The Bates house, a Universal backlot fixture, never actually had a back. You’d think, given its iconic status in *Psycho*, that it would be a complete structure. But Hollywood, as it often does, preferred illusion. It was all facade.

A facade, not a house

Alfred Hitchcock started making Psycho in late 1959. He had a tight budget, just $806,000. He told his art department to build a Second Empire Victorian mansion on a small hill on the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. This house would loom over the low, flat Bates Motel below.

But he only needed one side of it. The Bates House was built with just its front and left walls. Behind those walls there was nothing. Just an open frame. A staircase climbed to a landing, then stopped in mid air, thirty feet above the ground.

Reused, endlessly

After Psycho, they moved the house a short distance and left it standing on the backlot. For decades, it popped up again. Sometimes it was just a silhouette on a hill in the background of another film. You can spot it in Invitation to a Gunfighter, The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre, Death Cruise, Curse of the Living Corpse, and countless episodes of Murder, She Wrote.

In 1983, for Psycho II, they finally put up the missing walls. The house you see today from the Universal Studios Tour tram is technically the same house Hitchcock built in 1959. It is still on its little hill, still with the motel below it, but now it has two more sides.