Post by erik on Oct 14, 2014 19:37:08 GMT -5
Quote by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in PSYCHO:
Yes, it was released fifty-four years ago; yes it was made on a budget that wouldn't even cover the catering on most of today's Hollywood extravaganzas; and yes, it has been slavishly imitated thousands of times over since. And yet, there is still something about Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror masterpiece PSYCHO that makes it almost certainly the single most important horror movie of the modern era (i.e., post-World War II).
You all, of course, know this scene; who doesn't?:
It isn't necessary to regurgitate the plot here, although it does turn the concept of Motherhood on its head, and it did cause a lot of people (notably Janet Leigh, of course) to stop taking showers. But one of the things that makes it such a classic is that it is essentially both a horror film and a macabre black comedy, something that one would expect from so deadpan and dour a fellow as the British-born Hitchcock, though he had never attempted anything like this in his career before that was so overtly Horror (he would, though, visit the genre twice more, in 1963 with THE BIRDS, and in 1972 with FRENZY). The other thing to watch, no matter how many times you see it, is what he does with the infamous shower scene. It's not only that Janet Leigh's character, whom we would normally think is the heroine of the piece, is bumped off a mere 45 minutes in--but the fact that Hitchcock shoots it and edits it in such a rapid-fire fashion, that it appears infinitely more graphic in its horror than it really is. We see the knife, and we see Janet Leigh writhing--but we never actually see knife actually penetrate any part of Janet Leigh's body (though in 1960 it must have seemed that way).
Unlike a lot of people, I am not as bothered by what seems a convoluted explanation for Perkins' psychopathic history given by the psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) at the end. And anyway, if it is even a flaw at all, it's only a mere pinprick; and Bernard Herrmann's shrieking score, done entirely with strings, set the standard for most horror film scores that have come in its wake, including, of course, John Williams' score for JAWS. This is still a masterpiece of the horror genre; and, with just a few exceptions, has never been either equaled or surpassed for sheer monumental, diabolical brilliance.
"Well, a boy's best friend is his mother."
Yes, it was released fifty-four years ago; yes it was made on a budget that wouldn't even cover the catering on most of today's Hollywood extravaganzas; and yes, it has been slavishly imitated thousands of times over since. And yet, there is still something about Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror masterpiece PSYCHO that makes it almost certainly the single most important horror movie of the modern era (i.e., post-World War II).
You all, of course, know this scene; who doesn't?:
It isn't necessary to regurgitate the plot here, although it does turn the concept of Motherhood on its head, and it did cause a lot of people (notably Janet Leigh, of course) to stop taking showers. But one of the things that makes it such a classic is that it is essentially both a horror film and a macabre black comedy, something that one would expect from so deadpan and dour a fellow as the British-born Hitchcock, though he had never attempted anything like this in his career before that was so overtly Horror (he would, though, visit the genre twice more, in 1963 with THE BIRDS, and in 1972 with FRENZY). The other thing to watch, no matter how many times you see it, is what he does with the infamous shower scene. It's not only that Janet Leigh's character, whom we would normally think is the heroine of the piece, is bumped off a mere 45 minutes in--but the fact that Hitchcock shoots it and edits it in such a rapid-fire fashion, that it appears infinitely more graphic in its horror than it really is. We see the knife, and we see Janet Leigh writhing--but we never actually see knife actually penetrate any part of Janet Leigh's body (though in 1960 it must have seemed that way).
Unlike a lot of people, I am not as bothered by what seems a convoluted explanation for Perkins' psychopathic history given by the psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) at the end. And anyway, if it is even a flaw at all, it's only a mere pinprick; and Bernard Herrmann's shrieking score, done entirely with strings, set the standard for most horror film scores that have come in its wake, including, of course, John Williams' score for JAWS. This is still a masterpiece of the horror genre; and, with just a few exceptions, has never been either equaled or surpassed for sheer monumental, diabolical brilliance.
