Norman Bates

Who they are

Norman Bates is the young proprietor of a lonely motel off a bypassed highway, and the first person a stranger meets when she walks in out of the rain in Psycho. He is polite, boyish and a little nervous. He makes small talk and apologizes for the state of the place. Behind him, up a rise, stands a Gothic house where his mother lives. Within minutes of his first scene an audience has decided that Norman is shy, not dangerous, and that decision is the film's most important trick.

Anthony Perkins played Norman for Alfred Hitchcock in 1960 and went on to play him three more times, in Psycho II (1983), Psycho III (1986), which he also directed, and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990). The character began in a novel, Psycho (1959), by Robert Bloch, where he was a very different kind of man. The film, the sequels, a 1998 remake and the television series Bates Motel (2013 to 2017) each reinvent him, which is part of why he remains one of the most discussed figures in horror.

He is rarely described by what he does. He is described by how he is read. Norman is the character that taught popular culture to be suspicious of the quiet person with good manners, and to wonder what a likable face is hiding.

Why they became iconic

The American Film Institute ranked Norman Bates second on its 2003 list of the 100 greatest movie villains and heroes, behind Hannibal Lecter and ahead of Darth Vader. Empire and Premiere have both included him in their lists of the greatest movie characters, and Total Film placed Perkins's performance 27th on its 2009 list of the greatest screen performances.

Norman matters beyond the rankings because he changed what a screen killer could look like. Earlier horror made its monsters visibly strange: a face, a cape, a laboratory. Norman is a clean-cut young man who runs a small business. That shift opened the way for decades of killers who pass as ordinary, from the psychological thriller to the slasher film, and it made the audience a participant in the mistake of trusting him.

Defining traits

• Soft-spoken, apologetic and visibly shy, with a habit of nervous snacking that Perkins improvised.
• Bound to his mother in a way that the film hints at long before it explains.
• Sympathetic by design: Hitchcock wanted the audience on Norman's side before the story complicates that.
• Lives in an ordinary workplace, a motel, that doubles as a trap.
• Treated differently by each adaptation, from a heavy, middle-aged man in the novel to a handsome boy next door on screen.

Bloch's Norman, and the real case behind him

Robert Bloch, a Wisconsin fiction writer who had left an advertising job in Milwaukee, published Psycho in 1959. His Norman is nothing like the figure on screen: in the novel he is in his forties, short, overweight, balding and homely, a man who reads widely in occult and esoteric writers, including Aleister Crowley and P. D. Ouspensky. The setting is the fictional California town of Fairvale.

The novel is often described as a retelling of the Ed Gein case. Gein was a Wisconsin man arrested in 1957 after the disappearance of a hardware store owner in Plainfield. Bloch said the inspiration was less Gein himself than the circumstance: a quiet man in a small town who could turn out to be a monster without anyone noticing. He later added that Norman Bates did not exist until he made him up. Some accounts also link Norman to Calvin Beck, publisher of the magazine Castle of Frankenstein. Bloch sold the film rights for a small sum, reportedly receiving about $6,750 before taxes, and had little involvement in the movie.

Hitchcock and Stefano reshape the role

Hitchcock acquired the rights for $9,500 and, according to accounts, had assistant Peggy Robertson buy up copies of the novel to protect its surprises. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who had one previous film credit, found Bloch's Norman unsympathetic. His interest grew when Hitchcock proposed Perkins, and he rewrote the character as a younger, kinder person. He removed the drinking, the occult reading and the interest in pornography.

The adaptation also changed the audience's relationship with the character. In the novel, the reader spends long stretches inside Norman's head. The film keeps us outside, watching his face and listening to his halting small talk. Stefano has said he was in therapy about his own mother while writing the screenplay. His aim, as he described it, was to suggest that something was wrong with Norman without explaining or overplaying it. The result is a part that rewards a second viewing, because every pause now carries a different weight.

Anthony Perkins and the performance

Perkins was in his late twenties when the film was made. He had been a young star since Friendly Persuasion (1956), which brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and a Golden Globe, and since Fear Strikes Out (1957), in which he played baseball player Jimmy Piersall. He agreed to a $40,000 fee for Psycho. Hitchcock gave Perkins and Janet Leigh room to interpret their parts and improvise as long as the camera did not need to move, and one of Perkins's additions was Norman's habit of eating candy corn.

The performance is built from small things, hesitations and half-smiles that make Norman seem both harmless and slightly off. Contemporary reviews in New York papers praised it, though the Academy did not nominate him. The part followed him. After Psycho he bought out his Paramount contract and moved to Europe, where he won the best actor prize at Cannes for Goodbye Again (1961). The part never stopped defining him, and in 1976 he parodied it himself on Saturday Night Live.

The house, the motel and the voice upstairs

The Bates house was modeled on Edward Hopper's painting House by the Railroad, and the motel and house exteriors were built on the Universal lot, on the same stage used for the 1925 Phantom of the Opera. They still stand and are a stop on the studio tour. The design matters to the character because the house looks like his inner life: a high, narrow, dark structure that sits above a low, bright, ordinary business.

Bernard Herrmann's score, written for strings alone, gives the film its pulse. Hitchcock said about a third of its effect came from the music. The voice of Mrs. Bates, heard from the house, was performed uncredited by Virginia Gregg, Paul Jasmin and Jeanette Nolan, whose voices were used interchangeably. Filming ran from November 11, 1959, to February 1, 1960, at Revue Studios, on a budget of about $807,000. The film opened in New York on June 16, 1960, under a strict no-late-admission policy that Hitchcock enforced in theaters.

Sequels, remake and the TV prequel

The sequels turned a one-note shock into a long-lived character. Psycho II (1983) was directed by Richard Franklin, an Australian who had studied Hitchcock's methods, from a script by Tom Holland. Perkins first declined, then agreed after reading the script, which treated the film as Norman's story. It opened June 3, 1983, finished second behind Return of the Jedi, and grossed roughly $34.7 million. Jerry Goldsmith scored it, and Vera Miles returned as Lila Crane. Quentin Tarantino has called it Perkins's best work.

Psycho III followed in 1986 with Perkins in the director's chair for the first time, and Psycho IV: The Beginning in 1990 was a cable movie directed by Mick Garris, with Henry Thomas as the teenage Norman and Olivia Hussey as his mother. Gus Van Sant remade the original in 1998 with Vince Vaughn as Norman, aiming at a close copy in color. It earned about $37.1 million worldwide on an estimated $25 million budget, divided critics, and shared a Razzie for worst remake. Roger Ebert thought Vaughn miscast.

Bates Motel, created by Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin and Anthony Cipriano for A&E, ran for five seasons and 50 episodes between March 18, 2013, and April 24, 2017. Freddie Highmore played Norman and Vera Farmiga played his mother Norma, in a present-day prequel set in the fictional White Pine Bay, Oregon. Farmiga received an Emmy nomination and Highmore won a People's Choice Award. The series gave Norman something the film never had, a long adolescence, and it suggests how much room the character leaves for interpretation.

Reading Norman

Writers have argued over Norman for sixty years. Some read him as a study of a damaged mind, and others as a comment on postwar American family life, in which the mother and the motel are both traps. The film's structure is sometimes read as a lesson in identification: we like Norman, and we are disturbed by how much we like him. That idea sits close to Carol J. Clover's later work on how horror films invite viewers to share a character's position, though Clover wrote mainly about the slasher.

Critics have also noticed how the film invites us to forgive him. Hitchcock and Stefano stack the early scenes with small kindnesses. Norman is awkward, generous and self-effacing. When the plot turns, those qualities remain, and they keep the character from becoming a mere monster. That tension is why later adaptations, which add backstory, have tended to deepen him instead of explaining him away.

Influence and where to go next

Norman's influence is easiest to see in how horror treats its killers. The ordinary-looking murderer in later thrillers owes him a debt, and so does the slasher tradition that grew through the 1970s. The case that inspired him also fed other horror: the same Wisconsin crimes lie behind Leatherface, though that character is shaped into something far rougher.

Viewers new to Norman should start with Hitchcock's film and then watch Psycho II, which treats him with real tenderness. The Alfred Hitchcock entry covers the director's wider career, Halloween shows how the slasher borrowed from Psycho, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shows how far it could be pushed in the other direction.

Verified details

• Robert Bloch's novel Psycho was published in 1959.
• Hitchcock paid $9,500 for the film rights.
• Perkins's fee for Psycho was reported as $40,000.
• The Bates house was modeled on Edward Hopper's painting House by the Railroad.
• Filming ran from November 11, 1959, to February 1, 1960.
• Psycho premiered in New York on June 16, 1960.
• The Library of Congress selected Psycho for the National Film Registry in 1992.
• Psycho II opened on June 3, 1983, and finished second at the box office behind Return of the Jedi.
• Perkins directed Psycho III (1986), his first feature as a director.
• Bates Motel ran on A&E from March 18, 2013, to April 24, 2017.
• Perkins died on September 12, 1992, at age 60.

Sources and further reading

• Norman Bates, Wikipedia
• Psycho (1960 film), Wikipedia
• Anthony Perkins, Wikipedia
• Psycho II (film), Wikipedia
• Psycho (1998 film), Wikipedia
• Bates Motel (TV series), Wikipedia
• Robert Bloch, Wikipedia
• Ed Gein, Wikipedia