Psycho (1960) was the dawn of a new breed of horror movies, and there was no turning back for the genre.
The iconic shower kill, the performances by Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, and the suspenseful film style would make it one of director Alfred Hitchcock’s enduring works. It didn’t take long after its theatrical release to leave an impact on cinema and especially on the horror and thriller genres.
Below, these four movies were inspired by Hitchcock’s classic and treated it like a foundational cinematic text to pay homage to or to attempt to outdo what Psycho did for audiences in 1960.
Homicidal (1961)
‘Homicidal’ (1961)Credit: Columbia Pictures
Director William Castle was known for his gimmicks to get the public to see his spooky B-movies (a floating, plastic skeleton hovered over moviegoers for 1959’s House on Haunted Hill). But he met his match with Hitchcock.
In the documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story (2007), friends and admirers of Castle talked about the director attending the New York premiere for 13 Ghosts in July 1960, where the director noticed the line of people that went down a block waiting to get into a screening of Psycho. Hitchcock even used a gimmick to build curiosity by denying late entry into a Psycho screening.
Castle’s film, Homicidal, is more of a ripoff than an homage, where you get an icy blonde actress, a house with family secrets, and a gender identity crisis. It was released the following year after Psycho with a “Fright Break” gimmick that gave a brief intermission before the supposedly frightening climax to Homicidal, to allow cowardly moviegoers the chance to leave and get a refund.
It backfired when audiences saw the movie twice and got a refund on their second viewing, forcing Castle to quickly revise his marketing ploy.
Sisters (1972)
‘Sisters’ (1972)Credit: American International Pictures
Conjoined twins, one good and the other bad, who were separated. A score by frequent Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann. A dual role for actress Margot Kidder. What you get in Sisters is an homage to Hitchcock and the psychosexual themes of Psycho.
Director Brian De Palma loved Hitchcock’s film style, with many of his thrillers showcasing this, but he wasn’t just imitating the classic filmmaker. “I am dealing in surrealistic, erotic imagery. Hitchcock never got into that too much,” De Palma said in an interview with Rolling Stone, several months after his 1980 erotic thriller, Dressed to Kill, was released.
Dressed to Kill is inspired by Psycho, but you should start with what he did in the first thriller of his career, Sisters. The horror-mystery follows a reporter who witnesses her neighbor kill a man, but she’s unable to prove it to the police. The movie uses the twisty plot structure of Psycho with eroticism, voyeurism, graphic violence, and split-screen effects that became signature elements of De Palma, in a screenplay he co-wrote with Louisa Rose.
When you stream it, just don’t confuse it with the 2015 comedy of the same name, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
Halloween (1978)
‘Halloween’ (1978)Credit: Compass International Pictures
In the documentary, Halloween: A Cut Above The Rest (2003), producers Debra Hill and Irwin Yablans recognized the marketing genius of casting Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh, in their independent horror film. It went on to make Curtis a star, and the Psycho connection never left the Halloween series.
In the same doc, director John Carpenter explained his inspirations behind his 1978 slasher. “Psycho is the granddaddy of these kinds of movies,” he said, “That’s the first modern horror film.” What Hitchcock did with Norman Bates (Perkins) is move the monster out of the vintage aesthetics of Gothic horror and into a modern setting. On the neighborhood streets where the terror lies, the closest to a crumbling old castle in Halloween is the abandoned Myers house.
Donald Pleasence’s obsessive doctor who has seen “the Devil's eyes” is named after Psycho’s Sam Loomis (John Gavin), who investigated the disappearance of his girlfriend Marion Crane (Leigh). Six sequels in, Halloween H20 (1998) gives Janet Leigh a small role, where the Herrmann score plays as she walks to the 1957 Ford she once rode toward the Bates Motel.
Scream (1996)
‘Scream’ (1996)Credit: Dimension Films
This meta slasher, directed by Wes Craven and from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, is stuffed with references to older classics.
The opening sequence that kills off Drew Barrymore as Casey has a shock factor similar to the fate of Marion, but originally, Barrymore was going to star as Sidney, which would go to Neve Campbell. When Barrymore wanted to change roles, Williamson loved what that could mean.
“I always saw it as sort of the Janet Leigh opening,” he said in an oral history interview, “You wanted the biggest star to be in the first moment of the movie. That’s why the scene is so long because I wanted to keep Casey Becker alive just long enough where you think she’s the lead of the movie and that she’s going to survive this moment.”
As Scream goes on, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) gets his surname from Halloween and, of course, Psycho, except Billy has none of the good intentions of those previous men. That’s because Billy is one of the Ghostface killers, and he reveals his murderous true self by gleefully quoting Norman Bates: “We all go a little mad sometimes.”
These movies were inspired by Psycho, but which one do you think did it best?
