Last week I checked out the new A&E series Bates Motel, with my wife and my youngest daughter Kaia. A few days earlier I had shown Kaia the 1960 classic Psycho - so we were pretty excited to see how this new show would go.
One episode in, and honestly, I'm liking it.
As the series is effectively a prequel to a story most people are very familiar with, it's interesting to see how they play with the interactions between young Norman Bates and his mother Norma. The casting is really good, both stars Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga come off as quite genuine, and both more than a little wrong - just the perfect mix of what you would expect for the characters.
The premise has them relocating to Oregon after the untimely death of Norman's father. Here they purchase a new motel and try to start a new chapter in their lives. Pretty quickly things start to go south. The police seem strangely interested in the pair and Norman's quick popularity with the girls at his new school seems to be a pretty big problem for his mother.
With a series like this everything comes down to atmosphere - if things go wrong you move quickly from creepy into farce, but so far, the tone is very nicely set and I'm definitely interested in checking out the next episode.
Doing a little prep work yesterday, I treated my 15-year-old daughter Kaia to her first viewing of the 1960 Horror Classic, Psycho.
I did this for three reasons.
1) Honestly, whether you're a horror fan or not, there really are very few films as fun to watch for the first time as Psycho. I told her nothing about the film, except that I thought she might like it and let her enjoy the experience with no knowledge of what the story would bring (totally jealous by-the-way, as I knew most of the plot points the first time I watched it) - for the record, at first she thought Norman was kind of cute.
2) Tonight on A&E the new series Bates Motel is starting, and as it follows a teenaged Norman Bates, she's probably going to either see it or hear about it - so I wanted her to see the original first.
3) In a week or two, I should be getting the 2012 film Hitchcock from my local library, and as the film is about the making of Psycho, I wanted to review the original again before I saw a story set behind the scenes.
In the end we had a pretty fun time watching the movie - at first she thought the title was a little misleading, after all, what's so psycho about a lady stealing some cash from her boss - it was pretty suspenseful however, so my daughter said the movie should have been called Suspense-o (doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?), but by the end, she admitted, the title was a pretty good one for the story.
