My paternal grandmother was a pretty vicious person. Always making subtle digs at my mother, and some of the stories my father told about growing up were pretty scary. She stayed with us for a week or so when I was 10 or 11, while my mother was in the hospital, and we experienced some of it first-hand. Big stuff and little - hitting my two-year-old sister with a shoe because she answered the phone. Watching Psycho with her on TV, and in the shower scene, she says "you know that's really that Norman guy, not his mother". When she died, my aunt told my father "She finally can't hurt anyone anymore".