In 1960, Alfred Hitchc*ck saw the future. The British director had been a force in cinema since silent films, but the 1950’s were by far his most successful decade at the movies. He churned out blockbuster after blockbuster, all filmed in gorgeous color with top Hollywood stars like James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Grace Kelly.
Now, Hitchc*ck was looking for ways to reach younger audiences. He was intrigued by the low budget, black-and-white horror films that were packing teenagers into drive-in theaters. “What if someone who knew what they were doing made a film like that?” he mused to his secretary, according to the documentary The Making of Psycho. Out of that off-hand question came Psycho (1960), a movie that not only transformed Hitchc*ck‘s reputation, but also fundamentally changed American movies, paving the way for the frank sexuality and graphic violence that would become commonplace in later decades. Now is an excellent time to revisit Psycho if you live in the United States. TCM and Fathom Events are bringing this seminal horror film to American cinemas on September 20 and 23.
The Making of Psycho
Hitchc*ck, who was never content without a movie to direct, began looking for a new project as soon as he completed the glossy thriller North by Northwest (1959). He settled on a trashy novel by Robert Bloch that was based on the sensational real-life case of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin man who murdered two women and filled his rural home with bodies exhumed from the local cemetery.
Psycho follows a Phoenix real-estate secretary, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is frustrated with her life. Marion is stuck in a dead-end job and her romance with a married man (John Gavin) is going nowhere. On a whim, Marion steals $40,000 from her boss and runs away to California. On a dark, rainy night, she pulls into the lonely Bates Motel where she is met by its twitchy, shy proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).
Hitchc*ck decided early on that Psycho was going to be a low-budget movie designed to titillate and thrill audiences in the same manner as the drive-in cheapies. With that in mind, he used the cinematographer and crew from his TV show, Alfred Hitchc*ck Presents, to shoot Psycho, although he was able to obtain Leigh and Perkins, who were both sought-after stars, to play the leads. Hitchc*ck‘s home studio, Paramount Pictures, was not eager to finance what they viewed as low-class fare, so Psycho was actually shot on the Universal Studios back lot. This seems bizarre in 2015, but in 1960 each old Hollywood studio was known for making particular types of films; while Paramount was known for glamorous Continental fare like Hitchc*ck’s French Riviera thriller To Catch a Thief (1955), Universal was known for teen movies and horror films.
Actually, Paramount’s reluctance to finance Psycho allowed Hitchc*ck much greater creative freedom. He later admitted to French director Francois Truffaut that he wasn’t really interested in making Psycho‘s story; instead he wanted to use his mastery of the medium to see if he could garner cheap thrills from an audience. “I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all of the technical ingredients that make audiences scream,” he said.
The Original Slasher Film
1960 audiences certainly got their thrills, cheap and otherwise, from Psycho. Hitchc*ck came up with a no advanced screenings policy that certainly fueled a media frenzy, but once patrons left the theater they didn’t hesitate to recommend the movie to their family and friends. In fact, Psycho had such a large impact on pop culture that Perkins often grew weary of being stopped at restaurants and airports decades after he first played Norman. “Everyone has a Psycho story or two,” he recalled in an interview quoted in the DVD notes.
Psycho‘s eventual impact was much greater than giving poor Perkins agoraphobia. The movie was groundbreaking in many ways, essentially shattering the motion picture production code that had been enforced since 1935. Leigh was the first post-code Hollywood heroine to appear in her undergarments, and Psycho featured the first toilet in American cinema (technically, this is true, but latrines are shown in the 1958 military comedy No Time for Sergeants).
All of those points are important, but Psycho‘s larger impact is in its creation of the slasher genre. The slasher films that appeared in the 1970’s and 1980’s are all the descendants of Psycho, although Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers somehow lack the subtlety and the humanity found in Hitchc*ck‘s masterpiece. For me, the most obvious difference between the slasher films and Psycho is the central figure of Norman Bates. The 80’s slasher stars had heart-tugging backstories – Michael was confined to a sanatorium, Freddy was a burn victim – but, by the time we see them onscreen, they are dehumanized monsters. Norman, on the other hand, is all too human. He commits terrible crimes, but he is a shy, frightened young man who is reeling from the loss of his beloved mother, who was the only stabilizing force in his life. Without her, he is a lost soul trapped in an ocean of grief, and his driving obsession to recreate his mother’s memory is both extremely bizarre and infinitely human.
Finally, the violence in Psycho is so much more sophisticated than in the slasher films. I don’t keep up with the horror genre, but from my understanding, films like the Saw and Hostel series feature more limbs being severed than in a Civil War hospital. Psycho‘s violence is much more stylized. The famous shower scene took seven days to film and featured 70 camera set-ups of approximately 45 seconds each, according to Hitchc*ck’s estimation. The result was two minutes of flash cuts, screaming violins, and slashing sounds that add up to the audience believing they experienced much more than they really saw. Perkins pointed this out in an interview quoted in the DVD liner notes. “It’s actually a very chaste scene,” he said. “There is no violence in that scene, it’s all implied. It’s all good angles and clever music and very artful intercutting.”
Hitchc*ck made more movies, but he always looked back on Psycho with a sense of accomplishment. “I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion,” he said. “And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.”
Where do you think Psycho ranks in Hitchc*ck’s filmography? Do you prefer the more stylized violence of Psycho or are you a fan of modern horror films?
(top image source: Paramount Pictures)
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