Digi-Schlock: THE PSYCHO LEGACY (Shout! Factory DVD)

One of the more enjoy­able recent trends in the field of hor­ror genre DVD’s is that of the extras-packed “series doc­u­men­tary.”  Horror film series like Halloween, Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street have all got­ten DVD-based ret­ro­spec­tives that sup­ple­ment their main fea­tures with a plethora of extras that allow the hard­core genre fan to delve deeply into the minu­tiae their cin­e­matic obses­sion has to offer.  Shout! Factory has served up a fresh addi­tion to this trend with their recent 2-DVD set of The Psycho Legacy and fans will be happy to know it fits the mold nicely.

The main fea­ture is pre­sented full-frame — the same ratio as the inter­view footage that forms its back­bone — and looks as sharp and col­or­ful as such a straight­for­ward video pre­sen­ta­tion can.  The pro­duc­ers stick to a sim­ple 2.0 stereo mix for the main fea­ture and this suits it well, allow­ing the viewer to con­cen­trate on the talk-driven nature of the piece but also mak­ing solid use of the occa­sional bit of score by Jermaine Stegall.

The same can be said for the look and sound of the extras: the only quib­bles are a few brief moments where the mix­ing on the “Shooting Psycho II” fea­turette allows the music to be become a lit­tle too promi­nent in the sound­scape (thank­fully, these instances are brief and not too distracting).

In keep­ing with obses­sive com­pletist approach of today’s horror-doc DVD’s, The Psycho Legacy appro­pri­ately adds around three hours worth of bonus fea­tures to sup­ple­ment the main attrac­tion.  On the first disc, there is an exten­sive series of deleted scenes and extended inter­views.  The deleted scenes are mainly short bits, some­times exten­sions of exist­ing scenes, but they offer up some fun mate­r­ial.  The best moment in this area is a story that Stuart Gordon tells about how Perkins helped him out­wit some clock-watching pro­duc­ers dur­ing a shoot for one of his films.

The extended inter­views are more sub­stan­tial, some­times offer­ing between 15 and 20 min­utes’ worth of mate­r­ial depend­ing on who is inter­viewed.  There’s plenty of inter­est­ing stuff in this area that didn’t fit the con­fines of the doc­u­men­tary: for instance, Katt Shea talks about how she used Psycho III as a learn­ing expe­ri­ence to pre­pare for her debut direct­ing gig on Stripped To Kill and Charles Edward Pogue talk­ing about the con­cept he devel­oped for a fourth Psycho the­atri­cal film that never got used.  Also wor­thy of note are the extended Diana Scarwid and Henry Thomas inter­views because both really get into the tech­ni­cal ele­ments of their act­ing work in the Psycho films.

The sec­ond disc is entirely devoted to a series of fea­turettes designed to flesh out addi­tional areas that wouldn’t fit the doc­u­men­tary.  There’s a short tour of the Bates Motel set on the Universal Studios lot, a brief mon­tage of sound clips from a Psycho reunion panel, a piece where crit­ics and fans dis­cuss Robert Bloch’s Psycho nov­els, a ses­sion with edi­tor Andrew London and writer Tom Holland where they go over var­i­ous Psycho II mem­o­ra­bilia while dis­cussing their mem­o­ries of work­ing on the film and a quick chat with the founder of the “Psycho Movies” web­site.  Elsewhere, a visit with a Psycho mem­o­ra­bilia col­lec­tor and a inter­view piece with artists who make Ed Gein-themed art allow the view­ers to get up close and per­sonal with the extremes of Psycho fandom.

That said, the two most inter­est­ing fea­turettes on disc two are an inter­view with Psycho II cin­e­matog­ra­pher Dean Cundey and a video of a Q&A ses­sion that Anthony Perkins did for a hor­ror con­ven­tion in 1988.  The Cundey inter­view sup­ple­ments the Psycho II sec­tion of the doc­u­men­tary by giv­ing us an insider’s per­spec­tive on how the visu­als were assem­bled: Cundey dis­cusses the visual chal­lenges of shoot­ing a sequel to a Hitchcock film and the meth­ods of study he and Richard Franklin used to approach this task.  The Perkins inter­view is a delight: despite its jit­tery, fan-shot look, it is tons of fun to watch because Perkins is a witty, fast-talking racon­teur who quickly gets the horror-fan crowd eat­ing out of the palm of his hand.  Anyone who appre­ci­ates this still-underrated actor’s work will find it a very reward­ing view.

Thus, the film­mak­ers have assem­bled a gen­er­ous and infor­ma­tive pack­age for The Psycho Legacy.  If you’ve ever been inter­ested in the Psycho series, this set offers you many ways to explore that inter­est and is thus a wor­thy value for the hor­ror fan.

The Psycho Legacy The Ultimate Retrospective on the Most Influential Horror Series of All Time!In 1960, Director Alfred Hitchcock unleashed the mother-loving, mur­der­ous Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) onto screens in Psycho and scared audi­ences sense­less. With its shock­ing shower scene and unheard-of-at-the-time twist end­ing, it single-handedly changed the hor­ror genre for­ever. Psycho was so suc­cess­ful that it spawned three sequels, one remake, one TV series pilot, count­less imi­ta­tors and is now con­sid­ered the “grand­fa­ther of mod­ern hor­ror”. The Psycho Legacy is the first doc­u­men­tary to unravel the screen­writ­ing, cast­ing and direct­ing of all of the Psycho films and reveals sev­eral sur­prises and insights that every fan of this clas­sic fran­chise will want to know.Director: Robert GalluzzoStars: Robert Loggia, Olivia Hussey, Henry Thomas, Diana ScarwidIncludes never-before-seen inter­view footage with Anthony Perkins and ultra rare inter­views with stars of the sequels.