The Director’s Shock-and-Gore Tactics: Dealing with Loss
The film’s shock-and-gore tactics are the director’s way of dealing with the loss of his parents, the actor Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson, a photographer and actress.
Perkins, who famously played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992, aged 60.
Osgood’s mum Berenson was 53 when she boarded American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001, after which the hijacked plane was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
He said of his new film: “I was like, ‘Oh right, this story is about this thing that creates these obscene deaths, these really unthinkable, weird tragedies that come out of nowhere.’
“Well, I’ve experienced unthinkable, weird tragedies that come out of nowhere. I’m an expert at this. And whereas when they happened to me, I was certainly defeated by them, I’m an older person now, I’m a father. I wouldn’t have got to, ‘Haha, I’m making a comedy about the fact that everybody dies’ if I hadn’t also had many years of feeling cursed and heartbroken.”
Until his late thirties, Anthony Perkins had relationships only with men, before opting to undergo conversion therapy.
He married Berenson in 1973, when she was three months pregnant with Osgood.
