Psycho

PSYCHO

(1960)
Dir - Alfred Hitchcock
Overall: GREAT

Likely the most analyzed and lauded film to ever fall under the horror umbrella, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho begat so much that it is interesting to remember that at the time, it was a gamble.  Hitchcock was already a household name and probably the most famous filmmaker on the planet, (a title that he largely still holds), decades into his career and hot off the success of North by Northwest and his hit television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents which was already five years running.  So adapting Robert Bloch's down and dirty voyeur murderer novel of the same name and pushing the boundaries of what kind of taboo subject matter he could get away with while the Hays Code was in full swing was a risky maneuver.  Paramount executives wanted nothing to do with the project, (considering it "too repulsive" and "impossible to film"), refusing Hitchcock's proposals which grew more and more small-scale until they approved of it only after the director gave up his usual salary for a stake in the film negative, and agreed to shoot it in black and white, within three months, and with his television crew.

 

The project was a deliberate left turn from the type of film that Hitchcock had by then positioned himself to make.  Inspired in part by low budget B-pictures that were turning a profit, he thought of what one might be like if it was done by someone who was actually good.  No need for Hitchcock to be humble as he had the clout to get any available A-list actor to work with him and virtually any project that he wanted off the ground.  Psycho was further an anomaly for him though since most of his movies were in color and his subjects were usually upper-class people caught up in murder, crime, or a combination of both.  While Psycho certainly had its fair share of murder, and Janet Leigh was certainly an A-lister, (Anthony Perkins within the A-lister realm as well), it hardly featured characters who were in the upper echelon of society.  Leigh's Marion Crane is a secretary who runs off with $40,000, (nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from the kind of high-end jewels that Cary Grant made an illegal career out of snatching in To Catch a Thief), and Perkins' Norman Bates runs a secluded and perpetually vacant motel that hardly seems to have enough clients even to cover the monthly electric bill for the place.  These are average Joe protagonists and antagonists, living far outside the sophisticated circles that Hitchcock himself frequented.

 

Because of course, only such average Joe's would willfully eat candy corn.

Though the director had previously made movies featuring characters who the modest-income viewer could more easily relate to, (Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, The Trouble with Harry), he was still more accustomed to cinematically portraying aristocrats, people with exciting professions, or just plain old wealthy folk.  The one rich guy that we meet in Psycho does flaunt his wealth around, (proclaiming that he is buying his daughter a house as a wedding present), but he is in a single scene and merely provides the film with its MacGuffin, meaning the money that Janet Leigh runs off with on a whim.  He is hardly a central player.  The film instead focuses on Leigh's character, famously doing away with her before we even hit the thirty minute mark.  At that point, things switch to Perkins who is someone that the audience roots for until the equally famous twist in the finale.

 

One of the often talked about aspects of Psycho is how it not only shifts its main player focus, but also how it sets us up for that twist where the awkward, lonely, covering-up-for-his-mother's-kills fellow running the hotel winds up being the violently deranged one.  Putting the audience on the side of the villain was nothing new during the Golden Era of Hollywood, and Hitchcock himself had done it a handful of times already, (Rope, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt again), but it was rare to not reveal that said villain WAS the villain until the closing moments.  Though an expert manipulator of course, never had Hitchcock lead the audience in one direction only to gobsmack them to such a degree.

 

After all, he wouldn't even hurt a fly.

The movie in effect establishes two sought after motifs then, to eventually make the sympathetic main character the bad guy and to kill off the other main character early on, letting everyone know that unspoken narrative "rules" were not to be obeyed and in effect, anything could happen.  This aspect of killing likeable characters was present in Bloch's novel, but Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano's decision to keep the focus away from Bates for so long while propping up Crane's ultimately unimportant arc was an even more extreme rug pull.  For the Master of Suspense that he was, such a shock tactic was tailor made for Hitchcock to exploit since it puts the viewer on the edge of their seats from that shower scene until the film is wrapped up.

Psycho is all about such manipulation, leading the viewer in one direction and then throwing them a curve-ball in as hair-raising a manner as possible.  Only two people are murdered on screen, but each kill scene, (or would-be kill scene including the finale when Vera Miles discovers what has been going on the entire time and John Gavin emerges in the nick of time to apprehend Bates), hits us out of nowhere, everything being meticulously choreographed by Hitchcock along the way.  Generally in horror, if there is a persistent musical score, it drops out when a jump scare is about to happen.  While Hitchcock technically does the same thing here for Leigh's murder, he deploys misdirection in a different manner for that of Martin Balsam's private investigator.

 

Dude never knew what hit him.  Didn't even notice the rear projection behind him.

When Balsam returns to the Bates Motel and house to snoop around, Hitchcock knew that extinguishing the music once again as he did with Leigh could likely signify to the viewer that this character was now also doomed.  So wisely, he lets Balsam roam around while Bernard Herman's score continues its unsettling business, be it in a low-key and mood-setting manner.  We see Balsam enter the Bates mansion and slowly ascend the staircase, and even cut away somewhere to a door opening up a crack which heightens the tension, but the killer gets him so suddenly with those shrieking strings interrupting the soundtrack that it still provides a jolt.

 

For Leigh's murder, the bamboozlement is more of a psychological nature.  When she decides to shower, it represents a cleansing of not just her body, but her moral compass.  It is clear that she intends to return to her job and face the music as far as her crime is concerned, her sudden stealing of the $40,000 being something that she has been emotionally struggling with the entire time.  Her casual chat with Perkins in his office over a humble dinner of milk and sandwiches leads to the discussion of people being "trapped" by certain circumstances in their lives, and this seems to reaffirm her inkling that taking the money was wrong and that she will forever be hounded by that rash decision.  She seems happy for the first time when she undresses and begins to wash herself.  It seems an ideal moment to murder her for maximum impact, but considering the more innocent time that this was made, (and again, because this is our main character Janet Leigh that we are talking about), audience members would trust that the film would not do that to them.

 

"Wait, Janet Leigh is dead and this movie still has HOW many minutes left?"

Hitchcock coming up through the silent era, having directed several episodes of his own television series, and so well-versed in his craft that he could work around any budgetary or censor constraint all proved to be advantages within the more minuscule production aspects that he was working with here.  Shooting it in black and white allowed for him to show flowing blood during the shower scene since he could experiment with different substances that appeared good on camera, ultimately going with chocolate syrup which obviously would have looked like a different bodily fluid pouring out of Marion Crane's corpse if it was shot in color.  Also if if was shot in color, Paramount would have balked at the the idea of any overt "gore", as comparatively tame as it is.  After all, Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast was still three years away, and that guy was hardly working within the confines of a major studio that would disapprove of such tactics.  Hitchcock was working within such confines, but he knew how to position his camera to not only get the blood flowing correctly, but also to obscure the nudity during Leigh's shower murder.

 

In Bloch's novel, Crane was decapitated instead of merely stabbed.  This detail also had to be reworked for the screen, another and more prominent being Norman Bates' entire personality.  Middle aged, overweight, and unlikable in the book, Hitchcock suggested to screenwriter Joseph Stefano that they cast Perkins in the role, something that changed the character's entire persona.  Good looking and charismatic, Perkins' Bates was the type of guy that an audience could get behind.  This was further made possible by eliminating most clear indications on how disturbed Bates was.  In the book, he is an alcoholic who goes into murderous rages as his mother when drunk, and he is also shown to be a fan of the occult and pornography.  Alcohol does not play into the screen version of Bates at all, and when Crane's sister Lila, (played by Miles, who was originally groomed to be the leading lady in Hitchcock's Vertigo), is snooping around the Bates residence, she comes across some literature that is never shown to the audience.  Instead, we only see her making a concerned face at her discoveries.

 

As it turns out, she would find something much more concerning in the basement.

Bernard Herman's score likewise makes ideal use out of him taking a smaller fee for his work.  Utilizing only strings instead of a full orchestra, it created a less lush and in effect more permeating soundtrack.  Coming right out of the gate during Saul Bass' opening titles and all through the first act where the only white-knuckled moments are whether or not Leigh is going to get busted for stealing the money, (in other words, no signs of murder anywhere to be found), Herman goes big.  Working within a menacing melody, the strings are sharp and ergo "stabby", which is helped by Bass' titles flashing strict lines, (or "slashes"), across the screen.  It sets the movie up to be a high-tension thriller even though it does not deliver on that set up until Crane's murder.  Herman's score continues to be heavily utilized throughout, never delivering anything tender or lovely, only creating steady unease or outright panic when those instantly recognizable stings bombard the audio during the kill sequences.

 

Of course one cannot discuss Psycho without also discussing its more boundary pushing aspects.  A toilet being flushed on screen, the film's opening depicting two unmarried people having just finished some lunch hour/hotel room hanky panky, Leigh being shown in lingerie two different scenes, (not to mention being naked of course for her fatal shower), and the reveal of Bates being a murderous transvestite, these were the types of taboos that made Paramount hesitant from the beginning.  They were also the taboos that Hitchcock was interesting in putting on the screen, again going for a more down-and-dirty film than the ones which he had previously done.  Psycho is still slick in its construction since its director was too detail oriented and skilled to do anything otherwise, but it deliberately has a more dingy and unsettling tone than any of his prior works.  It is not slick in the sense of portraying such freakishly attractive actors like Grace Kelly or Cary Grant in flattering and romantic manners, making sure that their wardrobes are impeccable and that they shine on the screen.  No, here we have Janet Leigh in her undergarments and Anthony Perkins in drag while wielding a knife.

 

How scandalous!

This brings us to the fact that Psycho is one of the rare Alfred Hitchcock films that can be considered horror.  From across the Atlantic in England, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was released several months before and coincidentally dealt with a similar premise of a disturbed young man with parental trauma who murders women and is also a voyeur.  Both movies can be seen as precursors to the slasher film, along with various Edgar Wallace adaptations that had been made since the silent era and would then get a boom starting the same year with Anglo-Amalgamated's series of forty-seven of them.  These would lead directly into Italian giallos and a handful of American and Canadian serial killer movies from the 1970s, John Carpenter's Halloween having the most immediate impact on the unfolding sub-genre.  Though Powell's film, a handful of those giallos, (particularly Dario Argento's), and of course Carpenter's are all expertly done, none are as influential as Hitchcock's.

 

Due to the movie's enormous popularity from the moment that it was released until today, (assisted by Hitchcock maintaining complete control over its marketing, keeping it away from critics and preview audiences in order to make sure that none of the plot twists would be leaked), likely every future filmmaker has seen it.  As far as swiping any of its ingredients, it is almost impossible NOT to be influenced by it.  Like other directors who dabbled in horror sparingly yet knocked it out of the park when they did, (Stanley Kubrick, William Friedkin, Werner Herzog, Andrzej Żuławski, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Adrian Lyne, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Masaki Kobayashi), Psycho represents the work of someone proficient yet also someone challenging themselves within the confines of a genre.  In his intention to make one of those low budget movies except actually good, Hitchcock also made one of those horror movies except actually great.

 

A man who was gonna show us how it's done.