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Journal of Popular Culture (2006) - Film Adaptation, Co-Authorship, and Hauntology: Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998)

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Abstract

This article interrogates the cultural significance of Gus Van Sant's near word-for-word, scene-for-scene 1998 adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho by reading it alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology. Approaching a film like Van Sant's Psycho outside of a psychoanalytic framework such as Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian readings of Hitchcock's films may seem counterintuitive, particularly as the article deals primarily with the ways in which Hitchcock's Freudian psychology haunts Van Sant's adaptation. Unlike Zizek, however, the authors are not seeking to understand how the "real" symbolic order is fundamentally distorted through the impossible possibility of symbolic identification in both films. They are instead seeking to understand how that spectral, infrastructural symbolic order, which so plausibly produces horror effects in Hitchcock's film, seems to break down entirely as an originary, or transcendental source of "terror" in Van Sant's version, particularly when interrogated under the hauntological lens of historical distance.

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