#751: Psycho

Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock
Initial release: June 22, 1960 (USA)

People have been making scary movies for over a century. The House of the Devil was an 1896 trick film that featured a guy in a big devil costume and various other spooky things. The 1931 version of Dracula is probably the first "proper" horror film as a distinct genre; in the ninety-five years since, there have been countless landmark works that not only left their impression on horror cinema, but on culture as a whole. This is especially true for the period following World War II, with film reflecting a suffuse post-war cynicism and paranoia coupled with a growing movement towards social change. America entered the 1960s with trepidation: the Cold War hung over everyone's heads like the Sword of Damocles, social agitation for civil rights for women, people of color, and sexual minorities was growing louder, and the world seemed to be getting faster, louder, and more violent. Taken on its own merits, Psycho, released at the outset of the decade, might just be another Alfred Hitchcock thriller, but its combination of sex and violence in ways that pushed the envelope make it possibly the most important horror film of the pre-New Hollywood era.

Probably everyone knows the surface details of the film: there's a naked woman in a motel room shower and she's stabbed to death — there's your sex and violence, all in one neat package. The more savvy might recall the fun fact that chocolate syrup was used for blood as it was the only thing that looked right on the black and white film stock. But Psycho was a cultural phenomenon, one of those things where you really had to be there to understand just how earth-shaking it was. The film starts with Marion (Janet Leigh) in a seedy hotel room with her boyfriend, half-dressed in a bra as the two prepare to part ways until their next tryst. The depiction of an unmarried couple sharing a bed together was scandalous; that the woman should be nearly-topless doubly so. The two characters even lament the unfairness of it all, of having to hide their sexual relationship from a society that frowns on unmarried couples getting it on.

And then there's Norman Bates and the Bates Motel. Played masterfully by Anthony Perkins (one of my favorite actors from the era,) Bates is a seemingly-normal, but quiet and furtive sort who manages his failing motel. He lives under the domineering control of his elderly, invalid mother, who degrades and shouts at him for so much as looking at women. When Marion, who stole $40,000 on impulse from her job with the half-formed idea of eloping with her boyfriend, comes across the motel while in need of a place to stay, Bates spies on her as she undresses, before murdering her in the shower. A private investigator sent to track Marion down is murdered as well. In the end, it turns out that the murder, initially implied to have been Bates' mother, is in fact Bates himself, whose personality had split following the tragic death of his mother, with the more dominant personality being his mother, or rather, Bates' perception of her. The entire concept of Bates is ripped from the headlines: in 1957, serial killer and repeat graverobber Ed Gein was discovered after murdering a local woman. A search of his property revealed a frightening propensity for violence towards women and a complex relationship with his deceased mother. While Bates wasn't exactly wearing women's skin, the concept of needing to embody one's dead mother translated to Bates dressing as his mother and acting as her, with his two personalities even arguing with each other.

All this was, in a word, scandalous for 1960. Hitchcock had to pull strings to get the film made, as Paramount initially wanted nothing to do with it; he ultimately wound up deciding to finance it himself, using the same studios he made his TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents at. While there were some glowing reviews at the time, audiences were shocked at the violence and frank sexuality; British film critic C. A. Lejeune, though friends with Hitchcock, was so appalled by Psycho she quit her job outright before the movie was even over. In later years, Psycho was blamed for making violent movies popular, with 1963's Blood Feast emerging as the first "splatterpunk" film. And then New Hollywood came along and nothing was ever the same again.

But clearly Hitchcock hit on a winner here. The movie plays out like a film noir in some respects, with pretty much the entire first half of the film being a pretty typical 1950s-era noir plot with a morally compromised (by 1950s standards) woman impulsively making a potentially dangerous or at least legally troublesome mistake, imagining in her head all the things people might be saying about her as she nervously drives towards California. But things get turned on their head when Bates kills her and hides her car in a nearby bog. The story then switches to Marion's sister Lily, who is joined by Marion's boyfriend Sam as they — and Arbogast the private investigator — try to track Marion down. I think here is where the film starts to sag a bit, personally, especially once Arbogast is murdered. But the film's climax, as Lily discovers the desiccated corpse of Bates' mother, is fantastic.

If there's a problem I have with the film, it's with its ending, as a police psychologist is brought in for a lengthy tell-all where he explains what, exactly, Bates was thinking. I find the sequence clumsy, and while there's an argument for its necessity (if only for the incredible superimposition of the skull of Norma Bates over Norman's face in the final shot) I can't help but wonder if there was a better way to achieve the same effect.

Nevertheless, Psycho is by all means a success. With its truly iconic soundtrack, Psycho in a lot of ways feels like a predecessor to Halloween, in which Janet Leigh's daughter is menaced by another psycho with a knife. Depending on who you ask, Psycho is the first true slasher flick, despite its low body count; regardless of whether you agree with that assessment or not, it nevertheless has been an enormous influence on horror films, particularly slasher movies, a genre with its own reputation for heady mixtures of sex and violence.

In fact it is due to this very legacy that Psycho got a couple of sequels nobody asked for, all produced after Hitchcock passed away and all much more obviously in line with the very slasher films the original inspired. None of them were very good, each one worse than the last. There was also an ill-advised remake produced in 1998, which simultaneously showed the pitfalls of being too faithful, and not faithful enough: where it was like the 1960 film, it was so almost identical you might as well have watched the original; where it was different, it went for the pointlessly edgy and shocking, making you wonder why even bother? And then there's Bates Motel, a TV show on A&E that was apparently pretty decent, enough to get five whole seasons at least. Maybe I'll sit through it someday and let you know what I think.

While Psycho isn't my favorite horror movie from the era, it's certainly really effective when it works, proving that Hitchcock deserves the label of "master of suspense;" it's also just a damn good movie, one of those milestones in horror cinema that everyone should see at least once.

-june❤