Editorials
Norman and Me: Discovering Myself in the Bates Motel
When I learned that filmmaker Sam Wineman was accepting submissions for his upcoming queer horror documentary, I knew immediately that I wanted to talk about Anthony Perkins. The original Psycho (1960) has long been one of my favorite movies, horror or otherwise, and Perkins is a huge part of that. As tormented mama’s boy Norman Bates, Perkins is immensely sympathetic and relatable, which makes the revelation that he’s the killer all the more shocking. Certainly I related to this young man who was different in some mysterious but undeniable way; I myself always felt different, so when I realized I was gay it provided the answer to a long-standing question. Back when I was a child and first watched Psycho and Psycho II (1983) on video—with my mother, appropriately enough—Norman resonated with me in a way I didn’t quite comprehend at the time. A mama’s boy myself, I have a long-running joke with my own mom—wonderful, supportive, and hilarious, nothing like the domineering shrew suggested by Psycho—that I’m Norman. As I wrote up my notes on Perkins for the documentary taping, I realized that it was through Tony and Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins, Charles Winecoff’s 1996 biography, that I actually learned about gay history, culture, and identity—and thus about myself. I had a dream about the actor in my early twenties. In the dream, Tony and I met and discussed what it was like to be a gay man in his lifetime versus mine. I woke up wondering if I had somehow actually met Perkins in my subconscious.
Norman Bates’ odd vulnerability, as beautifully rendered by Perkins, made him something of a folk hero, and the greatest modern example of the persecuted monster as sympathetic victim. This archetype is one of the reasons queer people have been historically drawn to the horror genre, and with Norman being portrayed by a closeted gay actor, the character gains an added resonance for LGBTQ audiences.
Norman has other queer qualities as well. He’s a shy, sensitive mama’s boy—gay men have historically had close relationships with their mothers, and an outdated “theory” of homosexuality is that it was caused by a suffocating mother. Two years after the release of Psycho, controversial psychiatrist Irving Bieber published Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals. As detailed in Split Image, Bieber wrote that “mothers of male homosexuals usually behave in … abnormal ways. They are overly intimate with their sons. They are also excessively possessive, over-protective and inclined to discourage the son’s masculine ways.” This sounds a lot like Mrs. Bates, who psychiatrist Dr. Richman describes as “a clinging, demanding woman.” Even after homosexuality was removed from DSM-III in 1973, Bieber protested “a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim.” This bizarre and demeaning view of gayness provides important context for the time in which Psycho was released and thus the reason we can “read” Norman as gay.
Norman’s sexuality is also mired in shame and secretiveness. He removes a painting depicting a rape to peep at Marion (Janet Leigh) in her underwear. The argument he has with his “mother” makes it clear that he’s been made to feel tremendous guilt over his sexual desires. “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper—by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds!” “she” declares.
In the film’s climax, Norman famously appears in drag and tries to stab Lila (Vera Miles) in the cellar, only to be restrained by Sam (John Gavin). Wanting to preserve his voice for his upcoming Broadway musical debut in Greenwillow, Perkins asked if he could pretend to scream and dub the sound in later. “Hitchcock liked the silent screams so much he never added the sound,” Perkins recalled. I later heard someone describe this moment as “the silent scream of gay men.” It’s utterly unintentional, of course, at least on a conscious level. But there’s something powerful and resonant in watching Perkins restrained by the manly Gavin, his face contorting in a shriek but yet unable to make a sound. I would never watch the scene the same way again. (Norman does have one line just prior to this scene, right as he appears in the doorway of the fruit cellar: “I am Norma Bates!” It was most likely recorded by actress Jeanette Nolan, one of several actors who recorded lines for “Mother.” Hitchcock blended them together for an uncanny quality.)
I read Winecoff’s Split Image as a freshman in high school, having not yet discovered my own sexuality. Certainly I was already a somewhat obsessive Psycho fan, so I was interested for that reason. But perhaps there was something more that drew me to the book, with its handsome cover photo of Perkins and its intimate details of his personal life. I learned that Perkins, like the author, was a gay man, and was forced to remain closeted for the sake of his film career. He later married photographer Berry Berenson and had two sons with her, musician Elvis Perkins and film director Oz Perkins (Gretel and Hansel). Winecoff provides at times explicit details of Perkins’ life with his male lovers, including fellow closeted matinee idol Tab Hunter, which I was surely intrigued and confused by at the time. The book also recounts Perkins’ battle with AIDS, which led to his death in 1992. I had been aware of AIDS as a child; in fact, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia was the first “grownup” movie I saw in theaters (the film was released the year after Perkins died, when I was ten). But reading Split Image’s account of the crisis and Perkins’ passing was my first real education in AIDS’ devastating impact.
Perkins learned of his status from a 1990 National Enquirer headline, “PSYCHO STAR BATTLING AIDS VIRUS”; a lab technician had apparently tested his blood after he visited his doctor, and then sold the results. It was a cruel and fitting coda to a life spent running from the homophobic machinery of the Hollywood press. Winecoff explains that gay actors lived in fear of another trashy tabloid, Confidential, which loved nothing more than to “out” closeted stars during its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties. A source recalled to Winecoff how he’d once witnessed Perkins and Hunters’ clandestine car ride—in separate vehicles—to Hunter’s West Hollywood apartment. “I left a note on the seat of Tab’s convertible, with a drawing of two pansies intertwined,” the man remembers. After learning how fearful Hunter was of an expose in Confidential, he knocked on the actor’s door to apologize; “Tab was very cold.” I recalled this story one afternoon when my grandparents drove me home from school. We had pulled into a driveway to turn around, and I joked that I was home. My grandmother said that I wouldn’t want to claim this house, pointing out a floral flag out front. “You see those flowers?” she asked. “Those are pansies.” I understood the implication immediately, and it hurt. (I was closeted to her at the time.)
Because of Winecoff’s book, Perkins became my window into gay history and culture, and the way homosexuality has been mocked, repressed, and expressed over the years. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in LGBTQ history. Perkins’ career was marked by a long history of queer coding, in which a character is never explicitly “written” as queer but can be read as such through subtle clues. Apart from Norman, Perkins played an early Broadway role in Elia Kazan’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), about a young college student suspected of homosexuality but “saved” by the love of a good woman. Then there was “Never Will I Marry,” his showstopper in Greenwillow (1960). Ostensibly about his character Gideon’s curse– to never settle down—“it became an instant camp classic within the invisible gay community because fey Anthony Perkins was singing it,” Winecoff writes. “Indeed, over the years it has proved an ironic theme song for the actor’s own surprising personal life.” The song was later covered by gay icons Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland.
About fifteen years ago, when I was living in Boston, I interviewed an older gay man as a possible roommate. He noticed that I had one of Perkins’ album covers on my wall and told me that he slept with the actor on Fire Island back in the day, not initially knowing who he was. His story encapsulated everything I had learned from Tony’s biography: “The next day he told me, ‘Yes, it’s me. Please don’t tell anyone.’”
In 2007, I saw Tony’s son Elvis perform on Coney Island and met him briefly at a CD signing afterwards. I appreciated his melancholy music, but I felt compelled to go because I knew it was the closest I’d ever come to meeting his late father.
Whether or not Perkins really visited my subconscious, he is truly immortal thanks to Norman Bates. The character’s legacy continued through three sequels, a 1998 remake, and the prequel series Bates Motel, which further explored the character’s ambiguous sexuality. (Actor Freddie Highmore was an outstanding choice to inherit Perkins’ torch.) The tormented and sympathetic Norman, and his portrayer, stand as a testament to the struggles and pain gay men endured to get to this point. I’ll never get to meet Tony, but I’ll forever be grateful to him.
I’m relatively new to the Bloody Disgusting family, but I feel the need to admit something that you might find disturbing, distasteful, and downright disappointing. Basically, and with the utmost respect for your feelings, I’m of the opinion that Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is the best entry in the entire franchise.
To be clear, I like Sam Raimi’s original trilogy well enough, especially 1987’s Evil Dead II, but the zaniness can’t help but neuter the horror for me. They’re fun movies! I’m entertained by them, but I’m just drawn to Alvarez’s meaner, gorier, and more tonally unrelenting take on the same material.
A new Evil Dead film is now in theaters, and just as 2023’s Evil Dead Rise followed this same brutal vibe, Evil Dead Burn is continuing that wet slide into utter carnage.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Evil Dead (2013)
Commentators: Fede Alvarez (director/co-writer), Rodo Sayagues (co-writer), Jane Levy (actor), Lou Taylor Pucci (actor), Jessica Lucas (actor)
1. The family watching in the basement at 3:11 includes producer Rob Tapert’s son and a local actor from New Zealand, the one with the disfigured face, who has survived two separate plane crashes.
2. The decision to flip the opening shot (post title) upside down came in editing as Alvarez recalled being unsettled by a shot from Raimi’s original Evil Dead. “Something that really impressed me about the original was all the camera work, and there’s a moment… where Bruce [Campbell] runs from one side of the room to the other, and the camera looks back and upside down.”
3. It was composer Roque Banos who came up with adding the siren sounds. His inspiration came after living in Los Angeles for a short time and hearing many, many sirens.
4. It was Pucci’s idea for his character, Eric, to have a beard and long hair – partly as a visual nod to the film’s 1970s vibe, and partly because “you never have to do anything” with it.
5. “In any good story you have one of the main characters taking a bad step in the beginning,” says Alvarez as David (Shiloh Fernandez) fails to simply turn around and apologize to his sister Mia (Levy). “He makes another mistake,” adds Levy when he ignores her pleas for help after she’s been assaulted by the tree, but Alvarez says that choice is far more understandable.
6. Pucci is asked if it was his choice to be playing with the deck of cards on the porch swing, but he says it was Alvarez’s suggestion. The director adds that he had just tried impressing Pucci with a card trick – turns out they’re both amateur magicians – and Pucci carried it into the scene. It’s also a nod to the original film.
7. The clock at 14:56 is the actual one from the original film.
8. Most of them agree that the blood would send them packing in real life well before the book would. They’d be curious about the latter.
9. “It smells like burnt hair” was improvised by Pucci.
10. The script called for dead crows in the basement, but Tapert suggested they try something different, so they went with cats. A dead one had been found “in an alley” somewhere, and they took a mold of it to craft additional prosthetic cat corpses.
11. All of the closeups of people touching the book feature Alvarez’s hands.
12. Mia’s front yard vomit consisted of cold soup.
13. Early scenes of a wet and angry Mia were preceded by her doing sprints or jumping jacks offscreen to make her seem more exasperated. She was so amped up while driving the car that Alvarez, who was hidden in the backseat, was scared “while Jane is going crazy.”
14. Levy recalls Alvarez suggesting a similar scene from Wild at Heart as a reference point for her own performance after crashing the car into the pond.
15. They shot the film mostly chronologically, and that left producers a little concerned as they were seeing a lot of character drama. “They didn’t know what we were doing, and they were really anxious to get to the horror.” Those concerns were put to rest when they saw the dailies for the assault and bunkbed scene that follows.
16. It was Tapert who suggested they include the tree vine assault, and Alvarez was happy to see it used as more than just a shocker. “Being raped is her being injected with the devil,” says Levy, and he adds that it moves the story forward rather than just disturb.
17. The shower burn was the first bit of graphic mutilation that the writers conceived when they started working on the script.
18. The attempted escape in the Jeep after Mia is burned originally included a shot of David trying to call for help on his cell phone only to be stymied by a lack of service, but Alvarez took it out. He doesn’t think the audience needed it, and he didn’t want it to knock viewers out of the scene’s intensity.
19. The flooded river at 35:16 “is a real river.” It’s the same one the Jeep passes through at the beginning, and they simply waited for a heavy rain and then filmed the result.
20. Alvarez asked the sound department to come up with a unique sound for the Deadites, and the result was the crackling, “bug in a jar” noise.
21. “This was the hardest thing ever,” says Levy at 37:54 as her character projectile vomits blood onto Olivia’s (Lucas) face. They did four takes of the scene with Lucas having to be completely rinsed off and reset each time.
22. That’s not digital trickery at 39:32 as Olivia’s reflection gives an evil grin. “This was a timing thing because the mirror had to go away from me, and as it went away from me I had to actually do that face.” We see mostly the back and slight side of her outside of the reflection at this point, and the result is a cool little shot.
23. The bathroom encounter between Olivia and Eric originally ended with her hitting her head, but Raimi watched the dailies and asked Alvarez to milk the horror and gore a little bit longer.
24. “So everyone actually kills each other,” says Levy, “Mia never kills anybody in this movie.” Alvarez adds, “That’s the whole beauty of the story; Mia is the only innocent person, she’s a victim all the way.”
25. Alvarez recalls that one of Raimi’s “three rules of horror” is that “the innocent must be punished.” Does that contradict the point immediately above? Maybe, but she went through hell, and at the end of the day, are any of us actually innocent?
26. He acknowledges that the film, like many horror movies, is filled with characters making questionable choices, but he defends most of them as being understandable given the context.
27. “It’s my first sex scene,” says Levy at 1:31:11 as her character licks Natalie’s (Elizabeth Blackmore) leg. “This one was her stunt double’s leg.” She adds that “Kiss me, you dirty cunt!” is the favorite thing she’s ever said.
28. Natalie’s attempt to rinse her hand wound was originally written to include a black worm coming out of the gash, “but we didn’t want to be too supernatural.” Mr. Alvarez, my good man, have you seen your own movie?
29. Alvarez sees the theme of the movie as accepting that sometimes the only way out of a problem is through it – and here that means killing your friends before dismembering or burning their bodies. A good lesson for us all, really.
30. Eric’s laughter at Natalie saying “My face hurts” was real as Pucci found the line – one that Alvarez added on the fly – to be very funny given the situation and the fact that both of her arms are gone.
31. “Those woods were really, really creepy,” says Pucci, and Lucas adds that their New Zealand filming location was near a Maori burial ground.
32. Mia, gasping for her life in the hole with the plastic bag over her head, was apparently Levy’s audition scene.
33. They see Mia’s resurrection – the real Mia coming back to life after her brother’s janky defibrillator attempt – as a reward from beyond for David finally apologizing to her like he should have done from the start. I don’t mind saying that this is an odd take given how clear this film (and franchise as a whole) makes it that there’s absolutely no good supernatural entity looking out for these characters. Characters in these movies are absolutely and utterly fucked, and they should probably just accept that. Alvarez ultimately concedes that you can also just believe that the defibrillator actually worked.
34. For those who missed it, the necklace chain on the ground at 1:16:51 is in the shape of a skull as a nod to the scene in the original film where Ash (Campbell) goes for a necklace and sees a skull.
35. The machete comes through the wall at 1:20:10 and slices Mia’s leg, and they used Natalie’s prosthetic arm for the shot – it’s getting cut at the elbow.
36. They went through various versions of the Abomination Mia (Randal Wilson), including one that was made up of all five of the friends.
37. The original ending saw Mia walking on the road, but they cut it. The image still made it into the one-sheet poster.
38. The end credits feature extremely bloody shots filmed at high speed and meant to reference various beats from the film itself in tighter, close-up detail that viewers might have missed.
Quotes Without Context
“You kind of want to put the rape idea in people’s minds.”
“The car, of course.”
“I would definitely open the book.”
“Swimming through the swamp was fun.”
“Duct tape fixes everything.”
“How come David is such a bad boyfriend?”
“This kiss, I was really suffocating her.”
“I’m such a perv.”
“It’s like Beetlejuice.”
“Fede kept telling me this is my Bruce Willis moment to pump me up.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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