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‘She Just Goes a Little Mad Sometimes’: Fear of Knowing Transgender Bodies in Horror
“It's not as if she were a maniac, a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes.”
-Norman Bates, Psycho (1960)
As a child, I remember settling down on the sofa to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I was young. Too young, perhaps. I was probably still in single digits. I remember the looming sign for the Bates Motel, the shower scene (of course), and I remember that eerie dissolve at the end when Norman’s face briefly turns to a skull. Most of all, I remember the real horror when it was revealed that the killer Mrs Bates had been Norman all along. I didn’t know that Norman was a cross-dresser. I didn’t know that Norman was mad…
Not much later, I watched The Silence of the Lambs (1991), a film bursting at the flesh-sewn seams with identity issues. Most people remember the…