Sunday, September 1, 2019

Is The Birds a Prequel to Psycho? pt 1



Melanie Daniels in The Birds said her mother ran off with an interesting character:

My mother?... She ditched us when I was 11 and ran off with some hotel man in the East.  

Oddly, Norman Bates’ mother has an interesting connection to the same industry

...a few years ago, Mother met this man. And he, he talked her into building this motel.    

Would a hotel man from the East find running a motel to be...


...a relative walk in the park comparatively? 

He'd certainly need funds for such a venture. Did Mrs Bates have such funds for a motel venture in the West? 

I mean, she [Mrs Bates] didn't have to go to work or anything. He [Mr Bates] left her a little money. 

Would that hotel man have a reason to travel across the country from the East? Was he fleeing anything?

Mrs Bates poisoned this guy... when she found out he was married.  

So, could that hotel man talk a single mother into building a motel? Well, yes...

...he talked her into building this motel.  

Could he also talk Mrs Bates into uprooting her life & her son's and moving so far away with him? It seems Norman thought so:  

He [the hotel man] could have talked her into anything.  

Norman’s dad had been dead at least ten years when Psycho starts. 


Would going back those ten years put Melanie Daniels around age eleven? The age when her mom ran off with some hotel man?



Fun as it is to consider such a connection, there really is none. The timelines of these movies do not work out at all, nor could the character lives overlap in any way. So why bother asking if The Birds is a prequel to Psycho?


Well, the question is clearly not asking about a literal narrative prequel scenario, but rather a conceptual one. 

That is, did Hitchcock quietly leave us links - and the clues to find those links - in The Birds that would connect it to Psycho in a precedent manner?


It is precisely this very question that we will be looking into.











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