ABSTRACT
When taking on the task of rebooting an entire franchise that was spurred by Hitchcock’s seminal horror film Psycho (1960), writers for Bates Motel (A&E, 2013–2017) had to find a way to deal with the vast legacy of novel and film sequels, remakes, and lookalikes, a well-established and well-known continuity and mythology, and images from the original film that are firmly engrained on our collective consciousness. This chapter will take a very close look at the methods used by the series’ showrunners to somehow respect the film’s seriality while at the same time rerouting it and even turning it upon itself. It involves a highly coordinated reworking of character development and story arcs, creating a complex dialectic of past and present through new aesthetics and cultural references, and playing clever games of anticipation, repetition, and deviant replay.
