Psycho (1962)

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Perhaps no other film changed so drastically Hollywood's perception of the horror film as did Psycho. Nowadays, when any psychological thriller featuring a loony with a knife is designated "Hitchcockian" in some quarters, it's easy to forget just what a dramatic change of pace this was for Hitchcock. Though renowned for stories of murder, intrigue, and high adventure, Hitchcock's Hollywood films of the 1950s generally boasted top-drawer production values, big stars, picturesque surroundings, and, more often than not, Technicolor. In comparison to North by Northwest (1959), Psycho was intentionally sleazy and cheap both in the look and subject matter. The film opens with voyeuristic panache as the camera sweeps along the skyline of Phoenix, Arizona, focuses on one building, and zeroes in on a hotel window. Hitchcock clouded his intent and motives by reportedly stating that the entire film was nothing more than one huge joke. No one laughed. The violence and bloodletting of Psycho may look tame to those who have grown up on Jason, Freddy Krueger, and the films of Quentin Tarintino, but no one had ever seen anything like it in 1960.

Hitchcock opens in his traditional manner, involving the viewer immediately with his players and his twisting plot. The camera pans the skyline of Phoenix, Arizona, and then focuses on one building, zeroing in on one hotel window, going through it to show Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), wearing only a bra and slip, reclining sensuously on a bed, her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin) standing over her. From the onset of their conversation we realize that they are having an adulterous affair and that Gavin is too poor to get a divorce. (In presenting the opening scene in this manner, like a peep show, Hitchcock transforms the viewer into a voyeur.) The unhappy Marion returns to her real estate office, where her boss George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor) agrees to hold $40,000 for a rich, loud-mouthed client, Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson).

In a moment of weakness, Marion steals the money and decides to make a new life for herself. She pays cash for a new car, but her nervous behavior draws the attention of a state policeman who follows her and, when catching her asleep in the car, warns her not to sleep along the roadside. Marion drives through the night until she is exhausted and begins looking for a place to stay. Spotting the sign for the Bates Motel, she pulls in, meeting Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a jittery young man who gives her a room next to his office.

While they talk, the sensitive young man makes Marion realize that she has made a mistake in stealing the money. After he leaves, she resolves to return the money and set matters straight. Sliding back a picture on the wall when returning to his office, Norman peeps through a hole and watches Marion undress (more voyeurism) and slip on a robe. Nervously covering the peephole, he steps outside, looks furtively up the hill to a bleakly outlined Victorian house, and goes up the long steps to the house. The camera stays outside, and the shrill voice of an elderly woman is heard upbraiding Norman for renting the room to a young woman. It is clear that the woman's voice belongs to Norman's mother and that she is insanely jealous of her son's involvement with anyone else.

Hitchcock's camera next explores the bathroom where Marion is taking a shower. Through the shower curtain inside the tub a shadow is seen approaching. Suddenly the curtain is swept aside, revealing a dark figure in a granny dress holding high a bread knife. Marion screams as the knife descends again and again, slashing her flesh so that her blood gushes. The killer vanishes, and Marion collapses over the tub, clutching the shower curtain. The camera closes in on the drain, down which Marion's blood swirls; then the image on the screen dissolves into one of Marion's staring dead eyes. Marion's death is shortly discovered by a horrified Norman, who screams out in agony against what his mother has done. He methodically wraps the body in the shower curtain, drags it to the trunk of Marion's car, then mops up the bathroom. Finally, he drives the car to a nearby swamp and sends it gurgling to the quicksand bottom.

s When Marion does not show up, her sister Lila (Vera Miles) goes to Sam and begs him to look for her. He agrees, but before he can begin his search, a private detective, Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), appears and explains that he, too, has been looking for Marion, that he has been hired by George to recover the missing $40,000. Milton follows Marion's trail to the Bates Motel, where his inquiries upset Norman, who disappears into the mansion at the top of the hill. Milton checks the register in his absence, even though Norman has told him that Marion never stopped there. Finding evidence to the contrary, Milton goes up the hill to the old house. Once inside, he calls out and, getting no response, begins to climb the stairway. Just as he reaches the top, a lean, old woman races from the bedroom with a bread knife, stabbing Milton repeatedly until he falls backward down the stairs, the camera seeming to fall with him in a fast zoom. Milton is dead when he hits the floor below, and Norman screams out in terror at what his mother has done. We now realize that it was the old lady who killed Marion.

When they don't hear from Milton, Lila and Sam drive to the area of the Bates Motel and meet with the local sheriff Chambers (John McIntire), who tells them that Mrs. Bates, Norman's strange mother, has been dead for eight years and has long since been buried. Sam and Lila go to the motel, and while Sam occupies Norman, Lila sneaks up to the mansion, enters it, and begins to investigate, going from room to room. She finds Mrs. Bates's bedroom, noting the hollowed out spot on the bed where the old woman apparently sleeps and the ornate fixtures and dresser top items, including a strange looking powder jar. Downstairs again, Lila hears footsteps approaching the house and runs to the basement. It's Norman. Becoming suspicious of Sam, he has clubbed the stranger and raced to the house. In the basement, Lila finds a figure in a chair, seemingly Mrs. Bates, facing away from the intruder.Lila calls out, but the old lady doesn't respond. Under a low hanging, glaring light bulb, Lila swivels the chair, which turns around slowly to reveal not a live woman but a sunken-faced, rotting cadaver. Lila reels back in horror, knocking the light bulb so that it swings wildly, casting changing shafts of light upon the seemingly grinning corpse. Suddenly another woman appears, bread knife drawn, quickly approaching Lila for the kill. However, Sam also appears and leaps upon the attacker, pulling away the knife and a wig to reveal Norman, dressed like his mother.

Later, a psychiatrist, Dr. Richmond (Simon Oakland), tries to explain it all, saying that Norman had never been the same after his mother and her lover were murdered in front of his eyes. Traumatized by that horrific event, Norman became a schizophrenic, assuming his mother's personality and killing in revenge for her fate. Dr. Richmond also explains that Norman dug up the old corpse and kept it near him to maintain the illusion that his mother was still alive so that he could transfer his own guilt for his many murders on to her. The homicidal lunatic is then shown sitting in a padded cell, wearing a straitjacket. As Hitchcock closes the camera slowly in on him, Norman, in voice over, says that he will do nothing to betray himself, that he will not even harm the fly buzzing around to prove to his guards that he can be trusted. A closeup of Norman's face dissolves quickly into the skull of his mother and then into a shot showing Marion's car being pulled from the swamp by chains as the credits roll.

Norman Bates was modelled on the demented, cannibalistic Wisconsin killer Ed Gein, (whose heinous acts would also inspire The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Deranged (1974), Psycho is probably Hitchcock's most gruesome and dark film. Its importance to its genre cannot be overestimated. The film's enduring influence comes not only from the Norman Bates character (who has since been reincarnated in a staggering variety of forms), but also from the psychological themes Hitchcock develops. Enhancing the sustained fright of this film are an excellent cast and Bernard Herrmann's chilling score. Especially effective is the composer's so-called "murder music," high-pitched screeching sounds that flash across the viewer's consciousness as quickly as the killer's deadly knife. Herrmann achieved this effect by having a group of violinists frantically saw the same notes over and over again.

Hitchcock really shocked Paramount when he demanded that he be allowed to film the sleazy, sensational novel that Robert Block based on the Gein killings. Bloch's subject matter and characters were a great departure from the sophisticated homicide and refined characters usually found in Hitchcock's films, but the filmmaker kept after the studio's front office until the executives relented. He was told, however, that he would have to shoot the film on an extremely limited budget—no more than $800,000. Surprisingly, Hitchcock accepted the budget restrictions and went ahead with the film, utilizing television technical people, who were less expensive than standard Hollywood crews. Moreover, the director, realizing that Paramount expected this to be his first box-office failure, proposed that he finance the film with his own money in return for 60 percent of the profits. Relieved that its own coffers were secure, Paramount agreed to act as the film's distributor. But even Hitchcock's close associates refused to believe that he was making a wise decision.

It was Hitchcock who specifically ordered Marion's murder to be shown as a brutal thing, scribbling in his own hand for shot 116: "The slashing. An impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film." This filmic slaying is long, terrifying, and gory. Through lightning cuts between Leigh and closeups of the knife striking her body (she is stabbed at least a dozen times) and seemingly piercing her flesh, Hitchcock depicts—for the first time in film history—the bloody realities of violent murder. Reportedly, a fast motion reverse shot was used to give the impression that the knife actually enters Leigh's abdomen. Another of the inventive techniques Hitchcock employs in this legendary scene is the way in which he shows the spray coming directly out of the shower nozzle. Jets of water encompass the camera without ever hitting the lens, as if Leigh is looking directly into the nozzle. To achieve this effect, Hitchcock ordered a huge shower nozzle made, then moved his camera in for a closeup. Even though the film was shot on a frenzied schedule of a little over a month, Hitchcock took a full week to shoot the shower scene, directing it from a tower above the set, employing a single cameraman.

He had abandoned the use of Technicolor, so as not to make the film more gory than it already was, and washed chocolate sauce down the drain as if it were Leigh's blood. A makeup man walked onto the set and looked about and then asked Hitchcock: "Isn't this color?" Replied Hitchcock: "My dear boy, it will have so much more impact in black and white."

Because he owned so much of the film, Hitchcock turned promotion minded, devising the entire publicity campaign for his gruesome masterpiece. He insisted that no moviegoer be seated during the showing of the film. He also demanded that even the critics see the film with the audiences from the beginning, which alienated many a reviewer (leading some critics to label the director's work as "cruel," "sadistic," and even "pornographic"). The director's response was to say that he had fun with the film. In an interview with French director François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that "it was rather exciting to use the camera to deceive the audiences—The game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them like an organ— I didn't start off to make an important movie. I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation— My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audience— I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. That's why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to filmmakers." This was no news to Hitchcock's fans. In a 1947 press conference the great director laid out his philosophy of the mystery-horror genre: "I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks. Civilization has become so protective that we're no longer able to get our goose bumps instinctively. The only way to remove the numbness and revive our moral equilibrium is to use artificial means to bring about the shock. The best way to achieve that, it seems to me, is through a movie."

The film earned Hitchcock his last Oscar nomination for Best Director, but the award went to Billy Wilder.

CAST:

PERFORMER, CHARACTER

Anthony Perkins, Norman Bates

Janet Leigh, Marion Crane

Vera Miles, Lila Crane

John Gavin, Sam Loomis

Martin Balsam, Milton Arbogast

John McIntire, Sheriff Chambers

Lurene Tuttle, Mrs. Chambers

Simon Oakland, Dr. Richmond

Frank Albertson, Tom Cassidy

PRODUCTION:

Produce, Alfred Hitchcock

Directo.r Alfred Hitchcock

Screenwriter, Joseph Stefano based on the novel by Robert Bloch

Editor, George Tomasini

Cinematographer, John L. Russell Jr.

Composer, Bernard Herrmann