Psycho

It's time for one last block party on Wisteria Lane. We've been through so much with our Desperate Housewives over eight madcap seasons. That turns out to be both a good and a bad thing as Sunday's two-hour series finale approaches. The show was such a bold and unique amalgam of drama, mystery, and subversive comedy when it debuted in 2004. The way that Marc Cherry's creation adhered to and exploded the soap-opera genre made Housewives an instant sensation. The debut was watched by 21 million viewers, the season finale by 30 million.

"Endless TV showings, imitations and parodies have dulled the cutting edge of Psycho," writes Stephen Rebello, "particularly to a generation that may mistake spurting blood bags, flash editing and cranked-up soundtracks for the real thrills. " My guess is that Rebello does not teach film in general and Alfred Hitchcock in particular to the "generation" in question. I do. And my students are all collectively crazy about Hitch in general and Psycho in particular. Enrollment for classes about this filmmaker are more than double the number for any other director.

"You want to do what?" The Paramount executives were beside themselves. Here was Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, the biggest director in Hollywood, saying he wanted to make a movie about some loon who puts on his mother's dress and slices people up in the shower. What next, a mummy in the basement? Hitchcock called Psycho his "30-day picture," a quick change of pace from the long train of colorful thrillers he had directed for Paramount in the 1950s. Tired of what he termed "glossy Technicolor baubles," Hitchcock saw in Robert Bloch's 1959 novel the perfect brew of sex, voyeurism and bloody murder to shake his audience up. But the jittery execs were having none of it. Wary of the tale's transvestism and bloodletting, Paramount pronounced it an "impossible project," pulled its financing and forced the determined director to bankroll the movie himself.

Esther is a godsend. So it seems to her new parents, John Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard) and his wife, Kate (Vera Farmiga), at the start of Jaume Collet-Serra's immaculately plotted and photographed chiller, Orphan, one of the best entries in the cute-as-a-button-psycho-demon-child-from-hell subgenre. A beautiful 9-year-old Russian-born orphan, Esther is the perfect cure for the traumatized couple, whose marriage has taken a few body blows, including the death of their unborn child.

The shower curtain parts. The knife descends. The blood swirls down the drain. That scary scene in Psycho left Alfred Hitchcock's leading lady, Janet Leigh, a bath enthusiast for life. "I suddenly said to myself, 'My God, we're so vulnerable and defenseless in the shower,' " the 70-year-old actress said. "You can't hear because the water's running. You can't see. You're there and you're easy picking. " Leigh, in Glenside for a screening at the Keswick Theatre the other night of Psycho, hasn't taken a shower since madman Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)

It's probably inevitable that the film adaptation of the novel introducing the insatiable Hannibal Lecter would cannibalize its source material. But who would have predicted that Red Dragon, on one hand the prequel to the blockbusters Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, and on the other a remake of Michael Mann's creepily effective 1986 thriller Manhunter, would swallow without chewing? For the most part, Dragon is excellently cast (Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Lecter, Ed Norton is FBI profiler Will Graham)

The story starts in the middle of the night in March 1983, when Keith Scott, an 18-year-old ex-cook riding in the back seat of his ex-employer's Lincoln Continental, placed a knife at the throat of a passenger in the front seat - and then sliced the man's neck open. He ultimately stabbed him 17 times, and then cut the ex-employer, who was driving, 15 times - with one of the cuts nearly beheading the man. Maybe it was the 20 pain pills Scott reportedly said he had been downing with vodka and beer.

Toss a stone in any direction from the intersection of 20th and Snyder and, chances are, it will land near a onetime residence of screenwriter Joe Stefano, whose "veiled autobiography" Two Bits begins shooting in South Philly tomorrow. A drive with Stefano down the neighborhood's tidy rowhouse blocks is an invitation to whiplash. "I lived there," says the trim 71-year-old with the toothbrush mustache, pointing at a stone structure on the tree-lined 2200 stretch of South Lambert, where he learned to roller-skate while gripping onto the low hedges that flanked the rowhouse stoops.

It lasts only 45 seconds, but it took a week to film because it was composed of 78 separate shots. But after Alfred Hitchcock completed the shower scene in Psycho, the way movies treated murder and madness changed forever. The star of that scene, Janet Leigh, is scheduled to introduce a free screening of the film at the Bala Theatre on Thursday. Hitchcock said of his macabre masterwork - a piece that has exerted an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of directors - that the creation of Psycho made him feel like a man leading fair-goers through a haunted house.

What You See in the Dark By Manuel Muñoz Algonquin Books. 272 pp. $23.95. Reviewed by John Shortino   Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is a famously unsettling film: The sudden act of violence in the first act disorients the audience, adding an undercurrent of menace to every scene that follows. Manuel Muñoz's first novel, What You See in the Dark , takes a cue from Hitchcock's film, with a dark twist early in the book that adds a layer of dread and impending violence to the stories of four women in the town of Bakersfield, Calif., where scenes from Psycho are being filmed.

Esther is a godsend. So it seems to her new parents, John Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard) and his wife, Kate (Vera Farmiga), at the start of Jaume Collet-Serra's immaculately plotted and photographed chiller, Orphan, one of the best entries in the cute-as-a-button-psycho-demon-child-from-hell subgenre. A beautiful 9-year-old Russian-born orphan, Esther is the perfect cure for the traumatized couple, whose marriage has taken a few body blows, including the death of their unborn child.

JUST WHEN you thought Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich couldn't act any nuttier after he was accused of federal corruption charges related to President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat, he went ahead and named a replacement for Obama. Psychopathology, it seems, is not just for serial killers and pedophiles anymore. It's gone mainstream. I think of it as the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It's only surprising that we're surprised every time we pick up the paper and find out about another scam.

This Halloween, forgo the gore, blot out the blood, eschew the entrails, and let your imagination do the work while viewing classic horror pictures from bygone eras. There's no better place to start than British studio Hammer House - home of Christopher Lee's Dracula and Peter Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing - which pumped out some terrific films (and a few horrific duds) in the 1950s and '60s. Icons of Horror Collection: Hammer Films (www.sonypictures.com/homevideo; $24.99; not rated)

As the SEPTA subway train rocked forward, a thirty-something guy leaned over near the doorway and gently planted a kiss on the little boy at his side. When the train neared the Fairmount Avenue stop shortly after midnight on Thursday, the man reached out like an adoring parent and directed the 3- or 4-year-old tyke to an open seat. Then he flew into a monstrous rage. Without uttering a word, police said, the unidentified man whipped out a double-claw hammer and began bludgeoning a 20-year-old man who was dozing off in his seat.

Joseph Stefano, 84, who after leaving Philadelphia as a young man to pursue a career in show business ended up writing the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and becoming a co-creator of television's seminal science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, died of lung cancer Friday at Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks, Calif. The youngest of eight children in a poor family, Mr. Stefano grew up in South Philadelphia during the Great Depression. His mother died when he was very young, his father was usually out of work, and the family moved 13 times because they couldn't pay the rent, always staying near 20th and Snyder.

A movie that will never be endorsed by the Australian Tourist Commission, Wolf Creek offers up a grisly, seat-squirming account of a road trip gone awry. Really, really awry. Despite the occasional loping kangaroo and some scenic desert vistas, filmmaker Greg McLean's chronicle of three friends' drive across the empty landscape of the Down Under continent's interminable outback is anything but pretty. Imagine The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with an Aussie twang - and better acting and production values - and you have a notion of what's in store.

I REMEMBER George Bush pounding the podium, insisting that Iraq be held responsible for the crimes of Afghanistan (the protector of bin Laden) and the Saudis, citizens who comprised most of the hijackers who killed thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11a. Like any rich brat, he insisted on it. He said there were WMDs, and there weren't. He said Iraq worked with al Qaeda, and it didn't. Now, al Qaeda and every other radical Arab psycho group is active in Iraq. Kevin Allen, Philadelphia

Three surveillance cameras poked from the top of the 20-foot shipping container that Jerome Wigmore kept in his mother-in-law's backyard in Gloucester County. Inside the steel-gray box, video screens at one end allowed Wigmore to monitor visitors and cars as they approached. At the other end, police said, a large bed sat under a mirrored ceiling. And if the "Posted" and "Beware of dog" signs weren't enough to keep unwanted guests at bay, neighbors said, Wigmore would release Snowy, an ill-tempered white pit bull, to chase them away.