The House On Top Of The Hill

 

   Above is a picture of the Bates home, also known as the Psycho house, which was originally built as just a facade featuring the front and left sides as shown, as those were the only two sides needed for the original filming. 

   It was built on the Universal studios lot in California in 1960, then the home was somewhat completed (given a right and back side but no real interior) for the then-new Universal studios tour in 1964. 

   The four-sided shell of a house was dismantled in 1980 to make way for some other use of the hill it occupied on the studio lot. A close replica of the house (possibly using the dismantled shell?) with a few changes, (including a livelier paint job) was used as the beach house in the 1981 Chevy Chase vehicle Modern Problems.

   There have been sequels and remakes of Psycho that have made use of a partially or fully rebuilt Bates home - 1982's Psycho II used a partially rebuilt Bates home that attained a complete look via matte paintings, but 1985's Psycho III featured a fully rebuilt Bates home (it's the one seen in the first picture of this post).

   But the Bates home is not the actual subject here - the actual subject here is the house that purportedly influenced the design of the Bates home - said to be an Edward Hopper oil painting entitled House by the Railroad. 

   However, I cast doubt on that assertion. For starters the design used as the Bates house was fairly common - a popular Second Empire home design in the Italianate style with a Mansard roof - thousands of homes like this were built in the years immediately preceding the Civil War and for a few decades afterward.

  In my travels I've seen umpteen variations of the design, and many of those were far closer to the Bates house as seen in the movie than the one depicted by the great Edward Hopper.

   For example, the Bloom house in Trinidad, Colorado, built in 1882 and now part of the Trinidad Historical Society. 

   Not only does the Bloom house sit on a small hill that nearly duplicates every shot of the Bates house we see in the original Psycho, but the sloping sides of the Mansard roof as well as the ornamental cast-iron crestline that trims said roof is pretty much spot on (the Mansard roof seen in the Hopper painting features an odd onion bulge and recession to it, and no cast-iron ornamental trim). 

   The Bloom house has been used in other films, most notably as the rich man's house in Terrence Malick's 1973 masterwork, Badlands.

   The mood of the Edward Hopper painting may have had an influence on the direction of the film, but it is extremely difficult to imagine that painting was as direct an influence on the Bates home as is assumed by many film historians.

   But I could be wrong about that