Our horrifying countdown continues with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
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Yesterday saw Victoria Russell grapple with Carrie whilst earlier this week Greg Evans confronted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Antony Smith reviewed John Carpenter’s starling sci-fi gross-fest The Thing. Today, Ed Frost continues our Halloween countdown of horror by discussing the 1960 horror classic Psycho and analyses why it is a pioneering forefather of the horror genre.
Psycho (1960)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles
“We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”
Arguably the most famous of Alfred Hitchcock’s astounding collection of films, the Master of Suspense’s first all-out horror film, Psycho (1960), is a landmark in American movie history. Psycho fully cemented the filmmaker’s position as an auteur of both lucrative and influential repute.
Based on a slim novel by Robert Bloch that was inspired by notorious serial killer Ed Gein, Psycho saw perhaps the most notable shift in both style and themes for Hitchcock. Hollywood given carte blanch to explore humanity’s underlying fixation with perversity and voyeurism. Shot in glorious monochrome, the film is a striking and frightening concoction of Freudian ideologies made real. The various horrors on display were evoked by Bernard Herrmann’s iconic score as well as John L. Russell’s shadowy cinematography.
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In her career-defining role, Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane; an inhibited secretary goes on the run with $40,000 stolen from her employer’s client. She eventually checks into a shady, remote motel outside of town in what at first appears to be the perfect base to remain in hiding. Crane soon discovers the extent to which the boyishly delicate and easily agitated owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) operates under the dominance of his scathing mother.
Psycho features perhaps horror’s most recognisable sequences which see Marion brutally stabbed to death in the shower – presumably by Norman’s mother. Cut to Herrmann’s shrieking, strings-only piece of music – one of the most distinctive pieces ever that’s been borrowed by everything from Carrie (1976) to TV’s American Horror Story (2011-) – the scene is comprised of thirty-six shots spread over thirty seconds, tempestuously edited together to intensify the terror on screen.
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The sequence is renowned for its technical virtuosity and the fact that it audaciously does away with its leading actress a mere forty minutes into the film; something unheard of at the time. This is one of many pioneering elements found in the film, which range from the first shot of a flushing toilet in American cinema to subconsciously shifting the audience’s allegiance from Crane to Bates, a schizophrenic psychopath.
Hitchcock’s relentless manipulation of audience engagement extended outside the realm of the film proved by packed theatres across the West. Famously stating that his sole filmmaking aim was to “put audiences through it,” he fashioned a release strategy that stated: ‘No One … BUT NO ONE … Will Be Admitted to the Theatre After the Start of Each Performance of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho’, ensuring total distress when the shower curtain is pulled back and the knife plunged for the first time.
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The first in a series of darker films that explored the obscurity of his psyche and the depravity that lay within – most notably The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), – Psycho joins Vertigo (1958) as the most picked-apart of his films. It’s a work of supreme mastery, where each of the meticulously honed elements coheres into something that’s often imitated, but never bettered.
Perhaps Hitchcock describes it best when, in one of the many interviews with French filmmaker and critic François Truffaut, he states:
“It’s tremendously satisfying to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audience, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.”
Be sure to tune in tomorrow to see the latest installment of our Halloween countdown of horror.