Producer Hilton A. Green first considered Jamie Lee Curtis for the role of Mary Loomis in Psycho 2, but Curtis turned down the role and Meg Tilly dallied the part instead. With the handout of Norman Bates( Anthony Perkins) from a mental institution — 22 years after his initial series of murders — Psycho 2 followed Norman’s descent into provoked madness, in part, by Lila Loomis( Vera Miles ), the sister of Marion Crane( Janet Leigh ). Lila pretended to be Norman’s father to drive him crazy, and later in the film, a Hitchcockesque twist revealed that she had the help of her daughter Mary Samuels, otherwise known as Mary Loomis.

The casting of Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of Mary Loomis seems excellent since she is the real-life daughter of Janet Leigh, Norman Bates’s famed shower casualty in Hitchcock’s 1960 original, Psycho. By this top in the early ‘8 0s, Curtis was no stranger to the horror genre: Following in her mother’s footsteps, she secured her deed as a bonafide Scream Queen with Halloween, Prom Night, and The Fog. Plus, she previously worked with Psycho 2 administrator Richard Franklin on the thriller Road Games. So why did Curtis turn down what appears to be the perfect persona for her?

Related: Psycho: The True Story That Inspired Norman Bates

Unfortunately, makes picked the worst time to ask Curtis to appear in Psycho 2. The actress had resolved to quit horror after Halloween 2( 1981 ) due to fear of typecasting, and already had a John Landis comedy, Trading Places, in the works. Richard Franklin didn’t appear too upset by this, claiming her giving in the sequel would have been “too obvious.” In a 2003 interrogation in Eros Magazine, Franklin said, “I remember when I obligated Psycho II, a lot of beings asked why we didn’t use her in the lead. The refute was, it was too obvious.” However, he admitted that Jamie and Janet watched one of the first screenings of the film.

Though the timing was off and Franklin seemed in accordance with the casting of Meg Tilly as Mary, the inclusion of Jamie Lee Curtis would have established another Halloween and Pyscho parallel for the films’ individual and collective legacies. After all, Dr. Loomis’s name in Halloween derived from Psycho’s very own, Sam Loomis: Lila’s husband, Mary’s father, and Marion’s onetime suitor. A hypothesi even exits so far as to proclaim them to be the same person.

The casting of Jamie Lee Curtis as Mary Loomis in Psycho 2 could have gone down in cinematic autobiography as iconic or perhaps a bit cheap. The intuition of her avenging her actual mother might have been a clever wink to adept movie devotees. Yet, Curtis had other a blueprint for her job, and she did eventually restore her throne, returning to the blood-soaked genre and even Halloween in 2018.

More: How Modern Horror Movies Rescued Women From Hitchcock’s Hysteria

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