Classic influential horror

Rating: 8/10 (30 October 2012)

There's no denying Psycho's classic horror status. Hitchcock had done creepy Gothicism before, such as in Rebecca, and he'd done charming murderers before, such as in Strangers on A Train, but he hadn't done a slasher.
Psycho is what it says on the tin: it's about a psycho. Exploring the deep psychosis of a murderer was not something that had been done in Hollywood film before. We all know the shower scene but not everybody knows the nature of Bates' psychosis so I won't say anything on that topic. The psychiatrist at the end is a clumsy clunky Hollywood addition explaining the blatantly obvious. I fail to see that in 1960, the audience wouldn't have worked it out. It's a testament to Hitchcock that he still manages a creepy final scene. Bates may be a psycho but we can't dismiss him in the way that we may have dismissed previous psychotic villains.
Of course, the star of the film is Anthony Perkins. Everybody else is either bland or annoying and quite frankly, you want them all to die (maybe not the hot guy). Janet Leigh as Marion Crane...thank god we didn't have to spend too long with her. She spends most of the film in her bra (now a horror cliché)and steals loads of money from her boss. It's interesting that Hitchcock chose to make her so unsympathetic.
Perkins is very effective as Norman Bates, the proprietor of the motel that Marion checks into. He looks just like a creepy bird but initially he's quite sweet. It took me a minute to clock that he was going to be our psycho. One thing I will say on his psychosis was that the psychiatrist says he is straight, which I don't entirely buy. I think that's just to placate the audience.
Now, Psycho has been compared to Peeping Tom (or rather, Peeping Tom has been endlessly compared to Psycho. See my review on Peeping Tom for more info). Peeping Tom came out a few months before and on the surface it has a lot in common with Psycho: both have a handsome man who is psychologically disturbed with parental troubles and murders women. However the major difference is that Psycho cemented Hitchcock's reputation and Peeping Tom destroyed Michael Powell's illustrious career. So what gives? Psycho has lingering shots of a woman in a bra, gore and explicit horror; Peeping Tom has no blood, only brief nudity and no explicit horror. Surely if any film was going to shock the critics, it would be Psycho? Yet the only thing that the British censors objected to in that film was a flushing toilet.
Actually, no. Hitchcock was famously the master of suspense and had dabbled in types of horror before- it was obvious that he would progress to something like Psycho. Powell was known for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, making beautiful innocent British films (although at times some of them are very dark). He threw a curve ball and we couldn't take it. In some ways, Psycho is a mystery story and in the moments when the boyfriend and Marion's sister are exploring the motel, it brings to mind some of the creaky mystery moments Hitchcock had in his earlier films (Stage Fright, for example). Peeping Tom is not a mystery story. Bates is a main character but Mark Lewis is our protagonist. We see everything through his eyes. Both characters are handsome and polite but once we know something's up with Bates, we don't view him in that way. We always know that something's up with Mark Lewis and yet he's so adorable and polite and we never want him to get caught. Ironically, there are many moments where he almost gives himself away and we're shouting at the screen telling him not to.
As for the psychology, Psycho explains everything. Bates is a classic textbook psycho. Lewis is a very disturbed pervert but he's more than a Psycho. His problems stem from the sadistic experiments his father does on him. We see some, but not all. What we do see is horrible but it's only scratching the surface. It's a more interesting imaginative bit of psychology than Psycho.
Finally, the cinematography. Both films do brilliantly here- there's lots of creepy jump cuts and close-ups in Psycho. A particularly creepy moment is when Bates is framed by lots of stuffed birds glaring down at him. And it's all in scary black-and-white but not the cliché lurking in the shadows. But for my money, the cinematography in Peeping Tom is better. It's filmed in garish seedy colour, which makes it all the more scary. There's a clever bit of filming where Mark is looking through a grill with a birds eye view of the room and then the angle changes so we see the pens from his pocket falling down. The whole premise of Peeping Tom is a guy who kills with his camera and the cinematography takes full advantage of this. Filming in shadows and gloom is a cliché- luckily neither film does that.
Psycho is still a scary film- dated in its treatment of the secondary characters but modern as ever with its treatment of the psycho. Loads of thrills and chills to be had here. This film changed the horror genre in America forever.