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The “mother” of all horror films…directed by… ALFRED HITCHCOCK. He controlled every aspect of the film…. The Master of Suspense. Hitchcock utilizes many techniques in order to create suspense and engagement with the film
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The “mother” of all horror films…directed by… • ALFRED HITCHCOCK
The Master of Suspense • Hitchcock utilizes many techniques in order to create suspense and engagement with the film • The opening scene…an aerial view of Phoenix and then the camera moving to an apartment building, to a window, in the partially closed blinds to a clandestine meeting with her lover • Establishes the voyeur motif…audience as peeping toms….watching something naughty
Mise en scene • The placement of everything in the frame of the shot, from the actors, to the props, to the lighting…the objects, the placement, the movement, all to this communicates meaning, adds to the film…the following are some examples:
Arriving at the Bates Motel • she parks in front of the motel office and gets out of her car. The office is lighted but unattended. Then, from the motel porch, she peers around the corner of the motel, looking up at the gloomy, gothic-style Victorian house behind the motel on a hill. The stereotypical horror movie's 'old dark house' looks like a giant skull with lighted windows/eyes. In a lighted second story window, she sees the silhouetted figure of an old woman pass in front of the window.
Mise en scene • She honks her horn a few times to signal her presence.The nervous, gangly thin, shy, peculiar but likeable caretaker, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) breathlessly bounds down the steps on the hill in the rain (carrying an unopened umbrella) - smiling and greeting her with the words:”Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please.”As she enters the empty office, the camera captures her reflected image in a mirror, and then a split-second image of both of their faces in the mirror. They speak to each other in profile across the desk, prefaced by his meaningful, ironic comment: "Dirty night.” • This sets up their similarity and his deed
Wall decorations • As Bates shows her the room, framed bird pictures adorn the drab walls. But he stammers as he turns on the bright bathroom lights and points her to the "and the, uh, over there" (she must provide the word bathroom for him as if it was a forbidden, dirty word),
Small details… • The newspaper she hides the money in has the words OKAY in the headlines… • After her talk with Norman, she has decided to return to Phoenix and make all okay…after the shower scene the cut to the newspaper is an ironic shot…she’s not going back now
Symbols…stuffed dead things • The parlor is decorated with his stuffed [stuffy, but in another sense] trophy birds mounted on the walls or on stands - an enormous predatory, nocturnal owl with outstretched wings, a raven [a bird with a knife-like beak that preys on carrion (Marion?)], a pheasant, and a hawk - and classic paintings of nude women being raped. As he sits straight up and leans forward as in a toilet-like position while she nibbles on a sandwich (but doesn't drink any of the milk from the large pitcher)
The double motif… • Marion waits outside her motel door, and moments later sees Norman turn the corner onto the porch: "I caused you some trouble," she apologetically states. As they stand together on the porch, the camera photographs them as if they were the two sides of the same coin, and Norman's image is reflected in the glass window behind him - and symbolic of his split personality as well as their similar situation that is revealed over dinner
Even names are important • Norman Bates' hobby, "baiting ," snaring and trapping birds for stuffing - such as the "crane' woman from Phoenix - another legendary bird - has again found a suitable match - and he is amused by it.
More voyeurism • When he leans down to peer at Marion through the hole, his eye, in profile view, is illuminated by the light from her bedroom. The camera angle shifts and from Norman's point of view, he sees her undress down to her black brassiere and slip in front of her open bathroom door [a subjective camera placement implicates the audience in his peeping voyeurism]
After Marion has second thoughts she returns to her room and makes calculations about returning the money. To hide all evidence, she decides not to use the wastebasket and flushes the shreds down the toilet in the gleaming white bathroom - the noisy flush is emphasized as she watches the pieces circle around the bowl. [This was a convention-breaking taboo - to show a toilet and flush in a mainstream American film. This drain and 'flushing' imagery foreshadows the one of her own blood circling down the shower drain following her death.]
The shower scene… • In the next scene, the classic, brutal shower murder scene, an unexplainable, unpremeditated, and irrational murder, the major star of the film - Marion - is shockingly stabbed to death after the first 47 minutes of the film's start. It is the most famous murder scene ever filmed and one of the most jarring. It took a full week to complete, using fast-cut editing of 78 pieces of film, 70 camera setups
The shower scene… • 45-second impressionistic montage sequence, and inter-cutting slow-motion and regular speed footage. The audience's imagination fills in the illusion of complete nudity and fourteen violent stabbings. Actually, she never really appears nude (although the audience is teased) and there is only implied violence - at no time does the knife ever penetrate deeply into her body.
In only one split instant, the knife tip touches her waist just below her belly button. Chocolate syrup was used as 'movie blood', and a casaba melon was chosen for the sound of the flesh-slashing knife.
With her back to the shower curtain, the bathroom door opens and a shadowy, grey tall figure enters the bathroom. Just as the shower curtain completely fills the screen - with the camera positioned just inside the tub, the silhouetted, opaque-outlined figure whips aside (or tears open) the curtain barrier. The outline of the figure's dark face, the whites of its eyes, and tight hair bun are all that is visible - 'she' wields a menacing, phallic-like butcher knife high in the air - at first, it appears to be stab, stab, stabbing us - the victimized viewer!
Sound as part of mise en scene… • The piercing, shrieking, and screaming of the violin strings of Bernard Herrmann's shrill music play a large part in creating sheer terror during the horrific scene - they start 'screaming' before Marion's own shrieks.
parallelism • The camera slowly tracks the blood and water that flows and swirls together counter-clockwisedown into the deep blackness of the bathtub drain - Marion's life, or diluted blood, has literally gone down the drain. The drain dissolves into a memorable closeup - a perfect match-cut camera technique - of Marion's dead-still, iris-contracted [a dead person's iris is not contracted but dilated], fish-like right eye with one tear drop (or drop of water).
Roger Ebert … • Seeing the shower scene today, several things stand out. Unlike modern horror films, "Psycho" never shows the knife striking flesh. There are no wounds. There is blood, but not gallons of it. Hitchcock shot in black and white because he felt the audience could not stand so much blood in color
The slashing chords of Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack substitute for more grisly sound effects. The closing shots are not graphic but symbolic, as blood and water spin down the drain, and the camera cuts to a closeup, the same size, of Marion's unmoving eyeball. This remains the most effective slashing in movie history, suggesting that situation and artistry are more important than graphic details.
Camera movement • Notice how just after this brutal murder the camera pans through the hotel room to a window shot of the house on the hill and Norman is heard saying “Mother, oh God Mother! Blood! Blood!” How could he have known if he was up in the house? Yet this is his mirror image…
Symbolic action • Norman rushes down to room one (same dissonant music score) and after seeing her body in the bloody shower, stands in the doorway, grabs his mouth and knocks a bird picture off the wall (he has just knocked off Marion Crane, another bird)
The basement scene… • Sam appears behind the matronly old woman, and grabs, overpowers, and subdues the knife-brandishing attacker. In the film's dramatic climax, Norman is metamorphosized and revealed as his "Mother" [Norma?] when his drag disguises (the wig and dress) are stripped away and ripped off. His body convulses and spasms his eyes squint, and his face grimaces in pain when his decaying illusion is exposed. His fingers claw upward and cling to the knife as he collapses to the floor..
The 'Norman' self completely dies, while his macabre 'Mother' self is brought to life - illustrated by the cadaver's hysterically-laughing face, with its mummy's eyes 'moving' - animated and resurrected by the light. The 'living dead' eyes of the corpse that see Lila mock her - they appear lifelike but they are indeed lifeless
The mummy's face dissolves into the next scene set in front of the County Court House - the face appears imprisoned behind the four white pillars holding up the establishment's law and order building.
Interesting trivia… • A popular myth is that in order for Leigh's scream in the shower to sound realistic, Hitchcock used ice-cold water. Leigh denied this on numerous occasions, saying that he was very generous with a supply of hot water
Trivia cont… • Throughout filming, Hitchcock created and hid various versions of the "Mother corpse" prop in Leigh's dressing room closet. Leigh took the joke well, and she wondered whether it was done to keep her on edge and thus more in character or to judge which corpse would be scarier for the audience.
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In Psycho, he can be seen through a window, wearing a Stetson hat, standing outside Marion Crane's office.[58] Wardrobe mistress Rita Riggs says that Hitchcock chose this scene for his cameo so that he could be in a scene with his daughter (who played one of Marion's colleagues). Others have suggested that he chose this early appearance to avoid distracting the audience
In order to capture the straight-on shot of the shower head, the camera had to be equipped with a long lens. The inner holes on the spout were blocked and the camera placed farther back, so that the water appears to be hitting the lens but actually went around and past it.
It is sometimes claimed that Leigh was not in the shower the entire time, and that a body double was used. However, in an interview with Roger Ebert and in the book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Leigh stated that she was in the scene the entire time; Hitchcock used a live model as her stand-in only for the scenes in which Norman wraps up Marion's body in a shower curtain and places her body in the trunk of her car.
Leigh herself was so affected by this scene when she saw it, that she no longer took showers unless she absolutely had to; she would lock all the doors and windows and would leave the bathroom and shower door open. She never realized until she first watched the film "how vulnerable and defenseless one is".
Freudian implications • Slavok Zizev remarks that Norman Bates's mansion has three floors, paralleling the three levels of the human mind that are postulated by Freudian psychoanalysis: the top floor would be the superego, where Bates's mother lives; the ground floor is then Bates's ego, where he functions as an apparently normal human being; and finally, the basement would be Bates's id. He interprets Bates's moving his mother's corpse from top floor to basement as a symbol for the deep connection that psychoanalysis posits between superego and id.
cording to the book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the censors in charge of enforcing the Production Code wrangled with Hitchcock because some of them insisted they could see one of Leigh's breasts. Hitchcock held onto the print for several days, left it untouched, and resubmitted it for approval. Each of the censors reversed their positions: those who had previously seen the breast now did not, and those who had not, now did.
They passed the film after the director removed one shot that showed the buttocks of Leigh's stand-in.The board was also upset by the racy opening, so Hitchcock said that if they let him keep the shower scene he would re-shoot the opening with them on the set. Since they did not show up for the re-shoot, the opening stayed
The public loved the film, with lines stretching outside of theaters as people had to wait for the next showing. It broke box-office records in Japan, China and the rest of Asia, France, Britain, South America, the United States, and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period. It is one of the largest-grossing black-and-white films and helped make Hitchcock a multimillionaire and the third-largest shareholder in Universal.Psycho was, by a large margin, the top moneymaking film of Hitchcock's career, earning $11,200,000
