25 Years Ago, Gus Van Sant Remade Psycho and Predicted the Future of Hollywood

The film industry loves remakes. What better way to ensure audience interest than to redo something that worked so well the first time around? Complaining about Hollywood’s addiction to recycling beloved works is a tradition as old as the industry itself, although the problem certainly feels more pressing nowadays in the era of endless franchises and IP addictions. While there are exceptions to the rule, it seems as though modern studio-mandated remakes have only gotten more homogenous and less necessary. There are few truly sacred cows that won’t be plundered for more content. One exception is notable, however, and you can thank Gus Van Sant’s Psycho for ensuring that remaking Hitchcock has remained off-limits in Hollywood. What few could have foreseen was how one of the most infamous remakes in cinematic history paved the way for our current predicament. 

In the mid-’90s, Gus Van Sant became an unexpected commercial success. Good Will Hunting‘s Oscar wins and $225.9 million worldwide gross turned the king of queer indie cinema into a hot commodity for the mainstream. Like many a director before him, he used this boost in clout to get a passion project greenlit. His idea? To remake Psycho, perhaps the most iconic serial killer thriller ever made. To be specific, he wanted to remake it shot-for-shot. Somehow, Universal Pictures agreed to it. 

When asked why he wanted to remake the film in this manner, Van Sant responded, “Why not? It’s a marketing scheme. Why does a studio ever remake a film? Because they have this little thing they’ve forgotten about that they could put in the marketplace and make money from.” 

It’s a callous answer, but a pragmatic one that cuts through the industry bullshit to get to the heart of the matter. Hollywood remakes things because they are easy to produce and promote. Yet Van Sant’s vision still proved puzzling to many—the ultimate exercise in redundancy. 

It’s not accurate to say that the 1998 Psycho is identical to the Hitchcock original. The basic shots are copied, yes, but so much is different. The setting is moved to the modern-day, which adds an anachronistic quality to the plot of Marion Crane being unable to settle down with a divorced man and having to hide their affair in seedy motels. The violence is more explicit, in part because shooting in color will do that, and the sexual subtext is made text (particularly when Norman Bates masturbates while peeping into Marion’s motel room). During the murder sequences, Van Sant splices in surreal images that feel like suppressed memories or a nightmare that haunts the victims in their final moments. Simply adding real blood changes the chemistry. 

The most notable changes come from the actors. Anne Heche’s Marion is more impish, a sly fox of a woman who seems keenly aware of how men see her. In the original film, Janet Leigh’s Marion is achingly devoted to her lover. When he sardonically comments that she can lick the stamps for the alimony payments he makes to his ex-wife, she responds, “I’ll lick the stamps” with earnestness. When Heche says it, she’s eyeing up Viggo Mortensen’s dick and making it a punchline. Speaking of Mortensen, his version of Sam is pure fuckboy. When he is tasked with pretending to be the boyfriend of Marion’s sister, Lila, he takes to the prospect with far too much enthusiasm. Lila is played by Julianne Moore as a stomping power lesbian, obsessed with her Walkman, who can barely stomach having Sam near her. Vince Vaughn was dinged for seeming too unnerving off the bat, a stark contrast to Anthony Perkins’ sweet Norman whose turn to unsettling makes for one of the scariest moments in the original film. Yet, in the ‘90s, wouldn’t you be more aware of the dangers of a lone man in the middle of nowhere? 

Critics, of course, hated the Psycho remake. Camille Paglia commented that the only reason to watch it was “to see Anne Heche being assassinated.” Roger Ebert declared it to be pointless and inappropriate. Audiences avoided it like the plague, and the only reason it didn’t sweep the Razzies was because Joe Eszterhas and the Spice Girls had movies out that year. Since then, the industry has steered clear of remaking Hitchcock, although a new adaptation of Vertigo’s source material is apparently in the works with Robert Downey Jr. 

Van Sant always viewed Psycho more as an experiment than a commercial release for the masses. In retrospect, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the guy who made Gerry and adapted Shakespeare’s Henry IV into My Own Private Idaho turned a Psycho remake into an art installation. That’s really the best way to watch the film, to view it less as a traditional Christmas release than as a costly experiment-slash-troll against a system that turns every piece of art into a commodity. Psycho may not be the most obviously queer film in the Van Sant canon, but it is pure drag in its self-aware wink to the audience as it tries to replicate the impossible. It’s not hard to imagine Heche doing this performance in front of a screen as a lip-sync while an audience throws dollar bills at her. 

It’s ostensibly the same movie, yet everything is different. These aren’t the same characters, that Bernard Herrmann score feels new, and the inimitably ‘90s spin on a ‘60s film pushing against the Production Code cannot help but mean something else. A 1998 Psycho reveals just how much nearly four decades of change can impact even the most ageless stories. Repeating something until it becomes uncanny digs into the taboos of sex, violence and criminality that Hitchcock laid bare, and makes a too-cool-for-school Gen X crowd question it all. It turns a Hitchcock film into a Gus Van Sant one, testing the auteur theory to its limits.

Nowadays, the idea of a shot-for-shot remake of a classic is still considered pointless by most, yet it’s now a default mode for major studios. Disney has spent well over a decade translating its animated films to live-action, changing so little of the aesthetic and tone that they feel more like theme park attractions than true narratives. Critics quickly grew tired of this formula, but remakes of The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid made billions. Franchise filmmaking has never been more generic, with assembly line productions like the Marvel Cinematic Universe rigidly committed to a tone and pallor that cannot change regardless of who sits in the director’s chair. It’s no longer desecrating a sacred object to do remakes in this manner; it’s good business. Van Sant called it a “marketing scheme” back in 1998, after all. Everyone else just caught up in the 25 years since.

Contrary to popular belief, Van Sant’s Psycho remake isn’t pointless. Van Sant wanted to prove that replication is not the same thing as creation, yet by doing so, he made one of the most beloved thrillers in Hollywood history his own. Would that all remakes had such ambition. 

Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.