Please bear with me my reply is long but very helpful !
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Romero not only says Hitchcock is his favorite director but he had already worked with Hitch as an assistant when he made Night. Plus, visually, Psycho is obviously a big influence. So...who influenced Psycho?
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Robert Bloch influenced Psycho. For those of you who don't know who Robert Bloch is He received encouragement from his pen pal and muse, who ? Horrormeister H. P. Lovecraft.He specialized in tales whos macabre twisted endings make them read like extended sick jokes. Psychopathic killers figure prominentle 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 wrtie 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 that thirty miles from Plainfeild. Wait didn't something happen in Plainfeild, Wisconsin ?? Oh yeah thats right Police broke into the tumbledown farmhouse of a middle-aged bachelor named
EDWARD GEIN. Fascinated by the incredbile 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 the idea for a horror novel. The result was his 1960 thriller,
Pyscho. However when he died, on September 23, 1994, the headlines of his obituaries invariably identifed him as the Author of Psycho. As interpreted by Hitchcock, this pioneering piece of serial-killer literature set the pattern for all cinematic slasher fantasies of the past 45 years.
So looks like all slasher films can give a thank you to Mr. Ed Gein, if it wasn't for you ED this probley would never be possible !