“Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.” –Sue Grafton (from I is for Innocent)
By PJ Parrish
It’s getting toward late Octoer, so something wicked this way is coming. I love Halloween. It’s like a welcome breath of stale air just before we’re lost in the miasma of Pumpkin spice and pine cones.
(Sorry…but I won’t apologize for my dark heart)
I also love creepy movies and books. While browsing in a Good Will store this week, I found an old paperback of Robert Bloch’s 1959 book Psycho. I would guess that most of you, like me, have never read the book. We were terri-reared on the movie. Which with its perfect casting and sinister psychology, is pretty much is etched in our nightmares.
Two things always give me the heebie-jeebies about Psycho the movie. First, Hitchcock shot it in a stark chiaroscuro style. Black and white, everything we see is in shadows and flashes of light. Like Janet Leigh driving in the black rain, blinded by oncoming headlights. Norman’s mother moving across a lone white-lit window in the black maw of the Bates mansion, And even Marion’s clothes — she first appears in white bra and slip in the hotel room with lover Sam Loomis. But after she steals the $40,000, her underwear shifts to a black bra and slip, signaling her moral crossing and loss of innocence.
The second thing that creeps me out is Bernard Herrmann’s unnerving score. Herrmann was the beating-heart behind all of Hitchcock’s movies. Hitchcock wanted the famous shower scene to be just silence but Herrmann talked him into the screeching violins. Here’s a sampling. Note the initial quiet but driving urgency as Marion begins her flight and how it keeps relentlessly and inevitably moving her down the black road to the neon VACANCY sign, a seemingly light in the night..
I was surprised, when reading the book, how different it is from the movie. As in all books vs movies, there’s deeper exploration of each character’s psychology. Some key plot scenes are different. The novel opens inside the Bates house with Norman arguing with his mother. The movie opens in a hotel room with Marion and Sam Loomis in bed. In the book Mary (renamed Marion for the movie) and Norman share a meal inside the Bates house. In the film, they eat together in the motel office, under the stare of dead stuffed birds — while Hickcock keeps the house mysterious until later.
And then there’s the shower scene. I was shocked when, in the novel, Mary was beheaded with a large knife. We all knows what happens to her in the movie. (By the way, Hitchcock used Hersey’s chocolate syrup for the blood and had a prop man stab a knife into a melon to make the grisly sound.)
I liked Bloch’s book, It’s tightly written, very short and fast-paced. Norman is oddly sympathic, an overweight book-geek with glasses. Bloch relies on stream of consciousness narrative to capture his loneliness and fractured psyche. Mary has her own demons — she had to care for her dying mother, giving up her future so her sister Lila can go to college. Life has passed Mary by. From the book, here’s Mary thinking, after she psycholgically snaps, steals the money and goes on the lam:
All at once she could hear the sullen patter of the rain and sense the sigh of the wind behind it. She remembered the sound, because it had rained like that the day Mom was buried, the day they lowered her into that little rectangle of darkness.
Which resonates later when Norman Bates says:
“We all go a little mad sometimes”
As much as I love Psycho the movie, I almost wish I had read the book first. Mary is such a sympathtic character, whose life was cut short by her mother’s death and then again by Norman’s mother’s knife. But every scene of Hitchcock’s classic is so etched in my brain that it overshadowed the subtlies of Bloch’s thriller, which leaves so much more to the imagination.
Such is the tug and pull of book vs movie, especially in the thriller-horror genre. I can think of at least a dozen other examples we could argue about — which is better? — among them:
- Rosemary’s Baby.
- The Exorcist
- Silence of the Lambs
- Almost anything by Stephen King.
And my favorite: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Lucky for me, I read the book before I saw the movie. I read it when I was only about thirteen. It scared the daylights out of me. The movie is equally brilliant. There’s this one scene that haunts to me to this day and it’s in both the book and movie:
Eleanor and Theodora are sharing a room and a bed. As terrifying noises—including what sounds like a child being tortured in the walls—echo through the room, Eleanor blindly reaches out and clutches a hand in the dark for comfort. When the lights come on, Eleanor looks over and sees that Theodora is actually sitting up on the other side of the bed, completely out of arm’s reach.
Horrified, Eleanor stumbles back into the corner and asks the famous closing line of Chapter 5 — “God, God—whose hand was I holding?”
The hairs are standing up on my neck as I write this. Sweet dreams…
This is the playbook I’ve built from 30 years in the business: what producers want, how deals get made, and the mistakes that kill great projects. 
By Elaine Viets
If you’ll pardon a little BSP, Beyond the Frame is now out in the world. This is a stand alone, although there’s a possibility it might spin off another book. Or two. Not something I had in mind when I started writing, but as the book drew to a close and I was doing all the editorial reading, I noticed some potential sequels. Subconscious at work?
Agatha Christie Room
