It’s the birthday of Robert Bloch (1917-1994), best known for ruining so many showers for so many people as the author of the novel Psycho (1959), made into the eponymous Hitchcock film in 1960. Bloch wrote everything from mysteries to humor to horror, was one of the first to explore the minds of serial killers in his fiction, and influenced the likes of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King.

Bloch himself disliked graphic violence in movies and preferred relying on psychological factors and surprise endings.

Bloch was born in Chicago, Illinois; the family moved to Milwaukee in 1929. Bloch grew up reading H.P. Lovecraft, even corresponding with him, and at age 8—by which time he was in the fourth grade—he saw The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and subsequently experienced “about two years of recurrent nightmares.” He graduated from high school at 17 and sold his first story to the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1934. He never went to college and would go on to write hundreds of short stories, including “The Hell-Bound Train,” which won the Hugo Award in 1959—the same year that Psycho was published.

By then Bloch had published half a dozen other novels as well, and ultimately published a total of 20 or 30 as well as those gazillion short stories and a ton of screenplays, including The House That Dripped Blood (1970) and Asylum (1972). But let’s talk about Psycho. Bloch was inspired in part by the true story of murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein—that’s body snatching as in stealing corpses from graveyards and doing untoward things with them. (And I have this to say about body snatching: I’m agin’ it.) The inspiration came not from anything Gein did—the story of Norman Bates was entirely made up—but from the fact that Gein lived undetected for so long in small-town America. It makes you want to move to a nice safe big city.

When Hitchcock released the movie version, he demanded that no one be allowed into the theatre once the lights were down, and theatres actually enforced this. This resulted in the creation of the first-ever ticket-holders line (distinct from the box office line where you bought tickets). Ray Bradbury said that the film was “the beginning of a dark period when we made films based on psychotic reality rather than mythological things.”

(Shoot. Just realized I haven’t showered yet today.)

Bloch was married twice, had one daughter, and died at 77 of cancer of the esophagus and kidneys.

Have a calm, almost weirdly uneventful day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.