CineAction (1999) - Manufacturing Horror in Hitchcock's "Psycho"
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- article: Manufacturing Horror in Hitchcock's "Psycho"
- author(s): Steven Schneider
- journal: CineAction (01/Sep/1999)
- issue: issue 50, pages 70-75
- journal ISSN: 0826-9866
- publisher: Cineaction Collective
- keywords: Psycho (1960)
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I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers.... the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional (Hitchcock: Truffaut 283).
Along with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (which actually preceded it by a few months), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) has been hailed as the first "modern" horror film. The reasons given in support of this claim are usually thematic — in Psycho (as well as Peeping Tom,) the "monster" is not some unnatural, unholy creation, as "other" who stands utterly outside our existing conceptual scheme. Rather, the monster here is human, all too human, and besides that, all too real. Not real in the experiential sense, of course (though it should be noted that Norman Bates' character was inspired by the case of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein), but in the psychological sense. After Psycho, emotionally traumatized and psychosexually motivated monster-murderers began appearing in horror films with alarming regularity. In the words of Robin Wood, "We have been led to accept Norman Bates as a potential extension of ourselves. That we all carry within us somewhere every human potentiality, for good or evil, so that we all share a common guilt, may be intellectually a truism; the greatness of Psycho lies in its ability, not merely to tell us this, but to make us experience it" (148).
In American Horror: 1951 to the Present (1994), Mark Jancovich argues that the nature of the supposed break between Psycho and its cinematic predecessors "should not be overemphasized" (22). With respect to the thematic claim above, Jancovich is surely right — Fritz Lang's M (1931), for example, stars Peter Lorre as a psychotic child murderer under compulsion to commit more crimes.(1) At the level of cinematic-narrative discourse, however, the "nature of the break" between Psycho and all that came before it (including Peeping Tom) has not been emphasized nearly enough. In particular, the three manifest "horror scenes" in Psycho — the shower scene, the scene in which Mother kills Arbogast, and the scene in which Lila discovers Mother, only to be confronted by Norman in drag — scenes which do not lose their impact even upon repeated viewing — merit much closer examination as a set than they have thus far received. By drawing out and focusing on their subtle similarities rather than their obvious differences (e.g. the shower scene is a rapidly-edited montage; the Arbogast scene makes use of an extended overhead shot; in the Lila scene, nobody gets killed), we can gain insight into Hitchcock's strikingly original technique for inducing horror in viewers. It is this technique, in fact, precursors of which can be found in Strangers on a Train (1951) and Vertigo (1958), which stands as the true breakthrough in cinematic horror. As we shall see, a number of directors (including DePalma, Hooper, and Roeg) have followed Hitchcock in employing it to create their own unforgettable horror sequences.
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONSparBefore turning to the scenes in question, it would benefit us to lay some theoretical groundwork that may be applied, modified, or rejected as we proceed. Hitchcock, in a number of published writings, proposed a cinematic-narrative distinction (more accurately, an opposition) between "suspense" and what he sometimes called "terror," other times simply "surprise." Both are subcategories of cinematic fear; whereas in the former case, "the audience is aware of the menace or danger to the people it is watching,"(2) however, in the latter case, the audience is not privy to any such forewarning. With respect to terror, then, the audience — which has been made to identify (or at least sympathize) with the potential victim — shares in the character's shock at the eruption of violence.
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