It’s political correctness gone Psycho!
Remake won’t show killer cross- dressing in shower scene to avoid ‘transphobia’
IT IS the chilling moment from the classic film Psycho that once seen can never be forgotten.
Deranged motel proprietor Norman Bates, dressed up in his mother’s clothes, launches a murderous knife attack on a defenceless guest in the shower.
But now the scene from the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock thriller starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh has been remade, but with a crucial difference. Bates i s no l onger wearing women’s clothes – for fear of damaging the image of the transgender community.
This is despite the fact he wears his mother’s dresses at other moments in the series.
It is the climatic episode in the fifth and final season of US television series Bates Motel starring British actor Freddie Highmore as Norman Bates and singing superstar Rihanna as his intended victim, Marion Crane.
The scene will be screened on the Universal channel in the UK later this year but has already been broadcast in t he US, prompting outrage among fans of the original film with one tweeting: ‘Rhianna’s Bates motel shower scene will have Hitchcock turning in his grave.’
Bates Motel writer Kerry Ehrin explained the makers’ sensitivity over the cross-dressing: ‘In none of our minds is that what the story is about.
‘It’s about a kid who very specifically thinks he is his mother, as opposed to anything else.
‘It really became about protecting that and not letting it slip or
‘It will have Hitchcock turning in his grave’
slide into anything transphobic.’ The shower scene in the 1960 film, which featured close-ups of an undressed Leigh and blood disappearing down the plughole, caused s hock when i t was released but has come to be seen as one of the virtuoso moments in cinema history.
Professor Frank Furedi, the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, said the changes to the scene said a lot more about the TV show’s production company than they did the original film.
He said: ‘It has gone beyond political correctness. It is the subordination of art to political dogma. This sort of approach violates the aesthetic and artistic integrity of the original film.’