Transcript PSYCHO… - Malibu High School

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• The “mother” of all horror films…directed by…
• ALFRED HITCHCOCK
He controlled every aspect
of the film….
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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, gothicstyle 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
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 fastcut 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-clockwise down 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 matchcut camera technique - of Marion's deadstill, iris-contracted [a dead person's iris
is not contracted but dilated], fish-like
right eye with one tear drop (or drop of
Mirror images…
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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 icecold 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
• 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