A special holiday addition of midnight screenings, for mother.

In one of cinema’s more fortuitous twists of fate, Psycho II is essentially a re-adaptation of 1964’s Straight-Jacket, William Castle’s Psycho rip-off that, itself, only relied on the concept of Psycho to drastically reconfigure its thematic texture and imaginative logic. Like that film, Psycho II ruminates on the tortured pull of past, on whether cycles of violence inextricably perpetuate themselves or whether they diffuse and eventually decay, whether they emanate from individual souls or via cycles of society, as the unfortunate tragedy of vicious circumstances, or as the unknown endpoint of some sort of cosmic gravitational pull. Like Castle’s film, Psycho II can only play silly for long before revealing its secret: it genuinely cares about the soul of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the troubled man who, twenty-five years before, murdered a few trespassers and cleaved linear cinematic storytelling in half along with them. Under the sway of Norman’s own psychological self-splitting, Hitchcock proposed that the medium itself could not stand stable anymore.

Psycho II bristles with the consequences of that history. It trembles with disquiet not at the murderous power of a seemingly self-composed man but at what it would mean to put himself back together again, to recompose the soul of a broken man. In the original film, Bates was essentially a cipher for a fragmented world. This film posits that the society unleashed by that world does not want him to find a home in it, that it would rather ossify its instabilities in him than acknowledge them as distinctly social distortions. This film’s portrait of Norman is not a malevolent individual force. He is a lost soul tormented by unseen energies he cannot name in a film trapped by a history it does not want to claim.

Fittingly, then, Psycho II is essentially a film concerned with whether it can differentiate itself in the slasher genre, whether it can return to a society it birthed after nearly a quarter century. The original film was the patron saint of modernist horror, slashing and burning the genre’s vision of terror understood as normality corruptible by monstrous excess. Psycho was revolutionary because it offered a human-scaled portrait of thoroughly banal atrocity, in which normality itself was monstrous. A dangerous dissident, it was, but this sequel was born into an entirely different world, one populated – devoured – by debased variations on its own offspring. In a sense, Psycho II is a film consumed by whether the forces it has unleashed will have their way with the man who spawned them. In its narrative of the past coming home to haunt a reconstructed man, the film asks whether a sequel to Psycho, the non-slasher that helped spawn the genre in however belated a fashion, can retain its soul in a world where it would be so, so easy to give it up, or to sell it to the society that had bastardized its own children and commodified its anxieties.

In other words, Psycho II is less a necromancer channeling the disorienting urges of Hitch’s original than a ruminative cryptkeeper pondering its own fate, exploring what it would mean to be worthy of the genre it calls home. As a story that begins with one man stalked by his past and another young woman struggling with hers in her attempt to escape yet another mother, Psycho II is surprisingly thorny and multivalent in its ruminative gothic doublings and awareness of spectral forces beyond our immediate vision. Even the film’s psychologist says “like mother like daughter.” Writer Tom Holland’s screenplay genuinely has the fate of its predecessor – indeed the weight of history itself, and the possibility of escaping it –  on its shoulders, much as Holland’s later Fright Night would meditate on the value of gothic horror for the slasher era. The moral climax of Psycho II involves another woman trying to help Norman because she is “not living for dead people anymore,” and the film’s obvious empathy with the child is fascinatingly cut against the film’s own position as a demonic cinematic stepchild that, seemingly, didn’t need to be made. As one of the first films in the belated sequel craze, what, the film asks, is to be done with the bastard offspring abominations of itself running amok in the horror genre? What if it might be better to leave the past behind, even if Psycho is self-evidently a better film than, say, Friday the 13^th?

To that extent, director Richard Franklin infests the film with cracked-mirror images of the original, replicating its voyeuristic camera but via a different character and for a different goal, and repeating both the setting of and the style of both of the original film’s kills albeit in misplaced contexts. When we do witness kills, meanwhile, they’re self-consciously more overt, even if the undisguised bloodletting only bespeaks a different breed of suggestiveness. The one on the stairs (of course there’s one) concludes not with someone falling down after being slashed with a knife by a lone killer, as in the original film, but suddenly splaying over the side of the railing before landing on their own knife, a brutal embodiment –  disembodiment – of the horror film that proposes that the real culprit is our own human ability to destroy ourselves, or to fail to overcome those forces arrayed against us.

In its final moments, rather than a man unable to cope with the fracture of his own singular subjectivity, Psycho II fragments its characters and stories living in the dim but ever-present echo of their pasts and being coerced to project a simulacrum of others’ history, to dress up as anothers’ past so you can finally make sense of yours. While the original film presented a terrifyingly quotidian void of a killer, this one concludes in a brutal tangle of miscommunications, where people prying into each other’s pasts through many levels of transference, and fabrications of transference, turn history into a cavern in which you fall, an alleyway in which you prowl, and a pageant in which you play both your part and multiple parts. When the final kill does occur, it feels like history itself cracking up, or submitting to itself. Perkins is dangerously good here, channeling his star-making role and the role that killed his career into an abyssal man deeply aware of his capacity for violence and all-too-willing to accept society’s projections of his history. In one final, fell swoop, he ends the film with a return of the repressed and an unabashed declaration of selfhood, a character reclaiming their present life by metaphorically unburying a past self. It is also a man collapsing into history, rescinding the possibility of a future he has been told cannot be his, and which he has decided to take for himself on terms which seem at once to be a reclamation and a truly awful, catastrophic tragedy. In its final moments, the film accepts its status as “just another slasher movie,” and it presents this act as a destruction of its cinematic humanity.

Score: 8/10