Audient Zeitgeist and first themed October horror: Psycho

This is the fifth and penultimate entry in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching six movies that had some significance in the zeitgeist but which I had not previously watched.

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. 

What the hell is ScarJo doing in a lame-ass Jurassic World movie?

Take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

There have been six movies in the Jurassic franchise -- or, three movies each in two separate Jurassic franchises, if you prefer -- and I have seen each one of them in the theater.

You can't say this for Pixar, as you discovered from my most recent post. You can't say this for James Bond, and of course you can't because I wasn't born when some of them came out, but I'm talking about even the recent ones. You can't say this for Mission: Impossible. You can't say this for a lot of series with a large quantity of movies in them.

And you won't be able to say this for the Jurassic movies anytime soon, because we already have plans to go see Jurassic World: Rebirth next week in the theater with our kids, during their school holidays. (By the way, does anyone have any concerns that there will now be more Jurassic World movies than there were Jurassic Park movies? Do we have to change the way we think about the whole franchise, or the two franchises in comparison to each other?)

But notwithstanding my own demonstrated sense of loyalty, I still think I can say that the Jurassic movies, generally speaking, are lame, and that I am ashamed at myself for continuing to think big-screen dinosaurs are going to knock my socks off like they've only done two times before.

If you want the God's honest truth, the one of these six movies I've enjoyed the most was the original Jurassic World. When I saw Jurassic Park in 1993, yes, I was wowed by the dinosaurs, but I left the movie feeling a little less toward it than I hoped and expected I would. The other four were mediocre to bad.

So I do believe I can say:

What the hell is Scarlett Johansson doing here?

Scarlett Johansson is an actress I respect unconditionally. She will probably never win an Oscar, but she always makes good choices and she always shows up, even in movies that ultimately proved not to be so good. In most cases -- maybe not all, but most -- they were still good choices that happened to turn bad.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is not a good choice.

Could it be a good movie? Sure it could. A lot of people out there seem to like director Gareth Edwards more than I do. He's helmed a Godzilla movie and a Star Wars movie. In many respects, he's the right man for the job.

But it's still a seventh movie in a series in which far more pedestrian actors than Scarlett Johansson had been plying their time.

Before I get the hate mail -- do people still send mail? -- I should rush to say that I don't find the trio from the original film, that being Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, to be pedestrian. Maybe none of them are out-and-out stars, but they are all compelling presences, and Jurassic Park would not be what it is without Goldblum inexplicably going around with his shirt off.

But when you move to the second trilogy, then you've got Chris Pratt, and Chris Pratt's charm has long since worn off, if you ask me. 

Maybe I'm letting some of the Hillsong Church stuff rub off on my perception of him on screen, and maybe that's not fair. But by year 15 or so of us knowing Pratt, and year 10 or so of him being a genuine movie star, we've all gotten one too many plucky animated characters and dumb heroes with their vacant charm to really find him fresh anymore.

Pratt's primary co-star in those movies was Bryce Dallas Howard, who I do like, but who I find to be an actress who has gotten a toe in the door through nepotism and then found just enough charm to keep that door open, though not enough to really earn my respect.

I respect the hell out of Scarlett Johansson. I do not respect this choice. No way she should be taking Pratt's and Howard's sloppy seconds.

But you know what else just happened to Scarlett Johansson? And by "just" I mean in November?

She turned 40. And I think, as much as it pains me to say it, that milestone may have pushed her into "career maintenance mode."

Johansson has such a hold on our affections, and still our prurient desires, that it may be hard to believe she's about to see a major change in the types of roles for which she can be/should be cast. But Hollywood rarely makes exceptions. Women over 40 have it tough.

I'm hoping that I'll go to see Jurassic World: Rebirth next week and it'll be incredibly fun, and that it'll seem like another win for ScarJo.

I'm worried, though, that it will not, and that our days of having Scarlett Johansson top our marquees may be dwindling. 

How I became a (very small) part of a future cult classic

I watched Jurassic Park on Thursday night, for what I thought was only the second time all the way through. 

After doing so, I consulted my list of movies watched multiple times and it appeared on there. However, given that this list was made in retrospect sometime in the last 15 years, based on assessments made at that time, a previous second viewing is not definitively verifiable. 

The point is, this movie that's considered a childhood classic for my generation or the generation just after mine -- I was 19 when it came out -- is not one of my own personal cultural touchstones. If I haven't seen it only twice now, I've seen it only three times. (Though of course, bits of it are such a part of the zeitgeist that I've seen certain scenes dozens of other times.)

So how is it that I ended up appearing in a shot-by-shot remake of this movie?

Well I'm about to tell you.

First off, the movie. I'll post a couple links so I don't have to fully explain all the wonderfulness that is Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux. Here's the link to an article about it in The Guardian. And here's the trailer:

I won't send the link to the video of Sam Neill wishing the project well, and I'll stop getting ahead of myself at this point. 

If we want to start longer in the past, I'm close friends with the brainchild behind this absurd and legally shaky project -- more on that in a minute -- who you'll see quoted in that article and who you'll see in the trailer as the Muldoon character, played originally by Bob Peck.

Might as well name him, since the above article does anyway: John.

John founded the review site that I took over five years ago, when he could no longer fit it in to his list of priorities. We were close friends before and have remained close friends since, though John now lives 90 minutes away in the aforementioned Castlemaine, plus has been doing stuff like this for the past three years, so I've only seen him about once a year during that time.

One of those was last July, when I went down for a single day of shooting on this crazy, quixotic endeavor. Although the concept was to use exclusively Castlemaine locals in the key roles, to complement the exclusively Castlemaine settings, any of John's mates from, well, anywhere were invited to show up and serve as extras. 

Although John would regularly put out calls to a WhatsApp chat, inviting people to a shoot where extras were needed, I wasn't able to work it out until the very last day of extras shooting. I was determined to appear in this project and I almost missed my chance. But I did get there, for a shoot located at a high school using their science lab facilities, which doubles as the lab we see John Hammond show his guests, where the scientists are cultivating the dinosaur eggs. I had the duty of appearing on screen reading a book (which is the best look you get at me in the whole film) and you can see my hands placing an egg into a basket with other eggs (which is my most significant contribution). After we finished shooting this, I also changed wardrobes and appeared as a worker outside the Jurassic Park headquarters. The action I chose to pantomime was sawing a fence, though to be honest, I have no idea why that would be something my character would be doing.

It was great fun and I knew there was no chance I could be cut out of the final film, because all the footage was going to appear in the film. That's what you have to do in a shot-by-shot remake. 

A few months ago we started hearing about a premiere date at the single-screen cinema there in Castlemaine. It had always been the plan to show the film a couple times on one weekend and then that would be the end of it. We'll see if that's the end of it, but with all the copyright infringement involved in the project, not the least of which is the use of all of John Williams' music, there was no way to envision it as something that would reach a wide audience or involve any profit whatsoever. In fact, the tickets would be given out for free.

That premiere date was this past Friday night, with two showings on Saturday and one more still expected today. Which is why I watched the movie on Thursday night, to have it in my brain, to mentally store away all the individual moments that I wanted to see how they would recreate on essentially no budget. (They estimate they spent about $3,000, but the vast majority of the film was made on the backs of volunteers who were as interested in this crazy idea and its brief moment of public existence.)

The point of this post is not to go into great detail about my experiences for a night in Castlemaine, but I'll mention I got there around 4:30 on Friday and had a 6 o'clock dinner with another two ReelGood writers and their young son. I didn't know who else I would know would be at the premiere -- the two I had dinner with were going the next morning -- so I rocked up by myself to the red carpet, dressed as well as I could manage on short notice (John sent out a message the day before saying they would be dressing up) in my only slightly rumpled sports jacket, and selected a seat in the balcony. John introduced the film with a nice speech beforehand, they showed two era appropriate trailers (The Last Action Hero and Sleepless in Seattle) and then we were off and running. Afterward, cast and crew appeared on stage for a Q&A, and the biggest surprise of the night came when the crowd finally filed out. I expected to just give John a hug and a congratulations and then get back to my motel room -- like you would for a groom at his wedding since you wouldn't expect any one-on-one time -- but John actually invited me back to his house for a drink, where I stayed until after 1. (The film let out about 11:30.) This felt extra luxurious because his wife, who I cherish, was also there. She played the Wayne Knight character in the movie in a hilarious performance.

Which makes a good transition into what I thought of the film itself. Well, it was both incredible and hilarious. John made a good comment in the Q&A where if you try to do this intentionally poorly, it's just shit, but if you try to do it as well as you can, it's funny. And Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux was funny not because it was bad, but because of how close it was to being really, genuinely good. I mean, I sort of think it is genuinely good -- the actors are pretty amazing, as you can tell from the trailer above -- but what I mean is, we were laughing because we could not believe they could so closely approximate the look and feel of Jurassic Park, in terms of the locations, the line readings, the actual close appearance of some of the actors to their counterparts, and even the effects. Obviously there were a lot of models and instances of forced perspective involved, but you would not believe how smartly they solved some of the obvious problems of a project like this, while still keeping the same camera angles. And John told me afterward that some guy in Texas did the digital dinosaurs for them, and they actually look really good -- never mistakeable for actual Hollywood digital dinosaurs, but good enough to leave me as delightfully surprised as I felt throughout.

And some of the comedy was just inherent. Since the movie was made over the course of three years, the two kid actors grew from something like age 11 to age 14, or maybe older than that. The male had grown so tall by the time they filmed the scene where he's carried after his tussle with the electric fence, that the Alan Grant actor had to throw him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, whereas the boy in the film is actually cradled. Stuff like this -- and like the fact that the Knight and Samuel L. Jackson characters were both played by women -- leaned into the whimsical ways they intended to give this movie their own flavor. The audience ate it up and found themselves in a delirium of recognizing neighbors on screen and just having a blast generally.

There's one important star I forgot to mention, which is John's dog Basil, who played any goat in the film that a dinosaur needed to eat. This dog sat on my lap for most of the time I was at John's house afterward.

Here are some pictures from the event. Modesty and I don't know? privacy? will prevent me from sharing the selfie I took of John and me in front of the theater, but you can certainly see these, including my name in the credits:

Obviously, the showing of the movie did not get shut down, though that was a realistic fear right up until go time. Whatever legal apparatus extends out of Steven Spielberg's creative output (I'm not sure if it's Universal or Dreamworks) did not obviously see it fit to squash this little DIY effort that had made a splash in the local media. Even if they felt threatened by it, which I doubt, they likely knew that the story of them shutting it down might go even more viral than the story of these plucky Castlemainians making it in the first place, and that's not a good look.

However, there does not seem any viable way that this film will be seen by a larger audience -- which, as I understand it, is exactly how John wants it. Not without Universal/Dreamworks taking some if not all of the profits, maybe leaving a scant 1% for the filmmakers if they were feeling really generous.

I do think there's a world where that could happen, though. I do think there's a world where we all -- where you all -- get to see Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux, and even though you won't experience the joy of seeing your neighbors appear in a remake of Jurassic Park, you will be charmed and tickled generally by everything else about it.

So that's why I'm calling it a future cult classic, which it may be even if, perhaps especially if, few people can see it. It's a movie lots of people will know about, and seeing it, in whatever way may one day be possible, might be considered a rare treat. 

And yes indeed, I am a (very small) part of that.