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My current students' reaction to Gus Van Sant's alleged shot-by-shot remake of Psycho indicates that Van Sant's tour de force has now fallen victim to the ultimate historical irony. Universal's scheme to release the film in 1998 as a loss leader that would rekindle interest in their most prestigious property just in time for the centennial rerelease of Hitchcock's Universal backlist on DVD has now been transformed into just one more old movie, roughly contemporaneous with the Hitchcock original, which my students have heard of but have not seen. Only the Hitchcock establishment continues to keep faith with its original outrage, as the flood of overwhelmingly hostile Internet commentary on the film has sedimented into the quarterlies. I except from this general rule three critics in the 2001-02 Hitchcock Annual: Paula Marantz Cohen, who defends Van Sant's film as "a consummate hybrid of art and criticism" (132); Steven Jay Schneider, who contextualizes the film as "'a Van Sant film'" rather than "a slavish imitation of the original" (142); and Constantine Verevis, who points out that since "each and every film is remade-i.e., dispersed and transformed-in its every new context or configuration," Van Sant's film differs from the long cycle of earlier films extending or quoting from Psycho-Psycho 2, Dressed to Kill, and so on-"not in kind, but only in degree" (157). I would like, in this essay, to extend the implications of Verevis's remark by engaging with several more disapproving commentators on Van Sant's film, but the principal commentator with whom I shall be arguing is myself as I sat watching the remake on its opening night.
As soon as something like Saul Bass's credits, now resplendent in black and green, began to race across the screen, accompanied by Danny Elfman's reorchestration of Bernard Herrmann's classic score, the young man sitting next to me leaned over and murmured to his date, "I'm so scared." The implication of his remark was clear: You call this a scary movie? I'm way beyond this. Of course, the implication I drew myself was rather different: What a jerk. Connoisseurs of film fright may know of instances in which the credits manage, or for that matter intend, to scare the audience, but I doubt that such cases represent the norm....