This man Is pscyho...
  • This man is psycho...

It's not original to think or say that Robert Horton is Seattle's most noted film critic. His reputation was established at the Everett Herald, and he is a longtime contributor to the most prestigious cinema journal in the US, Film Comment. Horton has written two books, the older of which is Billy Wilder: Interviews (his fave film by Wilder is Some Like It Hot), and the most recent of which is Frankenstein (he will read from the book on October 25 at Elliott Bay Book Company). Horton, who was a Genius Award finalist in 2003, also curates the Magic Lantern film discussion series at the Frye Art Museum.

When, not too long ago, I asked about how and why his relationship with the gallery world began, he answered:

I began curating the Magic Lantern program at the Frye almost 10 years ago, and it's given me a platform for exploring how film and the art world overlap. But when you write about film you end up writing about the whole world, so I have always had interest in art, sports, food, politics. If you write about movies you end up writing about everything eventually. In regard to the Psycho talk, which happens on the coming Sunday, this film has overlapped into a couple of fascinating gallery installations, and I think the overlapping is interesting.

As to what one can expect to see this Sunday at the Frye:

The Frye is allowing people to come in and do master copies in its galleries, and when I thought about the idea of an exact "mastercopy" in cinema (it doesn't really apply well), I thought about Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Psycho. That one really is a rare mastercopy—same script, same camera angles, same music. A truly bizarre thing. I always wondered whether Van Sant meant it as a postmodern stunt, or maybe something like Warhol's Brillo boxes. This is also an excuse to talk about the greatness of the Hitchcock film, which I think is a masterpiece from which film has never quite recovered (it happens to be exactly at the midpoint of film history, from where we stand in 2014). I also want to talk about how the Hitchcock film imprinted itself on Anthony Perkins' career, so that he (after giving one of the greatest fucking film performances anybody has ever given) ended up mastercopying his role in sequels, and a great SNL parody (The Norman Bates School of Motel Management), which I'll show. And I'll describe two gallery installations, both of which, by happenstance, I happened to see: Douglas Gordon's 24-hour Psycho, in which the projected film is slowed down to a glacial pace (I walked into a museum where this was playing just as the shower scene was starting, and that sequence has never seemed more violent and sad than it did at that speed), and that 21st-century polymath James Franco's Psycho Nacirema, which I saw when I was teaching in London last year—Franco re-created some of the rooms of the Bates Motel so that you walked through them, with blood spattered everywhere, and video monitors with Franco dressed as Janet Leigh. Plus the new Bates Motel TV show, and the fact that the Universal tour stops by the set, where an actor dressed up like Norman runs out with a knife. Also I think Hitchcock was lying through his teeth when he said he thought the movie was fun.

As to what is rocking Horton's world right now:

The Hummingbird cocktail at Pettirosso has been on my mind lately—St. Germain and sparkling wine. Good for mornings.