psycho ii

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Norman Bates is back! Well, not exactly – but for this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt wrote about his positive but patchy memories of Psycho II, and the reasons why he doesn’t particularly want to go back and find out whether the film was really surprisingly good or whether at the time it just benefited from really low expectations (and Meg Tilly, obviously).

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I was a teenager when I first watched Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho – though at the time I’d already picked up much of the plot through cultural osmosis, including that twist. As a result, there was little in Psycho that surprised me, except for this: even with me knowing who’d get killed how, why, and by whom, the film was still supremely tense. And that’s still true now, dozens of years later: as much of a cliché as the shower scene has become, for instance, it still works. It’s still one of the best scenes of its kind, and it’s difficult to top.