Psycho II (1983)

Psycho II arrives twenty-two years after the original, with Anthony Perkins returning to the role that defined him and Richard Franklin directing as a devoted student of Hitchcock. The premise is a small, mean joke dressed as a psychological thriller: Norman Bates is declared sane, released, and handed a job at a diner, where the world promptly begins conspiring to prove the diagnosis wrong. It grossed thirty-four million dollars on a five million dollar budget and opened second behind Return of the Jedi, which tells us something about the summer of 1983 and nothing whatsoever about social consciousness.

The film's treatment of mental illness deserves cataloguing, though not in the way a contemporary audience might anticipate. Insanity here is a slasher mechanism, a switch flipped for suspense, and Norman's torment is played for sympathy and dread in equal measure. There is no advocacy, no reframing, no impulse to educate. Lila Loomis returns as a woman bent on revenge, and the screenplay dispatches her with a cruelty the Washington Post found revolting at the time. Race, sexuality, class, and the environment do not enter the frame. The cast is uniformly white. Nobody lectures anybody about anything.

This is a studio horror sequel from the early Reagan years, made by craftsmen who wanted to honor a dead master and sell tickets. It carries no agenda beyond the box office. Every category of modern cultural instruction we apply to films of this vintage returns a clean zero, and I record that without disappointment. The movie is what it is: a competent, melancholy little thriller about a man the world has already convicted.