Psycho (1960)

The setup

A woman in Phoenix gives in to a sudden temptation, takes money that is not hers and drives out of town. Rain and exhaustion push her off the main highway and toward a dim, nearly empty roadside motel run by a courteous, awkward young man who lives with his mother in the house on the hill. What begins as a crime story abruptly becomes something else, and the film never fully lets the audience settle again.

Context

Psycho began as a book that most of Hollywood considered unfilmable. Robert Bloch's 1959 novel was loosely inspired by the case of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin murderer and grave robber, though Bloch invented most of its story. Alfred Hitchcock, coming off the Technicolor successes of Vertigo and North by Northwest, bought the rights for a reported $9,500. Paramount's readers and executives did not like the material, and the studio balked at financing it at Hitchcock's usual scale.

His answer was to make the picture cheaply and on his own terms. He used the crew from his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, shot in black and white, and financed the production through his company Shamley Productions, with Paramount acting as distributor. The budget is usually given as about $807,000. In place of his customary fee, Hitchcock took a large ownership stake in the negative. Filming ran from November 1959 to February 1960, largely on the Universal lot.

Why it matters

Psycho is one of the films that moved horror out of old castles and into the American motel. Its threat is not a creature from another place but a person who seems ordinary, in a setting that looks like any other stop on a highway. That shift, from the gothic to the everyday, is the reason it is so often listed among the roots of both psychological thrillers and the slasher cycle.

It also changed the rules of how a mainstream film could be sold and experienced. Hitchcock treated the movie as an event: he kept the plot secret, controlled the press and refused to let latecomers in. And it tested what American cinema could show. By the time of its release the old Production Code had weakened, and Psycho pushed through the gap with a level of violence and sexuality that earlier studio pictures avoided. Its legacy appears in psychological horror and in the slasher film, and the same debts are discussed in the entry on Norman Bates.

What to look for

• Bernard Herrmann's score for string orchestra only, which Hitchcock credited with a large part of the film's effect.
• The shower sequence, built from dozens of short shots, with the violence suggested by editing and music more than by what is shown.
• A structure that changes its subject partway through, shifting both the viewer's sympathy and their expectations.
• Stark black-and-white photography by John L. Russell, which keeps the image clean and the shadows hard.
• Recurring images of birds, mirrors, eyes and hands that quietly tie the characters together.
• A marketing campaign that included a trailer starring the director himself and a strict no-late-admission rule.

Development: from a paperback to a screenplay

Joseph Stefano, who had written very little for film at that point, was hired to adapt Bloch's book after an earlier draft by James P. Cavanagh failed to satisfy Hitchcock. Stefano changed a great deal. He removed the novel's more lurid details about Norman Bates, including his drinking and his interest in the occult, dropped a budding romance between Sam and Lila, and gave the first part of the story much more weight. In the book the heroine's section takes up only two of seventeen chapters, while in the film it fills close to half of the running time.

He also renamed the central woman. In the novel she is Mary, but a real Mary Crane lived in Phoenix, so the character became Marion. That tiny change shows how carefully the film was built to feel plausible. Hitchcock later said that his inspiration included Henri-Georges Clouzot's French thriller Les Diaboliques (1955), a film that had also played with audience expectation and a late surprise.

Casting and a cheap, fast shoot

Janet Leigh accepted a fee reported at $25,000, a fraction of her usual pay, and Anthony Perkins received about $40,000. His nervous charm is a main reason Norman is so unnerving. Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam rounded out the principal cast, and Hitchcock's daughter Pat appears as Caroline. Hitchcock himself makes his customary cameo on a Phoenix sidewalk.

The cheapness was a choice, not a limitation. Using his television crew meant that everyone knew how to work quickly, and the black-and-white photography matched the film's hard, plain look. Some accounts say that Hitchcock also wanted to hold down the visual impact of the violence, since a color version might have felt more gruesome. The production shot at Universal's Revue Studios, and the Bates house and motel set remains one of the best-known pieces of movie architecture in the world.

The shower scene: seven days for about three minutes

The shower sequence was filmed over several days in December 1959, from the 17th to the 23rd, after Leigh postponed the work twice. On screen it lasts roughly three minutes. Accounts differ on the exact count, but the cutting is extremely dense. One source describes 78 camera setups, and another points to a shot count in the same range. Hitchcock used close-ups of body parts, the shower head, water and the blade, so that the audience pieces together an event that the camera never shows plainly. Marli Renfro, who worked as a body double, has said that thinned chocolate syrup stood in for blood.

The credit for the sequence is part of its legend. Saul Bass, the graphic designer who made the title sequence, said that he designed and storyboarded the scene, and Hitchcock is credited as its director. Participants have disputed the extent of Bass's role ever since. What no one disputes is the editing by George Tomasini, whose rhythm is a major reason the scene feels so violent even though almost nothing graphic is shown on screen.

Herrmann's strings

Bernard Herrmann had worked with Hitchcock for years, and the director insisted on him even though Herrmann refused a reduced fee for the smaller budget. Herrmann chose to write for strings alone, which he and others later described as black-and-white music to match the picture. Hitchcock had actually asked for a jazz-influenced score. Instead he got a cold, restless sound of short repeating phrases, shrieking high violins and sudden silence.

The score is the clearest example in this library of music doing what the image cannot. Reportedly Hitchcock had been unhappy with the first cut and was considering reducing it to a one-hour television episode, and the music helped persuade him otherwise; he later credited a third of the film's effect to the score. No music plays when the heroine first steps into the shower, and then the strings arrive on the cut. For more on this idea, see how horror uses sound.

Release and a ticket policy that became part of the story

The film premiered in New York on June 16, 1960, at the DeMille and Baronet theaters, and spread widely that September. Hitchcock, who handled most of the promotion himself, decided that no one would be seated after the movie started. He believed latecomers would feel cheated if they missed the heroine's early scenes. Theater owners complained at first, then found that long lines outside were good for business. Critics were not given advance screenings, and the lead actors were kept away from the press.

The marketing included a trailer in which Hitchcock walks through the motel set and comes close to revealing details, only to stop himself. It was a joke that also functioned as a promise. The film earned a great deal: reference works describe it as the second-highest-grossing film of 1960, with a gross reported at about $32 million and a worldwide total often given at about $50 million. Hitchcock later exchanged his rights in the film for shares in MCA.

Critics, censors and a slow change of mind

The first reviews were divided. Some critics felt that the film exploited sex and violence, and in Britain the response was largely negative; one prominent reviewer left the screening and resigned her post. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times was cool at first but later placed the film on his year-end list. The French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma ranked it ninth in 1960.

Censors also reacted. The film was unusually frank about sex for a studio picture of its day, opening with the heroine in a hotel room with her lover, and it showed a flushing toilet, which was still rare on American screens. The Irish censor initially banned it. In the United States it first went out with an Approved certificate, was given an M rating in 1968, and was re-rated R in 1984. Over time the film's standing rose sharply: it received four Academy Award nominations, though no wins, and in 1992 it was added to the National Film Registry.

Reading the film

Critics have spent decades on this film's themes. The stolen $40,000 is what film people call a MacGuffin, an object that sets the plot moving but matters little in itself. The deeper subjects are guilt, voyeurism and the idea of a divided self. Mirrors recur, as do birds, and the film often shoots its characters from angles that make the audience complicit in looking.

Many readers also place Psycho within the changing American family of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Behind the neat motel office lies a household with a damaged past, and the film suggests that ordinary-looking places can hide the most disturbing relationships. It is also an exercise in audience manipulation: Hitchcock invites us to sympathize with one character and then another, and he does so by controlling what we are allowed to see. That control is why the film has been analyzed so heavily, and also why it holds up on repeated viewing.

Influence, sequels and remake

The direct line runs toward the slasher. Critics routinely cite Psycho together with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween as the foundation of the form, and the connection to Halloween is deepened by the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Janet Leigh. The director of Halloween, John Carpenter, worked in the shadow of that lineage. The shower scene has been parodied or paid homage in many films, including Dressed to Kill (1980).

Hollywood also kept returning to Bates himself. Perkins reprised the role in three sequels, beginning with Psycho II in 1983, and a shot-for-shot remake directed by Gus Van Sant arrived in 1998. A television series, Bates Motel, followed later. None replaced the original. For a look at the man who made it, see the entry on Alfred Hitchcock, and to compare how a different decade told a story of rural terror, move on to Night of the Living Dead.

Verified details

• Hitchcock reportedly paid about $9,500 for the rights to Robert Bloch's novel.
• The film was shot between November 11, 1959 and February 1, 1960.
• The budget is generally given as roughly $807,000.
• Janet Leigh won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for the role.
• The film received four Academy Award nominations and won none.
• It was added to the National Film Registry in 1992.
• Bernard Herrmann's score was not nominated for an Oscar.
• The MPAA first rated it Approved, then M in 1968, and R in 1984.
• AFI placed it first on its 2001 list of the most thrilling American films.
• Gus Van Sant's remake of 1998 reused Herrmann's score.
• In Bloch's novel the heroine is named Mary; the film changed it to Marion because a real Mary Crane lived in Phoenix.

Connections

• Character profile: Norman Bates.
• Subgenre: Psychological Horror.
• Subgenre: Slasher.
• Director profile: Alfred Hitchcock.

Sources and further reading

• Psycho (1960 film), Wikipedia
• Psycho (film), EBSCO Research Starters
• Psycho, Filmsite
• Unpacking the Psycho shower scene, No Film School
• Psycho score review, Film Music Review