Writer of ‘Psycho’ Still Employing His Scare Tactics

Writer Joseph Stefano loves to scare audiences. His screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 film “Psycho” has frightened the living daylights out of horror fans for nearly four decades.

Stefano also sent chills up the spines of TV viewers with the original ‘60s version of the sci-fi anthology “The Outer Limits.” He produced the first season of the legendary series and wrote 12 episodes, including the spooky “Feasibility Study,” starring Sam Wanamaker.

Now, 33 years later, Stefano has updated and revised “Feasibility Study” for Showtime’s revival of “The Outer Limits.”

David McCallum, who appeared in two episodes of the original “Outer Limits,” stars in this tale about how the residents of a suburban neighborhood find their lives torn upside down when a four-block section of their neighborhood is ripped from the Earth by a mysterious force and taken to another planet.

Stefano, 75, who grew up enthralled with the horror films of producer Val Lewton (“Cat People,” “The Leopard Man”), discussed his voyage back to “The Outer Limits,” what scares audiences today and his “Psycho” experience.

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Question: Did you approach the producers about doing an “Outer Limits” episode?

Answer: No, not really. “The Outer Limits” was the past to me. While I loved the connection of people who were fans and conventions that I would go to, I really had no, I guess you’d say, creative connection to that.

[The producers] had asked me to do one. [Executive producer] Pen Densham came up with the idea of doing a remake of one of my original ones.

I ran the cassette [of the original “Feasibility Study”] and I felt that this is still a story that works for me. Maybe even more, because the notion of ordinary people being heroic was maybe not even as relevant [then] as it is today, because we don’t have many heroes and we have certainly very few ordinary people who are heroes. That thought is what got me to do it.

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Q: Because “Outer Limits” airs on cable, you can be much more explicit. Didn’t you run into censorship problems with the original series? Wasn’t there one episode in which the monster was so hideous some stations refused to air it?

A: That [episode] was “The Architects of Fear.” One city, I guess, blacked it out. I certainly didn’t feel there was any reason to be that afraid of that particular monster.

We had censorship problems continuously. I spent a great deal of my time on the phone with Dorothy Brown at ABC. Sometimes she just wouldn’t know what it was that ought to be removed or changed. She would say, “It’s too scary, too unsettling.” Sometimes I saw little things I could do [to change it].

The weirdest kind of shots do [unsettle us]. There is a shot in “The Exorcist” where the priest walks up the stairs. It’s just so unsettling. Not because I don’t know where he is going; it’s just the way it was shot--the sense that sometimes, when you go to doom, you have to walk upstairs to it.

I love stairways and hallways and am always using those things in my work. My ambition was to scare you with the original “Outer Limits.” I don’t think that’s so with the new one.

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Q: Well, fears are different now. Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Cold War was a major fear. Villains have different guises now.

A: I don’t think people get frightened at the movies anymore. I think they get shocked or they get thrilled, but the whole focus on aliens, on people being out there, I think is the Cold War in a new guise. We need that fear.

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Q: Is that fear in your remake?

A: It is scary in concept. My feeling was the life force, from whatever planet, is perhaps too smart to come here and try to experiment on us in the Arizona desert. What they are going to do is take us [to their planet]. My sense is that they would have the intelligence to kidnap us and see what happens. The idea that I would wake up tomorrow morning and it [would] look OK [outside], but then I would begin to find out that I am on another planet--that would be terrifying to me.

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Q: How did you get the plum assignment of writing the screenplay of “Psycho”? Had you written for Hitchcock’s TV series?

A: I had written one movie and one TV show. Both were successful for me. The movie was “The Black Orchid,” with Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn. Then I did a play for “Playhouse 90” called “Made in Japan.” It was about racial prejudice. I wanted to work with directors who I could learn from, not who are going to be depending on you.

I went with MCA and gave them a list of 10 directors. I said: “Call me when you get one of these.” They got it into their heads that Hitchcock and I were going to work together on his next project. They hectored him. He didn’t want to meet with me. “Black Orchid” and “Made in Japan” were not anything that were going to enthrall him. Finally, he agreed to meet me. I got the job because I said two things to him.

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Q: What did you say?

A: I said: “I don’t like Norman Bates. I don’t see how we are going to have any sympathy for a 40-year-old reprobate who peeks in at girls. Secondly, I would like the movie to be about the girl.”

He looked at me kind of strangely and so I began to lay out that she was shacking up with her boyfriend and they are having a tough time and she gets this money in her hands and she goes a little bit mad and steals the money. When she goes to the hotel, she gets killed.

I think at that moment I had the job because I took as long to tell that scene, most of which I was making up off the top of my head, as long as it takes on screen. His first words were, “We’ll get a star to play her.”

He was fantastic. He taught me so much. It was an education. I don’t know where you would go to get that today.

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“The Outer Limits: Feasibility Study” can be seen tonight at 11 on Showtime.