Today’s Psycho Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Say the word “Psycho” to most people and they will immediately visualize scenes from the classic horror film: Janet Leigh getting slashed to pieces in a shower, Martin Balsam being set upon by an old biddy with a butcher knife, Anthony Perkins smiling insanely while a fly buzzes around his padded cell. But while it was Alfred Hitchcock’s genius that made Psycho into a masterpiece, it was another imagination that first dreamed up Norman Bates and his motel from hell. It belonged to Robert Bloch, one of the most prolific and influential horror writers of the century.
Born in Chicago in 1917, Bloch began publishing stories in the pulps while still a teenager. He received encouragement from his pen pal and muse, horrormeister H.P. Lovecraft (who named a character after Bloch in his story “The Haunter of the Dark”). After working as an advertising copywriter in Milwaukee, Bloch quit to become a full-time writer in the early 1950s. He specialized in tales whose macabre twisted endings make them read like extended sick jokes. Psychopathic killers figure prominently in his fiction. One of his best known stories is titled, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.”
In 1957, Bloch – who had relocated to Los Angeles to write screenplays – moved back to Wisconsin so that his ailing wife could be close to her parents. He was living in the town of Weyauwega, less than thirty miles from Plainfield, where police broke into the tumbledown farmhouse of a middle-aged bachelor named Edward Gein and discovered a collection of horrors that sent shock waves around the nation. Fascinated by the incredible circumstances of the Gein affair – particularly by the fact (as he later put it) “that a killer with perverted appetites could flourish almost openly in a small rural community where everybody prides himself on knowing everybody else’s business” – Bloch hit on the idea for a horror novel. The result was his 1960 thriller, Psycho, about the schizophrenic mama’s boy, Norman Bates – a monster who (like Dracula and King Kong) has become a permanent icon of our pop mythology.
Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and more than twenty novels, in addition to dozens of screenplays and television scripts. However, when he died, on September 23, 1994, the headlines of his obituaries invariably identified him (as he predicted they would) as the “Author of Psycho.” In spite of his lifelong obsession with psychopathic killers, Bloch himself was the gentlest of men, who had little use for the kind of graphically gory horror movies his own work had inspired. When asked his opinion of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the man who gave birth to Norman Bates admitted, “I’m quite squeamish about them.”
Culled from: The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
Smash Up Du Jour!
The other day I saw a viral meme going around Facebook that purported to show a “Biker’s Go Pro cam who recorded his own death”. It showed a graphic image of a person cut in two laying on the highway. I realized it was just a typical bogus bit of nonsense immedately, as confirmed by thatsnonsense.com:
Did a Biker’s Go-Pro Cam Record His Own Road Accident?.
But then I wondered… is there any footage of a fatal accident taken from a biker’s go-pro? And lo and behold – there is! And it’s a pretty fascinating video to watch. He was obviously a nice boy who liked to speed because his last word was “Whoa!” instead of an expletive, which I think most of us would have uttered. And let’s appreciate the mother who put the video out there as warning rather than attempting to hide it from us like so many others would. Hopefully watching it will make other motorcyclists think twice before speeding so drastically?
Family Releases Go-Pro Video of Fatal Motorcycle Crash for Road Safety Campaign
Incidentally, this is the car after the crash:
And this is David’s motorcycle:
