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The horror sequel Quentin Tarantino surprisingly prefers to the original

Mon 2 October 2023 18:45, UK

Through the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino flexed his movie geek muscles to bring us some of the decade’s most iconic movies. Establishing his distinctive style with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino showed remarkable talent in the fields of scriptwriting, directional command, and even a little acting.

Long before his rise to fame, Tarantino worked at a Video Archives rental store on Manhattan Beach. Although his passion for film had been stoked many years prior, it was here that his ambition truly blossomed. Tarantino shaped his distinctive style by taking what he saw as the greatest aspects of the directors and writers he admired and avoiding the folly of any flops he saw.

Anyone who’s listened to Tarantino and Roger Avary’s popular Video Archives Podcast can attest that the auteur is rather forthcoming with his opinions. We wouldn’t have it any other way; seeing someone so dedicated to their craft is always pleasant. However, that doesn’t mean Tarantino’s opinions are always popular.

We can get on board with his near-ubiquitous veneration of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, but on what planet is the 1983 sequel superior to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 original?

Psycho II was released 23 years after the original, and although it saw Anthony Perkins return to his role as the psychopathic motel manager, Norman Bates, Richard Franklin took over directional duties from Hitchcock, who had died in 1980.

“I’ve always been a big fan of Psycho II and a huge fan of the director, Richard Franklin, who did Road Games and Patrick before this. Those films are why Universal brought him over to do Psycho II, which was a very big deal,” Tarantino said during the Tarantino Film Festival in 2005, picking Psycho II out as a genre favourite.

Continuing, Tarantino suggested that Perkins was given a chance to show the full extent of his acting skill in the sequel.” Also, I feel that Psycho II has the very best performance by Anthony Perkins of all time,” he said. “I completely care about Norman Bates in this thing, and that’s fucked up”.

He added: “I remember at the time with friends saying if they’d just fucking left him alone, he’d been ok, alright? If that fucking Vera Miles bitch had just left him alone, he’d have been fine! He was really trying to be good, and they all got what they fucking deserved!”

As it transpires, Tarantino has held a firm, critical line to Hitchcock’s filmography. Discussing De Palma’s horror movies in his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino called one of Hitchcock’s late career movies “crap”.

“While De Palma liked making thrillers (for a little while, at least), I doubt he loved watching them,” Tarantino wrote. “Hitchcockian thrillers were, for him, a means to an end. That’s why when he was forced to return to the genre in the mid-eighties, they were so lacklustre. Ultimately, he resented having to make them and was bored with the form. Hitchcock’s Frenzy might be a piece of crap, but I doubt Alfred was bored making it.”

In an interview with Bret Easton Ellis for The New York Times, Tarantino also revealed that he has issues with Hitchcock’s 1959 classic, North by Northwest. “People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think it’s wonderful when actually it’s a very mediocre movie,” Tarantino opined. “I’ve always felt that Hitchcock’s acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further. I love Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin’s and Curtis Hanson’s Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock.”

“The 1950s held him down. Hitchcock couldn’t do what he, left to his own devices, would’ve wanted to do,” he added. “By the time he could do it in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, he was a little too old.”

Watch the trailer for Psycho II below.