The latest Audient Zeitgeist movie is doing double duty, just as the one from June did double duty. That viewing of Shoah was my 7,000th movie of all time as well as being an entry in this series, and this one also serves the function of announcing what my horror theme will be for the month of October.
But first, the zeitgeist bit.
The term "shot-by-shot remake" might not have existed before Gus Van Sant made his version of Psycho in 1998.
Oh, the concept behind it might have been intuitive enough. You restage a piece of filmed material, whatever it may be, using the same camera setups that run the same amount of time as in the original work. So that also implies that the editing is the same. Usually, that would also mean the same dialogue, or at least dialogue that runs for the same amount of time so the shots can be the same length.
Film people would know what it meant, as many of them spent a lot of time aping their icons in their formative years as filmmakers, even maybe doing their own shot-by-shot remakes of parts of their favorite films. (Certainly no more than parts, in most cases.)
But in 1998, casual people became familiar with the term. It was impossible not to know that Psycho was not only a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic film, but, like, an exact remake.
And given the box office and critical response, we also immediately learned that this was a bad idea.
How exact of a remake?
Well that was a challenge for me as I watched the movie. But I'll get into that in just a moment.
Now, the tie-in to the films I'll be watching this October in honor of Halloween.
To bring you up to speed, I've done themed October viewings for three previous Octobers now. I skipped 2022, not knowing at that point that I would ultimately intend to make it an annual tradition. But 2021, 2023 and 2024 have all featured these month-long themes.
In 2021, I started with 1970s horror movies. When I got back to it in 2023, it was horror comedies. Then last year, you may remember that I slogged through all the previous Halloween movies that I hadn't seen. And when you consider that I also rewatched the original, that made for 11 total movies, and exhausted me terribly.
I don't think I will be so ambitious this October, but Psycho has given me my first movie in the new theme: horror remakes. In fact, some of the Halloween movies I watched last October would have qualified here as well.
I set out on this task with the foreknowledge that it may not be a great month for being scared. Remakes of horror movies have a pretty checkered cinematic history, and in some cases, even the originals were not that scary.
But, I think I knew the previous two Octobers would not be very scaery when I chose my previous two themes, comedies and a bunch of Halloween movies that I knew were probably bad. If my only goal were to be scared, I don't know what theme I'd choose, because over the years I have already tried to get my hands on as many movies that I thought would scare the shit out of me as I possibly could. If you were to give me one suggestion of such a movie, right now, I'd probably try to watch it by the weekend.
So there have been a lot of horror remakes over the years, and I have already seen many of them. However, aside from Psycho, at least the following others have so far gone unseen by me, and I hope to rectify that this month, pending their availability:
Carrie (2013)
Friday the 13th (2009)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)
I Spit On Your Grave (2010)
And at least one of those will also be doing double duty, giving me a movie to rank for 2025.
There will surely be one or two more, especially if I can't find some of these, but these are the only ones I've thought of already. (I might be able to watch Macon Blair's new version of The Toxic Avenger, but only if it comes down from its current $19.99 rental price on iTunes before the end of October.)
The key is I'm trying to see movies where I've already seen the original (which rules out the Australian film Patrick and its remake, which I really should see because my wife's ex-boyfriend directed it), and I'd like to focus only on movies where there aren't a bunch of other movies in the franchise to muddy the water on what's a remake and what's a reboot and what's a reheat. Friday the 13th does that a little bit, but I believe the 2009 version was conceived as a straight remake of the original, much like Rob Zombie had recently done with Halloween. (Watching all the Friday the 13th movies I haven't watched would be a way to spend an October, but it's too soon after I did that same thing last year.)
Anyway, back to the project at hand: Psycho.
One of the things I of course wanted to know was how much Van Sant et al had stayed true to Hitchcock's original movie. It has been more than 30 years since I've seen Psycho, and though there would have been value to watching it again in order to prep for the Audient Zeitgeist piece, I decided not to. Whether the movie is successful or not is not a matter of whether it exactly copies Hitchcock. A successful execution of the exercise is not the same thing as a successful movie, and I decided that for the purposes of the assessment of Psycho as a legendary bomb that would qualify it for this series, I was more concerned with why it failed as a movie, if it indeed it did fail, than whether it failed as a successful execution of the concept.
However, it wasn't possible for me to shrug off this curiosity. What I really needed was what my friend did for the first few minutes of the version of Jurassic Park he directed in which I appeared as an extra -- check out this post if you want to learn about that -- in which the real movie plays in a picture-in-picture box down in the lower left-hand corner, just to show you how closely they followed their assignment. The JP filmmakers correctly dropped this after the opening scene, having given us a flavor and proven the standards to which they held themselves. There is likely a side-by-side version out there, somewhere, given the general infinitude of the internet. But Van Sant and company did not see fit to include it in the final film, which of course makes sense.
After a while I forced myself to give up thinking about it. This was partly made possible by the fact that I could tell there were deviations. For example, you can clearly see that Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates is masturbating while he spies on Anne Heche's Marion Crane, which would not have been possible in 1960. Then, because the film is updated to 1998, the dialogue is not 100% the same, especially during the moment when Julian Moore's character says she needs to go get her Walkman. (Unintentionally funny or just funny? You be the judge.) Then there's the fact that a movie made in 1998 needs to show page after page of end credits, whereas Hitchcock's movie just goes to THE END after you see the car containing Marion's body pulled out of the swamp. To accommodate for this, Van Sant's version pulls out of the scene and lingers on it for another three or four minutes as all the credits dutifully run past.
I had thought it was possible that Van Sant would try to make a movie set in 1960, and really stick as closely to it as he could. That would have felt like a more worthwhile effort. The changes he does make feel arbitrary, and in some cases, lazy. In reading up on the movie afterward, I found that they couldn't figure out how to recreate all the shots, so in the cases where they couldn't get the blocking right, they just did a different shot. How different? I don't know, but I can tell you that the guys making the Jurassic Park I was in did not settle for such a shoddy standard.
And I think that's really the thing about this Psycho: It feels shoddy. It doesn't necessarily feel poorly acted in any way that bothered me (though I know some howled about Heche's performance at the time). It doesn't necessarily feel like it should have had a better DP. (It had Christopher Doyle, who worked with Wong Kar-Wai and was one of the best going.) The editing doesn't feel off. The settings don't feel off, as they are the same part of the Universal lot used in the original, which is still a highlight of the backlot studio tour.
It's just the whole thing is a bit ... shoddy.
And also, pointless, which was the biggest complaint people had at the time.
I think the reason people don't make shot-by-shot remakes very often is that an important thing has changed between when the movie was first made and when you're making it now: Us. The audience.
What scared us in 1960 when Psycho came out does not scare us 38 years later in the same way. Even with the gestures toward modernism that Van Sant included, whether unintentionally funny or not, he was regrettably married to an old-fashioned form of filmmaking by sticking to Hitchcock's shots. When Hitchcock used those shots, they were the cutting edge, and they feel so fresh in his hands that I think even modern audiences can watch his Psycho and still be scared by it. But I think it does depend on how many horror movies they've already seen, and I think that appreciation comes with a knowledge that it was a different time.
Anyone who had already seen Hitchcock's version -- which likely describes much of the audience for Van Sant's version -- was not going to be scared by Van Sant's version without him giving us something new. Something old worked for Hitchcock, and the fact that it can't work the same way for Van Sant is no shade on what Hitchcock accomplished in 1960.
And if Van Sant's version was some people's first exposure to horror, well, that was a great shame for them.
At the very least, I think the movie did make a significant contribution to the zeitgeist, as a cautionary tale (both for studios and audiences), and as a way to acquaint us with something you could do, but probably shouldn't.
Heck, without this version of Psycho, my version of Jurassic Park might not even exist.
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