Psycho

Psycho Changed the Game

I first saw Psycho on TV when I was a teenager and it absolutely blew me away (I was too young to see it when it was released theatrically). Never had I seen a film so terrifying, so unrelentingly suspenseful. I loved it. Volumes have been written about this film and about Hitchcock in general, and there's little new I can add. But Psycho was a game changer. It is hard to find a horror movie done since that does not have Psycho in its DNA. Certainly Halloween and Friday the 13th are direct descendants, with their Oedipal/incestuous underpinnings. It's easy to forget that the first Friday the 13th film reversed the Mother-Son situation found in Psycho. And Halloween revolved around Michael's unrequited lust for his older sister.

Of course what sets Psycho apart from the endless Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels - not to mention the Prom Night's and myriad other teenage slasher films - is its meticulous setup and Hitchcock's clever audience manipulation. While this may have been the father of the slasher films, it was not itself a slasher film. There are only two on-screen murders. The slasher genre quickly devolved into an exercise in upping the stakes in body count and grostesquerie. This has led inevitably to the current spate of Torture Porn films.

Breaking Taboos

The difficulty with the horror genre has always been that it is a genre of taboo-breaking. But once a line has been crossed it can't be uncrossed. Though modern (read: younger) viewers may not realized it, Psycho was a controversial movie when it was released. There were reviewers who were outraged by it. Hitchcock did the unthinkable: he pulled us into a story of a woman, desperate for a new life with her lover, who, in a moment of weakness, commits a crime. For the first third of the movie we pull for her to get away with this, or at least to see the error of her ways and return the money before she is caught. Everything is seen from her perspective: her boss crossing in front of her car as she makes her escape; the cop looking in her window as she tries to keep the envelope full of money hidden from him; the increasingly suspicious used-car salesman; and finally the strange young man and his parlor full of stuffed birds. We are literally in her head as she makes her lonely way along the desert highway imagining what might be said about her when her crime is discovered. We get to know her as intimately as any Hitchcock heroine. Our first glimpse is a voyeuristic peek through venetian blinds as she lounges in white brassier and slip obviously post-coital. Later we see her after she has taken the money, similarly dressed, only now in black bra and slip. Finally we see her as close to naked as the censors would allow at that time, once again as voyeur. Then, after all of this, and after we realize she has indeed decided to return the money, she is murdered. A third of the way into the film comes arguably the most shocking murder scene in film history. It broke all the rules. It was brutal, it was violent, it was unexpected. And the victim was the star of the movie.

But what Hitchcock accomplished with this was to create a situation in which, for the remainder of the film, all bets were off. If a big star like Janet Leigh can get knocked off, anyone can. Ergo, as characters return to the Bates Motel and the old Victorian house behind it, the suspense is ratcheted up to the final scene (excluding the epilogue in the courthouse) in which Sam distracts Norman while Lila descends into the cellar where we saw Norman bring his deranged mother earlier.

Post Psycho

Psycho broke new ground, and psychological horror films that followed had to find ways to up the ante. For the most part this meant a larger body count as I mentioned earlier. But all in one way or another borrowed from Psycho. From the use of the killer's POV to the overbearing mother to the phallic knife to the audience as voyeur; Psycho has reverberated through the dacades as few films in any genre have. It is referenced, homaged and ripped-off; but has truly never been equaled. It remains the gold standard of psychological horror films.

Up next: The Haunting (1963) Vs. The Haunting (1999)

A Little Background and a look at Carrie

I am a big movie buff in general, but I have to admit that one of my true guilty pleasures has always been the horror film. As a kid I used to watch Saturday afternoon monster movies on the local Syracuse station. It seems every market at that time had their own Elvira inspired show, with a host or hostess done up in ghastly Gothic garb and spouting bad puns. Locally we had two: Baron Daemon and Dr. E. Nick Witty with Epal. Baron Daemon, a vampire in the over-the-top Dracula mold, started out as a late night host for B horror films like Mark of the Vampire or The Manster. Daemon reached such a height of local popularity that he even released a record. It was a 45 with "Transylvania Twist" as the A side song. The flip side was "Ghost Guitars." I had that record. Mike Price, who played Baron Daemon, sang/spoke the lyrics. He became so popular that he was eventually moved to a daily afternoon kids show that featured cartoons and Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. Dr. E. Nick Witty and Epal remained a Saturday afternoon staple for several years. It was here where I was able to see the classics: Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Dracula, The Mummy, The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I also discovered Roger Corman through such films as The Attack of the Crab Monsters, Little Shop of Horrors, Creature From the Haunted Sea, as well as his Edgar Allen Poe series.

Dr. E Nick Witty and Epal

Anyhow, that's where I learned to love fear. And I did love those movies. Even the really bad ones like From Hell It Came (a killer tree stump, for God sake) and the epitome of bad: Plan 9 From Outer Space (zombies and aliens - what's not to like!) As the years have gone by I've learned to differentiate between good horror films and bad ones, but those wonderful black and white cheesy monster movies still hold a special place in my heart.

So what makes a good horror film? In a word: Suspense. Not gore, not blood, not special effects. In the end, all of those things may help build suspense, and that's fine, but when a film maker makes those other things the focus, the film suffers. Suspense in one form or another is the key to any drama (or comedy for that matter.) Suspense is built through dramatic irony - when the audience knows something that the characters on screen don't know. When the beauty queen says yes to the nerdy guy, we know it's a cruel joke - but the nerdy guy doesn't. When Carrie wins prom queen, we know it's a set-up. She doesn't. But we also know something that the perpetrators don't know - that Carrie has freaky powers. So the suspense is two-fold: first: is Carrie's one moment of joy going to be ruined by a horrible practical joke; and two, what will Carrie do when it does happen?

So what makes Carrie a good horror film? Is it that final violent orgy of destruction as Carrie gets her revenge on her tormentors? No, that's just the icing on the cake. What makes it a good film is everything that led to this point. (By the way, I am speaking of the original Brian De Palma version, not the re-make). Most of the film is the story of a misfit. A poor, socially awkward, sexually naive girl who is struggling to fit into that cruelest of all societies: high school. She is ridiculed and embarrassed at school, and she is preached at and emotionally abused by her religious zealot of a mother at home. We feel for this girl. When she is pelted with tampons by jeering girls in the famous locker room scene, we feel a strange mix of revulsion and empathy. The point is, we care about Carrie and when we begin to realize that she is being set up we are torn because we really don't want to see her humiliated, but we do want to see what her tormentors have planned and we really want to see her response. Knowing this, de Palma builds to the climax slowly, stretching time as we follow the rope up into the rafters to see the bucket of pigs' blood poised above Carrie's head. The suspense is almost unbearable at this point and de Palma plays it out for as long as humanly possible so that when the climax arrives, it is appropriately violent. We have waited for this and now we will not be disappointed. There is a subversive quality to the film in that the audience is enticed, ala Hitchcock, into siding with a mass murderer. We want to see her revenge. But then we quickly realize her revenge is indiscriminate. Wrongly believing that everyone was in on the joke, the innocent as well as the guilty are punished.

The point is, the over-the-top violence is earned through a slow build-and-release of tension, through developing characters we care about and through building suspense.

Next up: My take on Psycho.