Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supposed to emerge after the individual was beaten down by group pressure, exhaustion and the desperate need to have five minutes alone. Travel with any of the current contenders in a van in Iowa and New Hampshire, and you are certain to encounter half a dozen reporters working on psycho-profiles. Tape recorders at the ready, they push and prod the candidate for his formative experiences: Was your father cruel, did your mother feed you gruel, were you popular in school, did you break the Golden Rule...
...bloodstream? By tapping the current mood of sexual malaise with a cautionary -- indeed, reactionary -- tale about an errant husband, a faithful wife and a career woman unlucky in love. And by skewing a Hitchcockian domestic thriller into a rousing horror show. Fatal Attraction starts as Vertigo and ends as Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, "The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman." Or woman...
...filmmakers tried for something more crimson. "We sat in a room for four days," recalls Dearden. "Obviously the present ending makes Alex a complete psycho. It works well as a piece of cinema but makes her less authentic." In July they were back in Mount Kisco, N.Y., for reshooting. Dearden wrote the new ending, "because I wanted to maintain some degree of influence over it." (The original ending may be used when Fatal Attraction is released in Japan next year...
...basic Hitchcock protagonist, a fairly decent man in a horribly compromised position. And at first glance, Alex, with her cool allure, seems an avatar of Hitchcock's blond ice goddesses. Only later do we discover she is as lonely and lethal as Mother Bates. But with a difference. In Psycho the woman with the knife was really a man with an Oedipus complex. In Fatal Attraction, Alex holds...
Hollywood has begun to cash in on the undercurrent of women's rage at men. In Fatal Attraction, currently the nation's top box-office draw, Actress Glenn Close enacts the ultimate female revenge fantasy. While Close's character eventually reveals herself as a murderous psycho, she has a number of exchanges with her married lover early in the film that hit home with every woman ever scorned ( "I woke up. You weren't here. I hate that"). Says one Washington woman who saw the film with two girlfriends: "Afterward, we talked about all the boyfriends we ever had wanted...