“Psycho’s” Bates house is reborn above the Met

“PsychoBarn” crosses the famed house of horror with a barn

A screenshot of “The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)”
A screenshot of “The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)”

A house of horrors that brings together Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock is set to open atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art Tuesday.

Dubbed, “The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn),” the installation is a 28-foot-high, two-thirds scale replica of the Bates house – the house from Hitchcock’s 1960 film, “Psycho.”

Set in a corner of the Met’s Rooftop Terrace, the house (really more of a set) is made entirely of materials from a disused, 1920s-era barn from the upstate town of Schoharie, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

“It’s two objects together. One is a fictional object, which is the ‘Psycho’ house, and the other is a real thing, which is the barn,” Parker told the Journal. “It’s all fake but all real at the same time.”

Parker was influenced, as was Hitchcock, by Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting “House by the Railroad.”

“Hitchcock really loved ‘House by the Railroad,’” Parker said.

“There was a whole mother thing going on in the Hitchcock,” she added. “And then the barn is somehow a mother too—a different kind of mother.” [WSJ] Christopher Cameron

Recommended For You