The legacy sequel has become one of the industry’s go-to fallback options in the age of franchise fare, with the prospect of bringing back fan favorite characters years or decades after the fact clearly more important than crafting a fresh or engaging story set in a familiar property. It’s easy to forget that the practice has been around for a long time, though, with Psycho II one of the first.
Releasing 23 years after Alfred Hitchcock’s all-time great, Anthony Perkins reprises the role of Norman Bates for a second chapter that picks up decades after the unforgettable original. These days, plenty of reboots, remakes, or long-awaited continuations get dragged for dusting off an IP that couldn’t possibly be bettered, so imagine how director Richard Franklin felt way back in 1983 when he opted to try and one-up one of the greatest there’s ever been.
The story picks up with Bates completing his “rehabilitation” at a psychiatric institution, only to discover his family’s motel is under new ownership. Not long afterwards, he begins hearing those pesky voices again, with Mother lurking in the shadows of his mind and threatening to come to the fore for another bout of bloody murder.
While it obviously wasn’t a patch on its predecessor, Psycho II is a lot better than it often gets credit for, and the response to a recent Reddit thread celebrating its merit underlines the enduring popularity of a sophomore entry that never really needed to exist in the first place. In a world where Jurassic World Dominion is a thing that made a billion dollars, it’s better to take a page out of the Norman Bates playbook, which is something nobody ever expected to hear out loud.
