Psycho Redux

by Donato Totaro
January 31, 2004

Six years old, Gus Van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho has already received its fair share of bemusement and criticism. Much of the reaction surrounding the film dealt not only with the shock of seeing such a heralded horror classic remade, but remade in the particular way it was: without a direct audience friendly reason. Horror classics have been remade since the beginning of narrative cinema (Nosferatu, King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Thing, The Innocents, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Cat People, Night of the Living Dead) and two other modern classics have been toppled since Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead (not yet released). But none of the previous directors approached their redux with the same attitude as Van Sant: to remake it with the same basic script, music, characters, mise-en-scène, and shooting style (or as Van Sant himself has half-erroneously stated, a ‘shot by shot’ remake). Most people, academics and audiences alike, wondered, why bother? And Van Sant (and others on his behalf) has responded with a bevy of varied reasons: a postmodern recycling/pastiche of a hallowed piece of art which is self-validated by its mere existence; an ‘appropriation art’ which guards against the fetishisation of art objects; a ‘cover’ version for a generation who never even heard of the original; or simply a personal mission on the part of Van Sant (he made an earlier trial run by parodying the shower scene used by the “Our Lady of Laughter Theatre Group in Los Angeles, 1979). Some of the audience anger against Van Sant’s remake is directed at the apparent lack of creativity behind such a project by assuming it is a cheap, exploitative consumerist device to capitalize on the “Psycho” name. Given Van Sant’s previous work, a valid response to this would be to see Van Sant’s remake as in fact a direct critique of this Hollywood mindset that champions ‘safe’ and ‘marketable’ products (sequels, remakes, adaptations of successful comics, television shows, etc.). In fact, the only reason that Universal studio gave him the large budget necessary to make this film is because his previous film Good Will Hunting made a load of money.