best known for playing Sandor Clegane “The Hound” on Game of Thrones, makes an impression in his role as a hulking character called Lurch, who also communicates in his own special way.
Now that you’ve heard all about Hot Fuzz, if you’re still wondering what the title means… well, the answer is, not much. They just wanted to give the movie a two-word title along the lines of Lethal Weapon and Point Break. “Fuzz” is a derogatory slang word for police and the rock band the Killers had just released an album called Hot Fuss, so Hot Fuzz seemed to be a good title for a cop movie.
REVIEW: Like Shaun of the Dead before it, Hot Fuzz is a very clever and entertaining blend of genres, with an obvious respect and even reverence for the movies that Wright and Pegg turned to for inspiration. The amount of time they put into perfecting the script is clear in the amount of set-up and payoff there is in the movie. There aren’t any wasted moments or lines, everything is building toward something. It all has a purpose, from the recurring gag of the escaped swan to the way Danny’s questions to Angel, based on things he’s seen in action movies, play into the climactic action sequence.
The movie does take its time getting to the sort of action Danny is so intrigued by. There are moments of excitement to be found in the first three quarters; murders and chases. But the bullets don’t really start flying until about ninety minutes into the film’s two hours. It’s worth the wait when the comedic mystery makes way for the spectacle. There’s a whole lot of gunfire and property damage, a vehicular chase, some fisticuffs. They may be solving a serial killer case, but Angel, Danny Butterman, and the fellow officers they convince to help them out have plenty of villains to take on in the end. Wright only had a budget somewhere in the range of fifteen million dollars to make this movie, but he still managed to shoot some great action with that amount of money. Sure, it’s no Bad Boys II, but what is? Only Bad Boys II.
While interviewing real police officers, Wright and Pegg were told that paperwork is a huge part of the job. It’s also something you don’t see much of in cop movies. So they made sure to include moments of officers doing paperwork in their film, with Wright shooting and cutting in them in a way that turns them into action scenes as well. The quick cuts in the paperwork sequences are an Edgar Wright trademark, but they’re stylized in a way that was meant to make them look like something out of a later Tony Scott movie. For example, Scott’s 2005 film DOMINO, which Wright was a fan of.
Pegg and Frost continue to have fantastic chemistry in this film, and the interactions between Angel and Danny were incredibly well written. You can really see these characters coming to care for each other. Neither one of them has a love interest on the side, the story is entirely dedicated to their blossoming bromance.
As expected, given the caliber of the actors involved, the supporting cast also did great work bringing their characters to life. Timothy Dalton, sporting a mustache he didn’t really want to grow, practically oozes slime in some scenes, his character is so unlikeable. When Angel makes an insulting gesture toward the former James Bond, the viewer is in full agreement. Dalton’s character first introduces himself as a slasher – a joke about how low the prices are at his supermarket. His discounts are criminal. But remember what we said about this movie having such great set-up and payoff, with no wasted lines.
LEGACY/NOW: Hot Fuzz is in the middle installment in what is called the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, or the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy. Shaun of the Dead started it off, and The World’s End wrapped it up several years later. Each were directed by Wright from a script he wrote with Pegg. Each stars Pegg and Frost. And each is a different style of movie. A zombie movie, a cop movie, and an alien invasion movie. They have their similarities, but they’re each as different from each other as three different flavors of the Cornetto ice cream featured in them. Shaun of the Dead was a breakthrough for Wright and Pegg, but it actually made the least at the box office. It had a global haul of thirty million. But since it was made on a budget of six million, it was more successful than The World’s End, which made forty-six million on a budget of twenty million.
Shaun of the Dead seems to be the most popular of the three films to do this day, but there’s no question that Hot Fuzz was the most successful entry in the trilogy during its initial theatrical run. This one made eighty million at the global box office. More success followed on DVD, when over one million copies were sold during its first four weeks of release in the UK. Almost two million copies were sold in the US. That two-disc set was packed with bonus features, perhaps most notably a commentary with Wright and his friend Quentin Tarantino, where they pack in references to nearly two hundred different movies during their conversation.
Well-reviewed, Hot Fuzz would also go on to land at number fifty on Empire magazine’s list of the one hundred best British movies of all time. It has a solid fan following, and fifteen years after its release it still holds up as a fine way to spend two hours. According to Pegg, the moral of Hot Fuzz is that it’s sometimes okay to switch off your brain and relax. If you need to switch off your brain and relax today, kicking back and putting on Hot Fuzz can help you do just that.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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