10 Insane Ways Directors Appeared In Their Own Movies

Of course, being such a master of the directorial cameo, Hitchcock wouldn't let a simple thing like being dead stop him showing up in movies of his own work.

Three years after Hitch's death a decades-later sequel to Psycho was made with Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates returning home after over twenty years in a mental institution. The movie was directed by Hitchcock acolyte Richard Franklin who wanted to pay tribute to his mentor. And what better way to do that than with a trademark cameo?

Mid-way through the movie, Norman enters his mother's room and Hitchcock's distinctive silhouette is clearly visible in the shadows at the side of the screen.

Franklin even went further in emulating the original Psycho by copying specific shots from the earlier film. He was nothing like as slavish in his devotion to reproducing the original, though, as Gus Van Sant would be in his 1998 remake, which reproduces so many of the original shots, sequences and camera movements that it's kind of jarring when it does something new.

Even though by then Hitch had been dead for the better part of two decades, this obsessive desire to recreate the original Psycho also meant recreating the original cameo. The first movie had Hitchcock seen through a window outside an office, wearing a stetson hat for some reason. So, Van Sant had a lookalike doing just the same, only now that hatted ersatz-Hitchcock was talking to Gus himself.