The Mother character was also based on one of Robert Bloch's friends Calvin Beck's Mother, in fact the look of Norman described in Bloch's book also resembled Calvin.
As in:
Bloch’s friends and professional cohorts claim he found inspiration for Norma Bates in a mutual acquaintance. Calvin Beck was a magazine publisher and editor whose mother rarely left his side. She told me herself that she went to his college classes, she monitored classes at college with Calvin, said Noel Carter, wife of author Lin Carter. As she told me this, I thought to myself, He must want to kill her! When Mrs. Beck wasn’t able to chaperone her son, she called “virtually every hour on the hour to check on him, according to Carter. Calvin also bears a passing resemblance to the Norman Bates Bloch describes in the original novel: paunchy, greasy and generally unhealthy looking.
Also:
Bloch wrote in his 1993 autobiography Once Around the Bloch that he knew very little of the details concerning [the Gein] case and virtually nothing about Gein himself when he wrote his 1959 page-turner. The author claims to have created Norman from whole cloth, basing his story on no person, living or dead, involved in the Gein affair.
The main part that Bloch took from the Gein case was that a killer could be living next door and be the perfect neighbour and no-one knew (Gein babysat for people as well).
More can be read here:
http://www.bmonster.com/horror29.html and the other link in that article.
I wrote a long post about it all going back, however it got weeded out by IMDb with all the other stuff (this board only goes back to July this year), however in short (that isn't that short really).
There are also connections between Psycho and the novel of Peyton Place written by Grace Metalious, with the characters of Norman Page and his mother written 3 years before.
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2006/anderson.htm
Evelyn is intent on grooming her son as a surrogate husband, rendering an even more unsettling hue on the interplay between sexuality and familialism that runs throughout the text.
Unlike the secret at the heart of the MacKenzie household, Evelyn’s quasi-incestuous hold over Norman is common knowledge in Peyton Place. One of the town patriarchs, the kindly Doctor Matthew Swain, harbors an unlikely hope that Norman will free himself of his mother’s grasp: I don’t think he’s strong enough to fight her. . . . She expects too much from him – love, admiration, eventual financial support, unquestioning loyalty, even sex.
As the doctor clarifies, sex in this case refers to Evelyn’s habit of giving her son so many enemas that he once suffered the worst case of dehydration I ever saw. . . Sex, with a capital S-E-X.
These sexualized invasions of the son’s body by the mother – from which he always got a bittersweet sort of pleasure – become more masochistic as Norman gets older. After her son confesses to kissing Allison, Evelyn whipped him and made him promise never to see Allison again.
While Norman acquiesces to his mother’s reassertion of dominance over his body – for he had not minded being whipped, but he was very sorry now that he had made the promise about not seeing Allison – his resentment manifests itself in an equally masochistic, displaced reaction. Spying on an act of oral sex between a husband and his pregnant wife, the first-time voyeur strangles a cat and subsequently seeks comfort in the arms of one whose offer of an enema to soothe his little tummy is met with distinct relief.
The warped togetherness that circumscribes the Page home stifles Norman through adulthood; while Allison escapes the confines of the home that had fed her paternal obsession, Norman cannot function in the outside world without his maternal leash. Hence, he is discharged from the military on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to handle the duties of a soldier.
In the book Bloch also writes:
http://memberfiles.freewebs.com/87/85/79668587/documents/RobertBloch-Psycho.pdf
Sam lit a cigarette. "I'm going to skip the data about his school years, and his rejection by the army. But it was after that, when he was around nineteen, that his mother must have decided Norman wasn't ever going out into the world on his own. Maybe she deliberately prevented him from growing up; we'll never actually know just how much she was responsible for what he became.
So even in that there is a similarity between Norman and Norma Bates and Norman and Evelyn Page, including the army stuff.
reply
share