For one of my books clubs last month I got to read a book I've been looking forward to for a long time, Daphne Du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca.
I saw Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 adaptation of the book a few years ago when working my way back through all the winners of the Best Picture Oscar and absolutely loved it. The film was haunting, captivating and included Judith Anderson as the villainous Mrs. Danvers, a character which still sits quite high on my list of most terrifying movie villains.
The book (which has never been out of print since its publication), focuses on a young woman who marries a considerably older man and finds herself at in charge of a large manor house, Manderley, where her husbands last wife, Rebecca ruled until her untimely death.
The novel focuses on how our narrator and unnamed heroine (often referred to as either "Dear" or "The Second Mrs. De Winter") attempts to deal with a household and environment still held under the sway of her husbands dead wife.
The book does have a lot in common with Bronte's Jane Eyre; young girl marries older man, mysterious goings on in the house, a tragic secret, etc., but is well worth reading on its own as Du Maurier has created one of the most thrilling reads about a young bride I've ever come across.
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.
