Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) stands as arguably the most iconic horror movie ever made, its famous shower scene featuring Janet Leigh (mother of Jamie Lee Curtis) being butchered is eternally etched in cinema history. In this review we take a look at how Director Gus Van Sant, in a bold and ambitious attempt, tackles Hitchcock’s classic with a 1998 near shot-for-shot color remake. Casting Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, the keeper of peepholes, to fill Anthony Perkins’s shoes, but left it's the soul behind.
Hitchcock’s 78/52 Shower Scene Captures the Shock of Psycho, but Does it Offer More?
It really feels like this is Psycho, but beyond the screams of Marion Crane pulling on that shower curtain for dear life, whether Leigh in 1960 or Anne Heche in the 1998 remake, it’s a bait-and-switch crime story. In an unprecedented move, it kills its lead halfway through and pivots to Norman Bates, whose voyeurism, stolen identity and twisted secrets define its core.
A taxidermy hobby, office chatter, long drives, motel small talk, and arguments from the house on the hill that break sound barriers, all wrapped in restrained glimpses of Norman and his Mother. Hitchcock handles it well, but it feels like not enough happens aside from that centerpiece shower scene, which leaves us gently stepping back from being front and center of the cheerleading squad. They say the horror of Psycho lies in its stillness, and we get that. Still, we can’t help but wish for a little more.
That shower moment? An assault on female vulnerability and decency, achieved iconically through 78 camera shots and 52 cuts to manipulate audience emotion through editing and that shrieking score, without ever showing a single stab wound. During an era when the Motion Picture Production Code still restricted graphic violence and nudity, Hitchcock cleverly pushed the limits with an approach that became known as his famous 78/52.
“I was directing the audience more than the scene”- a sentiment often cited in reference to the Psycho shower sequence
Subsequently, Van Sant attempts to recreate this for the ’98 remake with a bit more nudity and blood, but his herky-jerky, stop-motion-like framing is no Hitchcock. The switch to color and those inexplicable time-lapse shots of clouds that feel like random stock footage break its rhythm and drain the scene of the original’s fluidity. There’s only one clear winner here, as one slices while the other awkwardly splashes in the water.
Anne Heche's Marion Crane: Does her Bates Motel Journey Land in Psycho 1998?
The tale of Psycho unfolds in two distinct parts: first, Marion Crane’s impulsive theft and desperate flight, and then the retracing of her steps through the investigation into her disappearance along the stretch of road between Phoenix and Fairvale, California. This time around with Julianne Moore as her determined sister Lila Crane and William H. Macy as the persistent private detective Arbogast.
Marion, a real estate secretary who dreams of marrying her lover, Sam Loomis, a struggling hardware store owner from Fairvale, is driven to embezzlement when $400,000 in cash, a sum reflecting the $40,000 in 1960, practically falls into her lap after she is entrusted by her boss, Mr. Lowery, to bank it. Desperate to be with Sam, she packs her suitcase and skips town with the money, heading for the California love nest, where an unfortunate stop at the Bates Motel for some shut-eye and shelter from the weather changes everything.
Even though the 1998 remake runs nearly the same length (109 vs. 104 minutes), the 1960 Psycho lands with far more depth, a more complete movie in execution and atmosphere, leaving Van Sant’s attempt feeling shallow in comparison. As Hitchcock dominates across the board, what Van Sant does get right is Heche as Marion. While nobody could replace Leigh, Heche earns her place and feels like the only one who truly inhabits the role. She carries the first half. In a flawed remake, she’s the heartbeat. Unfortunately, that heartbeat ends in the shower. Unlike Hitchcock’s original, it doesn’t have Perkins's Bates to fall back on. Instead, it gives us a poor imitation in Vaughn.
We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes: Perkins was Norman. Vaughn was just visiting
Take Perkins’s portrayal, a fragile, unthreatening man-child that fit the character perfectly, and because of that, his disturbing attachment to his mother made his madness all the more unsettling. Fast forward to Vaughn, and Norman is now a physically imposing, creepy predator, masturbating through the peephole. For a movie so determined to follow the trajectory of its predecessor to a tee in order to capture its essence, Van Sant must have gone a little mad himself to make this swerve in the character.
The 1998 Psycho had room to breathe with the adoption of color and modern psychology. Van Sant had the opportunity to detour and make it his own, but his shot-for-shot approach wasted every chance. Marion’s guilt, the car swap, Arbogast’s snooping, or Lila’s investigation could all have been tweaked or reimagined to bring something new without gutting its soul. Instead, the only real deviation was Norman himself. Fiddling with Norman was the one place this remake should never have gone.
The role demanded a Norman who seemed breakable, Vaughn was just never the right fit. Nowhere is this clearer than when he delivers the line “A boy’s best friend is his mother.” With Perkins, it lands as an almost sweet confession. With Vaughn, we’re thinking, “this is Marion’s cue to get the hell out of there now.”
As we step past Van Sant, Psycho (1960) reigns as one of horror’s true royalty, mentioned in the same breath as Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s not for its gore or monsters, but for rewriting the rules, shaping the genre, and giving us one of cinema’s most unforgettable characters in Norman Bates.