Sketch o’the Week: Anthony Perkins!

Mother? It’s another classic horror icon subject for this week’s sketch… Anthony Perkins in his role as Norman Bates from the Alfred Hitchcock 1960 masterpiece “Psycho”! There are a lot of interesting facts about this film, here’s I few I learned about when researching the movie for the parody Desmond Devlin and I are doing in our CLAPTRAP book:

Despite Hitchcock’s fame and the commercial success of his previous films, Paramount did not want to back “Psycho”, considering it to be a “sleazy horror movie”. As a result, Hitchcock had a shoestring budget to work with and was deferred a lot of the rights to the film.

That’s why he shot it in black and white… not for artistic reasons but to save money.

Because it was in black and white, they used chocolate syrup rather than fake blood for any blood onscreen, as it showed up better in black and white.

This was also the first film in Hollywood history to feature a toilet flushing both onscreen and in sound. Hitchcock wanted to include it for “realism” but knew the studio would demand it be cut, so he made the flush part of the plot (Marion flushes some incriminating evidence down the toilet) so it would have to stay.