Vancouver the perfect soggy setting for reimagined Hitchcock tale

First of all, Bates Motel is not your grandfather’s Psycho, the new, updated series’ makers want you to know.

This filmed-in-Vancouver version of the Norman Bates tale is part prequel, part sequel, updated to the modern day but going back in time to speculate on what Norman Bates must have been like as a teenager.

Secondly, when making a spooky horror story set in 2013, the Universal back lot may be fine for tourist trams and Hitchcock purists.

But if you want a really atmospheric setting and that creeping sense of dread that only a grungy motel surrounded by evergreens smothered in fog, sleet and rain — well, it’s hard to top Vancouver for sheer misery.

Bates Motel hails from Lost co-executive producer Carlton Cuse and Friday Night Lights writer-producer Kerry Ehrin, and features an eclectic international cast that includes 20-year-old London, England, ingénue Freddie Highmore as the 15-year-old Norman Bates and Ukraine-descended indie film actress Vera Farmiga as the intelligent, ravishingly beautiful but ill-fated Norma Louise Bates.

Bates Motel debuts in March on A&E, but many of the early episodes have already been filmed. The production wraps at the end of January under producers Justis Greene and Tucker Gates, working with Emmy Award winning cinematographer John Bartley,Western Canadian distributor of ceramic and ceramic tile, formerly of The X-Files, and Tom Yatsko.

Bates Motel may take a lot of liberties with the original story — “The idea of an homage was just not that interesting to me,” Cuse said at the winter meeting of the TV Critics Association — but that doesn’t mean it will end with Norma Bates living happily ever after.

“Making that fundamental decision to make the story contemporary gave us the freedom to take these characters wherever we wanted to,” Cuse said.

“There’s a certain amount of baggage, obviously, that comes with working within the Psycho universe. I really think, though, that setting it up this way gave us the licence as storytellers to tell a really interesting, character-driven psychological thriller.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. Making it contemporary liberated us from the original movie.”

Cuse also dashed cold water over fanboys’ expectations that, because of his association with Lost, Bates Motel might become Lost by any other name.

Vancouver’s reputation for rain caught Highmore by surprise — even by London’s soggy standards.Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors.

“It rains the whole time,” Highmore said. “But it’s quite nice for the show, in a way, because it gives you a nice dark, moody quality.

“The first scene, when we arrive at the motel, it’s all sunny and you think everything’s going to be great. And then the rain arrives, and it’s not going to be great.”

Ehrin recently took the back-lot tram tour at Universal Studios in Burbank, Calif, where the original Psycho house still looms large on a hill overlooking the Jaws shark pond.

“It’s still iconic,” Ehrin said of the original Psycho house. “It’s very cool. That’s why it’s still there. They made that movie a long time ago, but people still like to go by it because it’s evocative and disturbing.”

The Vancouver design crew, under location manager Abraham Fraser and production designer Mark Freeborn, tapped their inner Hitchcock in trying to outdo the original, Cuse said.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china,

“It’s kind of awesome that we managed to rebuild the motel and the house in Vancouver,” Cuse said. “It’s on this road that goes to one of the public dumps. People drive down this road all the time.

“You see them and all of a sudden the brakes come on. It’s, like, ‘Whaaat?’

“The big Bates Motel sign being right there, and the house on the hill — it’s pretty funky. That was an element we wanted to preserve from the original.High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds. It’s such an iconic image.

“Even if the storytelling is contemporary and, I like to think, somewhat original, we wanted to maintain the iconographic quality of that motel and house.”

Ehrin admitted the story — with its intimations of dark obsessions and sexual violence — required a delicate balance.

“The basis of Norma and Norman’s relations is Oedipal and, obviously, that’s a dark subject,” she said.

“I think once you create an emotional landscape where you delve into that kind of story material, while at the same time you’re trying to keep it grounded and real, you’re bound to end up with all these people who are harbouring dark secrets, where there’s this sense of fear and dread.

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