Cat Watching Horror Movie

One of the best "reaction" videos I've ever seen. I'll leave you to guess which movie the cat is watching.

Norman isn't quite himself today

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Hoarder mom possibly unaware of son's corpse in her own home


By Melkorka Licea

September 25, 2016 

Woman lived with her son’s corpse for over a decade

It’s a plot twist not even Alfred Hitchcock would think of.

The elderly Brooklyn woman found this month living with the skeletal remains of her son, possibly for as long as 20 years, is a legally blind hoarder who may not have even known he was there, NYPD sources said.

The chilling discovery of the skeleton was made Sept. 15 when a relative showed up at Rita Wolfensohn’s Midwood home to fetch her belongings and take them to her in the hospital.

In a debris-choked second-floor bedroom, sister-in-law Josette Buchman found a “completely intact” skeleton, dressed in jeans, socks and a shirt, lying on its back on a thin mattress on the floor, police sources told The Post.

“It’s like some reverse ‘Psycho’ scene,” a law enforcement source said at the time, referring to Hitchcock’s 1960 horror flick in which a son, Norman Bates, keeps his dead mother’s remains in a basement.

But investigators now believe Wolfensohn may not have known she was living with the corpse of her son. Cobwebs and garbage filled the room where the body was found — as if “a garbage truck had dumped its load” inside, police sources said.

The room reeked of rotting food, but not of ­decaying flesh, the sources said.

When police questioned the ailing woman, she spoke about her son as if he had simply moved out.

Her brother, Joseph Buch­man, and his wife, Josette, would not say where Wolfensohn — whose husband, Jesse, died in 1987 — is staying, but they were seen Saturday visiting a Long Island assisted-living facility. 

Joseph told The Post he hadn’t been close to Wolfensohn for years. Another relative said he wouldn’t comment on the grisly mystery until “after the funeral.”

The widow’s Brooklyn home, a well-appointed, two-story brick house worth about $700,000, had fallen into disrepair. Last week it was empty, with mail piling up. No one answered multiple calls to the home phone.

Authorities have not officially identified the body but believe the man was Wolfensohn’s son and that he died of natural causes. They would not provide a name. 

According to public rec­ords, Wolfensohn had two sons, Michael and Louis. Relatives said they had not seen Louis — who today would be 49 years old — in 20 years.

Michael died in 2003 at the age of 38, according to court documents.

I'm psycho, too

We all go a little mad sometimes

A strange animation. This was put together from a half-dozen still pictures gleaned from Psycho, the famous parlour scene in which Norman eerily proclaims, "We all go a little mad sometimes." As you can see, there is a frame or two missing here and there.

This was an unusual project. I tried to get as many facial expressions out of six frames as possible. Norman's kind of a strange character anyway, so watching him twitch around and go from ranty to sweet in a nanosecond is nothing new.

But it was also an eerie feeling. These are just still pictures taken from a movie from more than 50 years ago. Yet there are moments - seconds - when something seems to be happening. Some kind of movement, an integrity between the frames that creates - something. Animation fools the eye. Film itself is an illusion, a lot of still pictures that the eye or the brain kindly blurs together and interprets as motion. It's also kind of strange that the background is so similar, though the fact that it kind of seethes in and out adds a special weirdness. The pictures aren't all framed exactly the same, though they're closer than most groups of movie stills even approach. Only one of them is way out of proportion, but the expression was so good that I had to use it. It gives the whole thing a weird lurching quality that I like.

Norman seems to be yelling "stop!" - or is it "stab"? 

"Mother isn't quite herself today"

Mummified body of woman who died four YEARS ago is found in her hoarder daughter's home

· Josephine Pallone died aged 98 in her bed in September 2010

· Her daughter, Janet Pallone Delatorre, planned to bury her with husband

· But panicked at the state of her 'hoarder' house and left her in bed

· Police investigating to see if there are any signs of wrongdoing 


By ALEX FINNIS FOR MAIL ONLINE

· PUBLISHED: 16:49 GMT, 14 August 2014 | UPDATED: 08:55 GMT, 15 August

The body of a woman whose daughter promised would be buried beside her late husband has been found four years later - mummified and decaying in her home in Gilbert, Arizona.

Janet Pallone Delatorre found her 98-year-old mother Josephine Pallone dead in her bed in September 2010, and told her son that she would be buried in Chicago.

But now her remains have been found still in that very same same bed, in what police have described as a rubbish-filled 'hoarder house' on Leah Lane.

The Gilbert, Arizona 'hoarder house', where Josephine Pallone's body has lay rotting for four years 


A police report says: 'Janet stated she "panicked" and believed police would think Janet killed her based on the condition of the house. Janet assumed the police would think Janet neglected her and that is why she died.'

For this reason, she bizarrely decided to leave her mother where she had found her, and she remained there until police discovered her gripping an old blanket on June 28.

They said it was obvious that she had been dead for a very long time.

Police made the gruesome discovery because Ms Pallone Delatorre's ex-husband, William Delatorre, had gained control of the house through the courts, after she had fallen behind on payments.

Acting as a court commissioner, a real estate agent went into the house to find it in awful condition. Concerned, police searched the house to find it full of rubbish, with clothes stacked in piles in many of the rooms, and Mrs Pallone's remains in one of the bedrooms.

They also found a pet bird, which was in healthy, cared-for condition.

Ms Pallone Delatorre's son Nathan told police he had moved out of the house four years ago to go to university, and not long after had been told by his mother over the phone that his grandmother had died.

He said he had not been to the house since, but had been told that his mother's plan had been to bury Mrs Pallone next to her husband in Chicago.

Sgt. Jesse Sanger told AZCentral that the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office still has not officially identified the body, and the case is still an active death investigation.

But it is expected the body will soon be announced as Mrs Pallone's.

He added that there are currently no signs of fraud or any other criminal activity.

Police are also looking into the rough date of death, and also to see whether the body has suffered any broken bones or other damage.

Harold Lloyd Goes Psycho!

I've rescored some of my favorite Harold Lloyd scenes with "unusual" music. This one makes your hair stand on end.

OMG OMG OMG!!!!!

Psycho - The Shower Scene With And Without Music

This was a real surprise. I was sure before I even saw this that the infamous shower scene from Psycho would fall completely flat without that eeeek, eeeek, eeeek, eeeek music by Bernard Hermann that helped make it so famous.

Not so, in my books.

Hitchcock knew the power of sound. He knew we hear before we see (in the womb), so sound is much more primal, even though we live in a culture which is almost 100% visual. The soothing shhhhhh sound of the shower is broken by the sssssst of the curtain being scraped back, and then the most godawful movie sound ever: the tip of the knife repeatedly entering flesh with a ruthless chttt, chttt, chttt. Though it's hard to pick up in the original, Janet Leigh's screams become increasingly erotic-sounding, with gasps and sighs interspersed, as if she's just having a particularly lusty bout of sex (illicit sex being very big in this movie, with bad women like Marion Crane paying with their lives).

Hitchcock did nothing by accident. This scene stands just fine by itself, and is maybe even an improvement because it strips back any interference with the extremely disturbing sounds of the original. The ping-ping-ping of the shower curtain being pulled down is a nice touch (though as usual with YouTube, this was clumsily edited and left out the best shot of the scene: Janet Leigh's open-eyed, staring face lying flat on the cold bathroom floor).

Which see.

TITBIT (or tidbid): I was to learn this, after the fact:

Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith writes that the music for the shower scene is "probably the most famous (and most imitated) cue in film music," but Hitchcock was originally opposed to having music in this scene. When Herrmann played the shower scene cue for Hitchcock, the director approved its use in the film. Herrmann reminded Hitchcock of his instructions not to score this scene, to which Hitchcock replied, "Improper suggestion, my boy, improper suggestion." This was one of two important disagreements Hitchcock had with Herrmann, in which Herrmann ignored Hitchcock's instructions. The second one, over the score for Torn Curtain (1966), resulted in the end of their professional collaboration. A survey conducted by PRS for Music in 2009, showed that the British public consider the score from 'the shower scene' to be the scariest theme from any film.

Mother's not herself today

"Here, kitty, kitty": when taxidermy goes terribly wrong

I don't know how I stumble onto these things. What was I looking for? Not THIS. Not this "what-is-it", unidentifiable: maybe an otter with the mumps. 

There is a whole art form out there - in fact, you may have seen some of it in old museums (reminding me of Dylan Thomas and his "museum that should have been in a museum"). In those days, "lifelike" expressions mattered more than anatomical accuracy, often with truly hideous results.

There are sooooooooooooooooooo many of these photos out now, probably due to a Facebook page called Taxidermy Gone Wrong. Now it has mushroomed like amanita, blossomed like a patch of lethal bacteria on a petri dish. Bad taxidermy: it's everywhere!

I think Norman Bates was the gold standard of taxidermy, posing his owls and other predatory birds in such realistic ways that it made your scalp prickle. One pictures him sitting there with his little needle and thread, and that stuffing that my mother used to call "cott'n batt'n". And, of course, scissors and a knife

Killing and gutting the birds doesn't bear thinking about.

But bad taxidermy (not the meticulous kind Norman practiced in the Bates Motel) is now a kind of found art. There are lots of cutesy poses where squirrels fire six-guns and rats pose as the Pope, but I'm not too fond of them because they're obviously supposed to be kitschy and bad. Some of these examples look like earnest attempts, which only adds to their horror. Pets are the worst. Did someone actually pay for this, to have Fido or Fluffy rendered Satanic for all time?

Somebody must have had the thought, somewhere, sometime, that this was a good way to stuff a dead pet. It may have been someone's idea of human-looking eyes. Fine, if your favorite human is a raving lunatic! That second one looks like he had one too many caramel macchiattos at Starbuck's.

As with the Royal Family, some of these cats should have been strangled at birth. With their deranged expression and eyes set too close together, they're obviously as inbred as the Hapsburgs. In fact, the puma (above) looks like he's about to go marry his favorite niece.

Oh Lor', oh Lor'. . . a polar bear with a hangover, a prehistoric Muppet, a tubular moose. . . Did this taxidermist ever SEE a moose, did he have any idea what one looked like?

.  The shrivelled, sunken, dessicated, dusty, shabby, moth-eaten, mummified look of

 bad taxidermy is awful enough without these demonic leers.

Taxidermy slippers! These were either made from the world's biggest moles, 

or meant to fit a Chinese woman in the 17th century.

Another "what-is-it?". Don't know what happened to its nose.

My personal favorite. It's easy to see how it died, but. . . 

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Look, Mother, I'm making a few bucks off self-caricature!

Light and shadow: the Perkins curse

It occurs to me that one of these days I should post a blog entry that's about something. So I will return to an old fascination which, for reasons unknown, has re-asserted itself.

Maybe it's Turner Classic Movies, that fusty old vault of forgotten Hollywood. Things pop up that maybe are best left in there. What constitutes a "classic" is a judgement call, and I don't know who makes it: Robert Osborne, whom despite his too-fast and slurry delivery is fascinating to listen to, or some producer or other.

They have festivals, of course, and not long ago it was Tony Perkins' turn. It could be argued that his life was a tragedy, but you'd only be partly right. I'm rereading Charles Winecoff's incredibly detailed but largely uncharitable bio Split Image, in which he seems to put Perkins' often troubled and even twisted life through a fine sieve (or a blender). Obviously gay (or I don't think he would rhapsodize about Perkin's sexy, pouty lips in The Tin Star), Winecoff has little sympathy for the double life he had to lead, both to stay employed and to stay married to a woman who was warmhearted but more than a little naive.

It all came to a dead stop, so to speak, when Perkins died of AIDS in 1992. He was 60 years old, and Norman Bates, the self-proclaimed "Hamlet of horror", had somehow consumed his career. He began as a fine young actor, dazzlingly beautiful rather than handsome, irresistable to women (especially older women, who wanted to take him home with them - which even happened in his own lifetime), and capable of roles as varied as college basketball star, insecure deputy sherriff, mentally ill baseball hero, Quaker enlisting in the Civil War, carefree-but-troubled-young-lawyer-romancing-Ingrid-Bergman-in-Paris-in-the-1960s, etc. etc. etc.

In other words, he was good. Good enough for Alfred Hitchcock, searching for someone to star in the mother of all slasher-films (Psycho), to say, "That young man over there. I want him."

Hitchy-baby, as I used to call him when he came over for beer and canapes, had an instinct for these things. Perkins was babyfaced, with marvelous dark eyes that could cloud over with an inexplicable anger. He was gangly and tall, with coathanger shoulders and very long arms, described by one friend as looking like a "prehistoric bird". He played the introverted loner to a T (for Tony), because in spite of his sweet smile and boyish charm, that's what he was.

I'm finding out, all over again, where it all came from. His father was Osgood Perkins, who lived up to his awful name: dire-looking, with a nose that could open letters. Absolutely cold, but addicted to the theatre and acting back when acting was very much paint-by-the-numbers. Was he any good? He fit the slot that seemed to be there, the slot with his name on it. Weirdly, he often starred as villains and other dark characters, typecast by his severe and unpleasant looks.

Osgood Perkins changed Tony's five-year-old life forever with a hell of a final act: dropping dead of a heart attack on his bathroom floor. Tony didn't cry, though he told People Magazine (in an infamous interview in which he almost outed himself) that he sobbed himself to sleep every night, thinking he had somehow killed him.

Tony inherited Osgood's scarecrow body, and as he aged his face began to twist and go off-centre, as if genes were finally having their way. He had a rich and varied career, if you take away the cheap slasher films he often resorted to in order to pay the rent and look after his wife and kids.

Yes. Wife and kids, though he was known all over Hollywood as a promiscuous homosexual. He was seeing a shrink called Mildred Newman (who co-wrote the blockbuster, groundbreaking psychobabble classic How to Be Your Own Best Friend), who believed she could straighten gay men out. In fact, it was her particular specialty. Another Newman disciple, one of Tony's longterm lovers, got married at about the same time. It was all very odd.

Berry Berenson, sister of supermodel Marisa, was from a blueblood family but came across as sweet and pretty, as well as pretty naive. Is that why Tony was so attracted? I can see them together for the first time (someone wrote a stage play about it: I'll try to find the link, as the guy playing Tony is phenomenal), Berry all breathless because she was finally meeting her idol and interviewing him for Andy Warhol's magazine. What was Tony Perkins really really like?

Next thing you know he was making her pregnant, but one wonders. This man was vastly complicated. He and Stephen Sondheim (yes, that Stephen Sondheim) hung out together and forced everyone around them into impossibly difficult word/mind games, a manifestation of the nasty, manipulative side of him. Yet, by all accounts, he was an attentive and loving father to his two boys, Osgood (ouch) and Elvis (double-ouch).

OK then, before this becomes another version of War and Peace, Perkins finally died of AIDS. For a long time he didn't say anything, but when he was near death he issued a statement to the effect that he had learned more about love and humanity and acceptance during his time in the world of AIDS than he had in his entire career in Hollywood.

When he lay dying in his bed, his friends brought sleeping bags over and literally camped around him. At one point, he woke out of a deep coma, sat up and said, "What's going on? What is this, a death watch?" It was the last laugh he'd ever get.

How we die is often a profound reflection of how we have lived. Devotion like this does not happen to people who are not deeply cherished. It's extraordinary, but just one more paradox in the enigmatic puzzle of his life.

There is a horrible postscript, or perhaps a few of them. On September 11, 2001, Berry Berenson boarded a plane she would never get off. The last few minutes of her life must have been horrific as the jet flew bizarrely off-course, sank lower and lower, then smashed into the World Trade Centre.

Why, why? These are unanswerable questions. On doing some digging, I turned up more sorrow. Elvis Perkins is a somewhat successful rock musician (Tony was a gifted pianist, as well as a screenwriter, painter and singer), but his songs are morbid and inspired by the death of his parents. Osgood, known as Oz Perkins, seems to dribble away on the IMDB after a few forgettable slasher-type films. Neither of them resemble their ideally beautiful father in his youth. They look coarse by comparison. What happened?

I have mixed feelings about Perkins. When Goodbye Again came on the other night (with the radiant, mature Ingrid Bergman playing his motherly lover), I was simply entranced. Perkins exuded a unique charm that somehow gripped you. It was powerful, a solar energy, dazzlingly bright but curiously cold. Did anyone really get close to this man? Did his one massive hit really destroy his career, or was he already dissolving into the tics, stammers and other irritating mannerisms that marked all his later films? Hitchy-baby didn't just randomly pull him out of the pack. He picked him because of his uncanny, even spooky ability to read his actors.

He picked him because Norman Bates was Tony's dark double, his father dying when he was five, his mother (in this case, rotting in the attic) sucking the air out of his life. He picked him for that disturbing untapped anger that made his dark eyes so fascinating. He was already Norman Bates, a character he would come to love and despise.

What's the conclusion? Sometimes success can be the worst thing that can happen to you. Is there a Perkins curse? Think of Osgood Perkins lying dead on his bathroom floor, Tony in a coma in his bedroom, Berry disintegrated in a second, his sons still stuck in glue or flypaper or some force field they can't break or even understand.

But think of the great times, hanging out with his sons, basking in Berry's warm unconditional acceptance, the obvious love of his friends, the Oscar nomination, the truly fulfilling parts that he nailed with his prodigious talent.

His delight in word games and mind games and singing (and by the way, he had a marvelous singing voice, lyrical and completely unpretentious) and playing his beloved piano.

This is a man who lived. Lived all the complications and contradictions of the painfully, profoundly gifted. I love him, I do. I can't get away from him, and he isn't even here. That's a man, is it not? That is a man.