Felix Reed tries to bring Norman out of a catatonic state. In Bloch's 2016 prequel to his second novel, Psycho: Sanitarium, Dr. In Bloch's 1990 sequel to his second novel, Psycho House, Norman appears only as a novelty animatronic on display in the Bates Motel, which has been converted into a tourist attraction. Adam Claiborne, discovers Norman's body and assumes his personality.
This in turn causes a fiery accident where the driver escapes, but Norman dies. Picked up as a hitchhiker, Norman tries to attack the driver with a tire iron, but the driver overpowers him. In Bloch's 1982 sequel to his novel, Norman escapes from the psychiatric hospital by killing a nun and donning her habit.
Norman is declared insane and sent to an institution, where "Mother" takes complete, and permanent, control of Norman's mind: he becomes his mother. He attacks her as "Mother", but Sam overpowers him, and he is finally arrested. When Norman figures out what they want, he knocks Sam out and goes running after Lila, who has reached the house and found Mrs. Norman is finally caught when Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) and boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), arrive at the motel looking for her. As "Mother", he also murders Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), a private detective hired by Marion's employer, days later.
When Norman awakes to discover what he believes his mother has done, he sinks Marion's car-with her corpse and the money in the trunk-into a nearby swamp. "Mother" takes control and stabs Marion to death (she beheads her in the novel). When Marion goes to her room to shower, Norman spies on her through a peephole he drilled in the wall. Norman defies her and eats dinner with Marion anyway, but lashes out at her when she suggests that he institutionalize his mother. "Mother" flies into a rage and threatens to kill Marion if Norman lets her in the house. Norman is smitten with her, and shyly asks her to have dinner with him in the house. In Bloch's 1959 novel and the 1960 Hitchcock film, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a young woman on the run after stealing money from her employer, checks into the motel one night. "Norma" and "Norman" carry on conversations through Norman talking to himself and to her corpse in his mother's voice, and Norman dresses in his mother's clothes whenever "Norma" takes hold completely. "Norma" dominates and belittles "Norman" much as she had when she was alive, forbidding him to have friends and flying into violent rages whenever he feels attracted to a woman. He inherited his mother's house-where he kept her corpse-and the family motel in the (fictional) small town of Fairvale, California.īloch sums up Norman's multiple personalities in his stylistic form of puns: "Norman", a child dependent on his mother "Norma", a possessive mother who kills anyone who threatens the illusion of her existence and "Normal", a functional adult who goes through the motions of day-to-day life. After a brief hospitalization for shock, he developed dissociative identity disorder, assuming his mother's personality to repress his awareness of her death and to escape the feelings of guilt for murdering her. After committing the murders, Norman forged a suicide note to make it look as if Norma had killed her fiancé and then herself. Driven over the edge with jealousy, Normanmurdered both of them with strychnine. Considine convinced Norma to open a motel. After Norman's father, John Bates, died, Norman and his mother lived alone together "as if there was no one else in the world" until Norman reached adolescence, when his mother met Joe Considine (Chet Rudolph in Psycho IV: The Beginning) and planned to marry. The novel also suggests that their relationship may have been incestuous. Both the novel and the 1960 film adaptation explain that Norman suffered severe emotional abuse as a child at the hands of his mother, Norma, who preached to him that sexual intercourse was sinful and that all women (except herself) were whores.