By Claudia Siefen

Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock is full of those mirroring scenes and is packed with that sort of communication between the actor and the camera. The audience is kept busy to seperate these two ways of looking at … yourself. Robert Bloch, the author of the original novel “Psycho“ (1959), nourished the rumour that he found inspiration for the character Norman Bates in a mutual acquaintance: Calvin Beck was a magazine publisher and editor whose mother rarely left his side and even monitored classes at college with him. His mom continued to check on him, and Beck also beared a passing resemblance to the original Norman Bates Bloch describes in his novel: fat, greasy, with a soft, hesitant voice, “unhealthy looking.”