Psycho: Birth of a Genre
In its time, it was the only thriller to see, and even today it is considered a must see thriller for the ages. Its now infamous shower scene caused hundreds of men and women to avoid bathing for fear of being murdered, and its twisted ending still has film buffs everywhere talking. In 2002 the American Film Institute revealed its list of the one hundred most thrilling films of all time, and Psycho was at the top.
But more importantly, from a historical standpoint, Psycho is the film that gave birth to one of the most profitable subgenres in the history of movies, slasher films. Freddie, Jason, Michael, Leatherface, and even Hannibal all owe a debt to the psychologically complex Norman Bates as portrayed by Anthony Perkins in Psycho. In the following paragraphs we will examine why Psycho is so important, but first, a warning. If you haven’t seen Psycho, don’t read anymore, because I wouldn’t want to give anything away.
A famous film critic once said “I envy people who are seeing Psycho for the first time and don’t know what it’s about.” I agree with that statement. But please, for your sake, go see it, you won’t be disappointed. And now, on to the film.
Psycho opens with a simple opening credits naming the cast and crew. The credits last about three minutes, and the whole time we are listening to the remarkably well-paced music of Bernard Hermann. The music, as well as the waiting, succeeds in making us jittery, preparing for what’s to come, and then the movie begins, very inconspicuously, with a wide shot over the city of Phoenix Arizona. Hitchcock even notes the exact date and time with big white titles, so we’ll remember.
The camera moves in on a window and into a cheap hotel room where Marion (Janet Leigh) and her boyfriend Sam (John Gavinas). They are half naked and rolling around on the bed, discussing their relationship. The scene goes on for several minutes, through the ins and outs of the relationship. It suddenly feels like a romance movie, and we’re stuck wondering why this movie is called Psycho. Finally, Marion says she has to go back to work and leaves.
Now the movie will get scary, right? Not quite. Marion returns to work at her real estate office, where a rich man is arriving to buy a house (Note to movie geeks, check the front window of the building at the very beginning of the scene. There is a man standing on the sidewalk in a hat and jacket. Behold, Hitchcock himself.). The man flirts with Marion in front of her boss, and then flaunts the 40,000 dollars cash he is going to pay for the house. Marion’s boss tells her to put the money in a safe deposit box in the bank and they’ll take care of it on Monday.
This is all amid office gossip between Marion and her coworker, who is played by Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia. Now it feels like an office drama, more like a play than a movie. Marion complains of a headache and her boss lets her go home early after she drops the money off at the bank. The next scene is at Marion’s home, where she is packing a suitcase with the money on her bed. She leaves town, seeing her boss at a crosswalk on the way out of town. She falls asleep on the roadside and is found by a cop the next morning.
An extremely tense scene follows, and when she finally leaves Hermann’s music provides the exclamation point. It’s not scary, but it is extremely tense and thrilling. Now the film is playing like a heist movie with a romantic twist. Marion’s inner thoughts are done in voice over, and we discover that she is going to see her boyfriend in California. In Los Angeles she buys a used car with some of the money while the cop that stopped her watches suspiciously.
There is an extremely tense moment when she is driving away in her new car and a voice shouts “Hey!” She stops, the brakes scream, and so do we. We’re sure she is caught, but it is only the attendant with her luggage from her old car. She drives away. Now we are really into this plot whether its scary or not. We want to know what happens to her and the money. That night it begins to rain, and she pulls over at a quiet little motel: The Bates Motel.
The place seems to be deserted at first, but then she notices a quiet house on the hill with a light in the window. She honks twice and a man comes trotting down. He is enthusiastic, stammering, but friendly. He introduces himself as Norman Bates. He shows her a room and then asks her if she’d like some dinner. In the following scene she eats and they talk in a room full of his stuffed birds.
Their conversation turns to his ailing mother, how she was damaged after her lover died. Marion suggests it might be best to put her in a home, and he grows very defensive. Finally he calms down and the conversation ends. We don’t know why Hitchcock is dwelling on Norman, but he is a fascinatingly lonely and odd young man, so we forget our doubts and focus on the intrigue of his character.
When Marion leaves him, Norma pulls a painting off the wall of his office and looks through a hole in the wall at Marion changing, then he goes up to his house and sits down. Marion does a little figuring on a sheet of paper. Her focus, and ours, is still on the money. Then she gets in the shower, and the film’s most memorable sequence begins.
For a few moments, more than a minute, she stands in silence, cleaning herself, and all we hear is the rushing of the water. Then a shot from the back wall of the shower, looking out through the curtain, where we see a distorted dark form moving quietly forward, then reaching out for the curtain.
Suddenly, the curtain is yanked aside and the jarring, screeching violins begin as a butcher knife is brought down again and again on Marion’s screaming form. After about 30 seconds and dozens of camera cuts, she falls into the tub and the form, revealed from the rear as that of an old woman, disappears from the room. Marion struggles to pull herself up from the tub floor with the shower curtain, then falls on the tile floor, dead. There is another long moment when all we hear is the rushing water.
The camera pans past her feed, following streams of bloody water as they go into the drain. The camera zooms into the drain and then out into Marion’s eye, then across the floor and out the window, where we see a light on in the house, and Norman is screaming at his mother. He runs down to the room and is distraught for a few moments, but then, quickly and carefully he cleans up, wraps the body in the shower curtain, shoves the body and all Marion’s things in the trunk of her and drives it around back to a swamp. He pushes the car in, and for a brief moment it looks like it won’t sink all the way, but then the black water swallows it up, and that is the end of Marion Crane. The main character we have followed for almost half a movie is gone, along with her 40,000 dollars, and the audience is reeling.
Now we move to a hardware store in a small town where Sam works. Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) comes in and asks him if he’s seen Marion. Shortly after she arrives a private detective names Arbogast (Martin Balsam). He is there to investigate the missing 40,000 dollars. They decide to work together and Arbogast goes to every hotel in the area to investigate, and finally arrives at the Bates.
There he meets Norman, still unsure about him. He tells Arbogast he hasn’t seen Marion, but when the detective looks at the register and compares handwriting, he finds that Marion was there under the name Marie Samuels. Norman suspiciously begins to remember and tells him that Marion was there and left early the morning after she arrived. Arbogast then asks to speak to Norman’s mother who he saw in the window, but Norman refuses. Arbogast thanks him and leaves, then makes a phone call to Lila and tells her he’s going to check it out again.
He sneaks back to the hotel and up to the house. When he goes inside, the suspense builds again. We know what’s in that house, and we know it’s not good. He ascends the staircase slowly, and at an upstairs door a crack of light appears. The audience is going nuts, knowing he’s about to meet his ends. Then the old woman appears once more, and once more we don’t see her face.
She stabs Arbogast and he falls down the stairs in an incredibly surreal shot using a projected backdrop and a dolly track. He is dead. When he doesn’t return, Sam and Lila are worried about him and Sam goes to investigate. He finds no one, not even Norman, then Lila gets an idea. They check into the motel as man and wife and investigate. After a while, Lila decides that they must see Mrs. Bates, Norman’s mother who has been presumed dead. Sam distracts Norman and Lila goes to the house.
After a few minutes, Norman figures things out, knocks Sam out, and runs back to the house. Right now, Hermann’s music and Hitchcock’s directing have elevated the terror to its absolute peak. Norman runs inside and Lila hides on the basement stairs. After he vanishes upstairs, she decides to look in the cellar. There in the center of the floor is Mrs. Bates, sitting in a chair with her back to Lila.
Lila approaches and touches her shoulder, at that the chair turns around to reveal the skeletal corpse of Mrs. Bates. Lila screams and suddenly we see Norman appear behind her dressed as his mother. Sam bursts in behind him and wrestles him down. The final shot of this amazing sequence is a close up on Mrs. Bates skull, a swinging lightbulb dancing shadows over her eyesockets.
The film’s epilogue is at the courthouse, where a psychiatrist explains that after murdering his mother and her lover, Norman began to adopt the tendencies of his mother for company, and by the end he had completely become her. The final shot in the movie is a slow zoom in on Norman, strait-jacketed in a room, while his mother voices over, saying that she’s going to show them, that she “won’t hurt a fly.”
So ends Psycho, and so begins the slasher genre.
Psycho is a precursor of slasher films in many ways, but in many ways it is also its own film. Slasher films all utilize creepy environments, and this began with the Bates Motel, the American Gothic environment that is the background for Psycho. Signature weapons have also become a big part of the genre, and Norman Bates’ butcher knife is the beginning of that. The death of main characters was not something that happened until the end of movies before Psycho, but now it is a staple of slasher films and horror movies in general.
But on a deeper level, Psycho did more than create important plot elements of the genre; Psycho created the mystique that surrounds the genre to this day. Norman Bates is the quintessential killer lurking in the dark because he is that last person you would ever expect, and that is the scariest killer of all.
The Bates Motel is a scary place because it is so cozy and homely, and you would feel at home there if you didn’t know its dark past. Psycho is a film about unseen evil, and slasher films have come to be about those part of humanity that we’d rather not see, the parts that no one believes, and we have Psycho to thank for that. So if you want to know why we have great movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, turn back the clock to 1960, check into a little place called the Bates Motel, and whatever you do, don’t take a shower.
