Entertainment

‘Psycho’ babble

“Bates Motel” introduces Norman’s half- brother, Dylan (Max Thieriot), who looks like a bully. (
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Maybe the old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” simply never crossed veteran producer Carlton Cuse’s mind.

As show runner of the new A&E series “Bates Motel” — a prequel of sorts to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 film “Psycho” — Cuse sees developing a previously nonexistent back story for the movie as an engaging and worthy endeavor, both for him and a potential television audience.

“Basically, it was an opportunity for [co-producer and co-writer] Kerry Ehrin and me to kind of reinvent the ‘Psycho’ franchise and put our own spin on it,” says Cuse, best known for his time writing for the ABC hit “Lost.”

“We felt like there was an opportunity here to take this incredibly iconic character, create a brand-new world and tell our best version of the story,” he says.

The iconic character in question is Norman Bates, the seriously damaged mama’s boy immortalized by Anthony Perkins. You know that story: Boy meets girl. Girl rebuffs boy. Boy takes on dead mother’s stern persona, dons a cheap housedress and wig, and then murders a girl with a kitchen knife in a sexually repressed fury while she takes a shower.

Never mind that neither Hitchcock nor Robert Bloch, who wrote the 1959 novel on which the film was based, ever delved into the evolution of amateur taxidermist Bates, much less his mummified mom.

“We sort of know the end, which is eventually he stuffs his mother, puts her in the window and becomes a serial killer,” Cuse says. “When Kerry [Ehrin] and I first started working out the story, doing an homage was just of no interest to me. I mean, why would you revisit a story that you’ve already seen that we’re certainly not going to tell better than Hitchcock did? So, to me, the critical decision was to maintain some iconography from the original movie — namely, the motel and the house — but then create characters that were derived from the characters in the movie but from that anchor point that sort of establishes the premise, and tell a brand-new story.”

In his movie, Hitchcock cast an uneasy Perkins as Bates, his psychotic protagonist, and sensual Janet Leigh as thief Marion Crane, his victim. The film spawned three sequels — all starring Perkins — and a dismal 1998 remake by Gus Van Sant, starring Vince Vaughan as Norman and Anne Heche as Marion. (Entertainment Weekly called it “weightless as air.”)

The counterparts in “Bates Motel” are 21-year-old British actor Freddie Highmore as the teenage Bates, who, after the mysterious death of his father, moves to misty coastal Oregon to help run a dilapidated motel with his domineering mother, Norma, played by Vera Farmiga (“Up in the Air”).

And while Highmore could easily pass for a pubescent Perkins, Cuse denies that played a part in his hiring or that it was a way to honor the original film. “I never really thought about the resemblance between them until it was pointed out to me,” he says. “I think it’s much more about Freddie being able to really make you care for him and like him, to see him as a normal boy on one hand and on the other hand see dimensions that are gonna make you believe that this guy is going to be a killer.”

Hard-core “Psycho” fans and Hitchcock scholars should take heart: Cuse takes substantial artistic license in telling his story. Flirty schoolgirls will vie for Norman’s attention — and battle his mother’s interference. There will be disturbing suggestions of incestuous feelings by the younger Bates. And viewers will learn of an estranged half-brother, Dylan, who calls his mother a “bitch.”

Hitchcock himself took some liberties with Bloch’s novel, casting a Perkins, who was then 27, as Bates — a character written as pudgy and middle-aged in the book.

Even more wack is that “Bates Motel” is set in modern times, rather than the 1950s — it isn’t a true prequel. But with Highmore’s Norman checking into the motel at the ripe age of 17, in theory he has a full 10 years to rack up a body count before reaching the age of the character in Hitchcock’s masterpiece.

“By making the show contemporary, it gave us more latitude to take these iconic characters and tell a brand-new story,” says Cuse. “We did not think audiences wanted to see a retread. Doing it as contemporary opened up a landscape of storytelling for us.”