It’s changed to a famously vicious stabbing in the film, but still retains the novel’s shower setting.īloch begins the novel with Norman, and then switches to the back-story of Mary. The novel never dwells on the murders, but the beheading of this first victim would nonetheless has been unacceptable in 60s cinema. The murder of Mary Crane (renamed Marion in the movie) is much more brutal in the novel, though very briskly described. In retrospect, it’s clear to see why, but it’s not done in so obvious a way that any reader of the original novel would have easily guessed the denouement. Her interactions with Norman are told through Norman’s perception of them.
The other significant character in Psycho, Norman’s mother Norma Bates, is kept deliberately vague throughout the majority of the text. For the film and subsequent media, Norman is softened up and presented as much more of a confused young man with simple and less academic hobbies. He’s also obsessed with sociology and amateur psychiatry, as well as pornography. He’s also a much less sympathetic character his internal monologue makes up much of the text and this portrays his him as misogynistic and utterly antisocial. Norman Bates in the novel is pudgy, balding and middle-aged. There are significant cosmetic changes, of course. He even adapts some of his dialogue directly from the novel. But Psycho isn’t like that at all Joseph Stefano’s script maintains all of the same beats as the novel and rarely strays from the basic plot. I’ve had that experience in the past of reading a book after I’ve seen the movie and thinking ‘that was really based on this?’ A good example is Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room upon which the film Soylent Green was based – very loosely it seems. What surprised me most of all is how closely Hitchcock’s film actually sticks to the book. I raced through the book in a couple of days and the fact that I was so familiar with the plot never really spoiled my enjoyment of the book at all. It took me a few months to get around to buying it, of course, but when I did I found that I literally couldn’t put it down. My wife and I were recently enjoying the first series of Bates Motel, when it suddenly occurred to me that, although I’d seen Psychomany times, its sequels of varying quality and even the monumentally redundant Gus van Sant remake I’d never read the book that started it all – Robert Bloch’s Psycho.
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