MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > "Robert Bloch, Author of Psycho"

"Robert Bloch, Author of Psycho"

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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We've been talking recently about differences between Hitchcock's movie of Psycho(screenplay by Joseph Stefano) versus the original 1959 novel Psycho written by Robert Bloch.

I thought I might talk a little ABOUT ..Robert Bloch.

A childhood/teenage memory: Once I knew that Robert Bloch was the "author of Psycho" his name took on a special connotation when it appeared elsewhere. Simply put, Bloch suddenly became "an emblem of the macabre" alongside Hitchcock, William Castle, Rod Serling, and(to get high falutin' about it), Edgar Allen Poe. Those names -- from the sublime(Poe) to the ridiculous(Castle) all got me thinking,"hmm...scary guy." Bloch was in there somewhere.

Bloch only got paid $9,000 for the rights to Psycho. Compare that to the rights for the bestseller Advise and Consent around the same time($250,000.) The feeling in Hollywood (and with Bloch himself) was that Psycho was "unmakeable" as a movie in late Hays Code Hollywood, so Hitchcock almost did Bloch a favor by actually buying the property.

But "Psycho" probably earned a lot more money for Bloch in TV and B-movie scriptwriting. The movies got in the ads "Screenplay by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho." And with the TV shows -- well, we Psycho fans just KNEW. Bloch wrote a Star Trek episode about Jack the Ripper as a "force through space and time" -- that was the "Psycho Star Trek." The classic Bloch short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper' became an episode of "Boris Karloff's Thriller." (BTW, Karloff can/should be mentioned with Hitchcock and Rod Serling as a macabre TV host of the 60's, but...he had that OTHER horror career, too.)

Various episodes of both "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" were from Bloch short stories or, I think, written directly for the show.

One of the Hitchcock biographies notes that after "Psycho" hit big, Hitchcock had a lunch or two with Robert Bloch and hired the writer to work up "another Hitchcock movie about a psycho," working from material about sex killers. It was meant to resemble "Shadow of a Doubt" with a suave strangler. It ultimately became Frenzy in 1972(from new material,a British novel) but Bloch was assigned to it for awhile near 1964.

Notes show that Hitchcock dropped Bloch as a writer not only because Bloch couldn't shape up the "Frenzy" material, but because Hitch didn't really much like Bloch as a writing/lunch companion. Conversely, Hitchcock LOVED Joseph Stefano(who adapted Psycho) as a writing/lunch companion, but aside from a "Marnie" treatment, never got Stefano to come aboard again. (During this period, Stefano became the creator of The Outer Limits, a show that joined The Twilight Zone, the Hitchcock series, and Thriller in macabre anthology, this time with a SciFi bent.)

Bloch's reputation as a writer for "pulp magazines" kept him from A list movie writing. His stint with Hitchcock was probably as close as Bloch got to "the big time." But he DID work with William Castle on a "Psycho" homage called Strait-Jacket (1964) which proved, sadly , that Bloch really wasn't all that good with dialogue or plotting for the big screen. I like to say -- do you want to see what Psycho would have been like if Wiliam Castle had made it? See Strait Jacket. Its not very good at all beyond the shock value(in this one, a DAUGHTER dresses up like her mother to kill people, with an axe this time. Oh, the mother is alive and Joan Crawford.) And then Bloch wrote a Castle movie called The Night Walker. (Leading Hitchcock to eventually cross Bloch off a "potential writers list" with the note: "Too much work with William Castle.")

I think Bloch got to write some British shockers, like "The Psychopath"(more mother/son stuff) and "Asylum." And I recall an American B-shocker called "The Couch" with focused on a serial killer. It was from 1962 and got "Psycho"-related advertising because of Bloch's writing it. I saw it on TV and recall a couple of poorly handled stabbing murders, that's about it.

A skim of his imdb page shows that Bloch sold TV material pretty much through the 80's. So that $9000 Psycho sale probably earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.
Bloch died at age 77 in 1994. (I actually recall where I was when I read the article about that; from a newspaper while having breakfast at a restaurant -- "Psycho author dies" caught my eye.)

This is a good place to note that Robert Bloch and Joseph Stefano had a bit of a feud, and I can prove that it lasted for decades:

When Joe Stefano wrote a thriller called The Naked Edge for 1961 release(the year after Psycho, natch, and it was Gary Cooper's final film before dying that year), the ad said "from the writer of Psycho." Robert Bloch wasn't pleased. He said "I wonder what Stefano would say if he adapted the Bible."

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

There was some mutual sniping. While Stefano felt that Bloch's novel was pulp trash that he initially didn't want to adapt for Hitchcock(the switch from obsese, creepy Norman to Anthony Perkins helped change his mind), Bloch noted that the finished film followed his novel's outline right down to the final line ("Why, she wouldn't hurt a fly.") Which is true -- from Chapter Three(Marion arrives at the Bates Motel) on. There was little for Stefano TO adapt, other than writing better dialogue for the characters. Hitchcock pretty much took charge of the cinematic murder set-pieces.

In 1974, when Richard J. Anobile published, in book form, a photobook version of Psycho, Joseph Stefano's credit was removed from the photos of the credits. Evidently Bloch had control over book versions of Psycho and had Stefano removed.

In 1998, with Bloch now dead, when Stefano "touched up" his 1960 screenplay for the 1998 Van Sant remake, Stefano evidently persuaded Van Sant to remove BLOCH's credit up front in the movie(Stefano is listed alone) and to move "From the novel by Robert Bloch" to the very end credits of the movie, in teeny-tiny type.

Oh, well -- feuds are understandable. Me, I feel that Bloch AND Stefano brought Psycho to life. Bloch was more important -- he invented the Bates Motel and House combo, he created the shower scene, it was his twist ending. But Stefano improved the dialogue in every way, and, working with Hitchcock , reworked the story and plot pieces to make for a better version(we've discussed improvements to the fruit cellar scene recently.) Still, OTHER screenwriters could have adapted Psycho for Hitch. (In fact, one did -- James Cavenaugh, whose script was rejected and he was was fired before Stefano was hired. Its in the record that Cavenaugh's version of the fruit cellar scene was a "Hays Code" version: Mother was a big giant doll with buttons for eyes!)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

In certain ways, Joe Stefano struggled as much, if not more, than Robert Bloch with his post-Psycho career. Blockbuster though it was, Psycho didn't seem to make either Stefano or Bloch bigtime Hollywood screenwriters. Stefano got a hit in The Outer Limits in terms of "staying in the memory" but not really much of a hit show(it lasted two seasons.) And then it was on to "Eye of the Cat" and a lot of TV movie work to survive.

Bloch perhaps had the more long-lasting fame. He WAS the author of Psycho, and however pulpy his writing style, it got him a lot of low-level work over the decades and a famous name. (Stephen King, a "pulp horror writer" of much greater success, wrote some nice things about Bloch as a WRITER of short stories and novels, in a book called "Danse Macabre" about horror movies, books, TV shows and radio productions.) There seems to be a Bloch book out there somewhere called "The Scarf"(about a strangler, natch) which has some cult classic cachet to it. It was never made into a movie. But I remember seeing the book on adult book tables in homes of my youth.

And this: as I read the name "Robert Bloch" over the years in TV credits and short story books, I always pronounced it "Robert BLOTCH" which seems kinda creepy in and of itself. But it turns out he pronounced it "Robert BLOCK," which sounds more like a writer of hard-boiled detective fiction to me.

Anyway, Robert Bloch. A spooky name to conjure with in the 60's and 70's. Psycho made his name and kept it "creepy." A classic will do that -- even if maybe that classic was NOT his novel, but rather: the film.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

PS. Bloch lived in Wisconsin and sold his short stories and novels from there. Hardly a "Hollywood kid." As it turned out, the inspiration for Norman Bates(and Hannibal Lecter, and Buffalo Bill, and Leatherface), Ed Gein, lived and killed in rural Wisconsin not too far from where Bloch lived. Gein lived with his dead mother. And thus Bloch got his idea for Psycho. Me, I think Hitchcock's Psycho is so far removed from the "cruddy and banal" details of Ed Gein's crimes that Gein doesn't have much to do with the movie at all. Gein didn't run a motel, kill anybody in a shower, or kill a private eye. That's "movie stuff."

PPS. A favorite Robert Bloch quote: "I'm a grown man, but I have the heart of a young boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk."

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

Bloch wrote a Star Trek episode about Jack the Ripper as a "force through space and time" -- that was the "Psycho Star Trek."

Bloch ['Blok' like 'Syko'] wrote three Star Trek eps. I think you're (implicitly) right tho' that the Jack The Ripper ep. was the best of them - it scared me as a kid for sure.

It's worth assembling links to previous discussions of The Psychopath:
https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/5b14b6bd103ce20014aa11e9/Blochs-other-Psycho-film-The-Psychopath-1966
Eye of the Cat:
https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/5c8943c056403a0ee6f4553f/OT-Eye-of-the-Cat
and Straitjacket:
https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/5c55e70fce029028e3562aa7/Psycho-and-Strait-Jacket-1964-SPOILERS-FOR-BOTH-FILMS

Worth Mentioning too that MovieChat is doing a fairly good job of maintaining old threads but any that are deemed very worthy of being preserved should be bump-posted occasionally to return them to the front of the queue. Psycho's archive goes 36 pages deep but that only covers 3-4 years, i.e., back to threads on Curtis Hanson's death & on first viewings of the big 2015 doc on De Palma.

Less popular films generate far fewer threads and often have movie-chat archives going back well over a decade. For example, I recently got around to seeing the early George Roy Hill film, The World of Henry Orient (1964). It's not a *great* film but it has its moments & charms still, esp. in the form of one of its young leads played by Tippy Walker. Reading around about the movie afterwards I came across a tribute to it in The New Yorker, which got into 'what happened to Tippy Walker?' and mentioned that Walker had posted a lot on IMDb's page on the film. Happily, all those threads from 15 years ago are still preserved on MovieChat, e.g.,
https://moviechat.org/tt0058756/The-World-of-Henry-Orient/58c725b15ec57f0478ee718a/Why-Tippy-Walker-retire-from-acting

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Bloch ['Blok' like 'Syko']

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Hah. Or "Siko."

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wrote three Star Trek eps. I think you're (implicitly) right tho' that the Jack The Ripper ep. was the best of them - it scared me as a kid for sure.

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I didn't remember that he wrote 3. I only remember the Jack the Ripper one -- which was rather a knock off of "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" -- so there you go.

Speaking of "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," while I think that story was placed in one of the Alfred Hitchcock short story collections for adults...it was also put in one of those "big hardcover" Alfred Hitchcock short story collections for KIDS. ("Spellbinders in Suspense," I think, which I got for Xmas.) As Psycho was edging its forbidden-fruit way into my consciousness on TV, I was ready all about body organs being carved out of female victims in Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper...all in my pre-teen years.

Hitch got away with putting quite a few gory short stories into his children's books. Like the Bond movies, he seemed to be preparing us for adulthood.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

It's worth assembling links to previous discussions of The Psychopath:
https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/5b14b6bd103ce20014aa11e9/Blochs-other-Psycho-film-The-Psychopath-1966
Eye of the Cat:
https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/5c8943c056403a0ee6f4553f/OT-Eye-of-the-Cat
and Straitjacket:
https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/5c55e70fce029028e3562aa7/Psycho-and-Strait-Jacket-1964-SPOILERS-FOR-BOTH-FILMS

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While I'm glad you "rescued" these Robert Bloch-related threads for us here, swanstep -- it sounds like otherwise they might disappear with time -- I'm reminded that I've "talked" here on Bloch before in those threads above, and on Stefano's Eye of the Cat, too.

But it goes like this: a certain topic will "trigger" because of certain OTHER discussions(we've been comparing Bloch book to Hitchcock/Stefano film recently) and ...voila...I decided to do a post JUST on Robert Bloch(including his feud with Stefano.) Some of this I've done before but (a) new readers arrive; (b) I seem to find new "angles" on the same material and (c) well, it can't be all OT posts around here, valued though they are.

I think what went "zoom" in my mind about Robert Bloch this time was another "back to my youth" memory -- how the very name "Robert Bloch" suddenly became very, very special once Psycho entered my world. Whenever I'd see his name on a TV show, I'd watch(often) hoping that I would be seeing something as "major" as Psycho itself. But alas...it never really was. Poor Robert Bloch -- one REALLY big classic blockbuster story to his name -- and the rest rather lesser to it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Which reminds me:

I thought it was quite weird how, when Universal's "Psycho II" went into production in 1982...suddenly there was a ROBERT BLOCH book called "Psycho II" out in 1982 as well. 22 years with no sequel to book or movie...and suddenly ...both?

I expect what happened was that Robert Bloch was not invited to write the movie "Psycho II" so he took his book rights and wrote his own.

They are quite different: in the movie, Norman Bates is declared sane and released to a diner job(he switches to managing his old motel instead after firing the sleazy new manager.)

In the Bloch book, Norman is still insane and escapes the asylum, Michael Myers-style(and by killing a nun and leaving in HER female clothes and hat)...and...after stopping by Fairvale in the dead of night to kill Mr. and Mrs. Sam and Lila Loomis in the backroom of a hardware store(they still live there, 22 years later!)...Norman makes his way to Hollywood, where cast and crew members of the movie "Crazy Lady"(aka Psycho) start getting killed by bladed instruments. Not a bad plot really...and I don't think that Norman was the ONLY psycho in that one.

Then when Psycho III came out(oh, maybe before, maybe after, I dunno) Bloch wrote "Psycho House," which posited the house and motel as a tourist attraction/theme park. I don't remember much about that one.

Someday maybe somebody should film "Robert Bloch's Psycho"(with its different killing scenes), "Robert Bloch's Psycho II" and "Robert Bloch's Psycho House" and give us an entirely different take on Norman Bates. (Since Norman went from fat in Bloch's novel to thin in Hitchcock's film, Norman isn't described physically at all in the sequels, btw.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Worth Mentioning too that MovieChat is doing a fairly good job of maintaining old threads but any that are deemed very worthy of being preserved should be bump-posted occasionally to return them to the front of the queue.

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I do that from time to time. Yet...sometimes I forget to and...my posts are lost to time. No biggie. I just re-write them from memory, except different.

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Psycho's archive goes 36 pages deep but that only covers 3-4 years, i.e., back to threads on Curtis Hanson's death & on first viewings of the big 2015 doc on De Palma.

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That's not THAT far, is it? Thus, all the stuff leading up to the making and release of "Hitchcock"(the Making of Psycho movie) in 2012 is gone. That was fun, and "new."

I recall writing about Norman's clean-up of the shower murder in a post from back around 2006 or so. Gone, gone, gone. Except I've written about THAT scene a time or two more since. In a different way.

Meanwhile, I think the last post from anyone on the Frenzy board is over a year old. And its mine....

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Less popular films generate far fewer threads and often have movie-chat archives going back well over a decade.

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Makes sense.

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For example, I recently got around to seeing the early George Roy Hill film, The World of Henry Orient (1964). It's not a *great* film but it has its moments & charms still,

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In the US, that one used to show up on "CBS Thursday Night Movie" a lot. I recall liking Elmer Bernstein's rather sweeping, almost Western-like (but somehow sad) score for the NYC-set film(The trees of the city and Central Park became its "West."). Peter Sellers was running about being rather funny in the film(as a ladies man conductor), but it was really a sad, dramatic film, focused more on the two girls stalking Sellers than on Sellers himself.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

esp. in the form of one of its young leads played by Tippy Walker. Reading around about the movie afterwards I came across a tribute to it in The New Yorker, which got into 'what happened to Tippy Walker?' and mentioned that Walker had posted a lot on IMDb's page on the film. Happily, all those threads from 15 years ago are still preserved on MovieChat, e.g.,
https://moviechat.org/tt0058756/The-World-of-Henry-Orient/58c725b15ec57f0478ee718a/Why-Tippy-Walker-retire-from-acting

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That was some great, touching reading but the question is begged...how are we sure its really HER? Did she say so somewhere. It does seem too specific and personal to be anyone else, though.

I have read that biggies like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg like to "lurk" among movie chat rooms . ("Vox populi," Hanks calls it.) Funny to think that sometimes, we MIGHT be talking to a biggie and not know it.

And I've definitely seen some material from our IMDb Psycho chats turn up in articles ---notably the pinpointing of the fictional Fairvale to Shasta County, California(near the city of Redding.)