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)