Sweet Kill, on the other hand, connects Eddie with live pigeons throughout the film. Pigeons are not nearly as elegant as the birds of prey that Norman surrounds himself with; pigeons are pests, they’re common, they’re associated with trash. Eddie’s neighbors complain several times about the noise and the smell associated with his birds; they’re a general nuisance rather than living sculpture.

The difference in birds reflects the differences in approach between the two films. Psycho is concerned with art, with revealing and psychological examinations of depraved minds. Sweet Kill, on the other hand, is sleazy, brash, wallowing in trash. Tab Hunter’s Eddie is the pigeon to Anthony Perkins’ lanky crane. Both are excellent at what they’re doing; they’re just both doing different (yet related) things.

The film ends with a truly upsetting scene that recalls the infamous Psycho shower sequence. The victim this time is Eddie’s downstairs neighbor, who has shown genuine affection for him throughout the film. She finds a body in his tub, and Eddie sneaks up behind her, stabbing her repeatedly. The sequence is all quick cuts and invasive, penetrating camera movements that suggest stabbing rather than showing it, just like Hitchcock’s original. We get a shot of her bloody hand sliding down the wall just like Marion’s head, and we see her pull down the shower curtain.

Then, there is a lingering shot of Tab Hunter, streaked with blood, his chest heaving as he stares down at his latest victim. A dribble of drool escapes his mouth, and he wipes it away. The image of the beefcake, heartthrob, all-American boy has become something grotesque, pornographic. We’re not meant to objectify him here the way we are when he goes shirtless in nearly all of his other films. Instead, we’re meant to be repulsed by him. And we are.

The film ends with a long tracking shot in almost total darkness, the only sound the overwhelming cooing of the pigeons. It’s not clear what we’re seeing at first; there’s a shape that we are getting closer and closer to, but it’s difficult to make out. Is it a bird?

The image resolves itself and comes into focus and we see that it’s Tab Hunter, lurking in the shadows of the rafters, his face melting into the darkness. He’s wild, animalistic, his eyes probing the camera, daring us to look at him. It’s shocking and upsetting and far more sophisticated than anything that’s come before. It recalls the overlay of Norman Bates and the death’s-head that comes at the very end of Psycho.

No wonder audiences who just wanted to see some naked women didn’t flock to theaters for Sweet Kill.

There’s a section of Benshoff’s book entitled “Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight, circa the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.” It’s about the way that monsters moved out of the shadows in the late 60s and in the 70s, becoming more normalized and taking on different forms than the repressed killers of the 50s and early 60s. In that way, Sweet Kill is quite regressive; yes, it could show way more nudity and sexual violence than its counterparts under the Production Code, but it still reduces its monstrous queer to a primal animal forced back into the shadows and in-between spaces of his building.

However, as a career move from a Hollywood star who spent his youth in the closet, it’s stunning. Here Tab Hunter has remixed and reinterpreted the most iconic performance by the man whose love he was forced to hide, and turned it into something even more twisted and perverse, as a way to break down and take control of his own star persona, wresting it away from the Hollywood machine. To paraphrase Gary Giddens in Tab Hunter Confidential, this monstrous queer is “radical,” an act of rebellion against the Hollywood system.