num_pages: 183
description: It killed off its star after forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film. Punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness nothing like Psycho had existed before. It was the biggest hit of Alfred Hitchcock's career and propelled him to new levels of international fame - never before had audiences been so aware of the role of the director in film-making. The movie industry - even America itself - would never be the same.In The Moment of Psycho film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred Hitchcock's career recreating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide. Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood Thomson shows how in 1959 Hitchcock then sixty years old made Psycho as an attempt to break personally with the dullness of his own settled domesticity - a struggle which mirrored the sexual creative and political ferment that soon overtook the nation.Psycho was not just a sensation in film: it altered the very nature of our desires. Sex violence and horror took on new life. Psycho all of a sudden represented all America wanted from a film - and as The Moment of Psycho brilliantly demonstrates still does.
language: English
title: The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder
publisher: Basic Books