Psycho

Movie Review: Psycho

Year of Release: 1960
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam

Plot outline: A young woman steals money from her employer and then encounters a young man too long under the domination of his mother (IMDb).

Based on the novel of the same name by Robert Bloch, Psycho is Hitchcock’s most famous movie - the movie that redefined the horror genre in the early 1960s, and certainly one of his biggest successes. It brought popularity and a measure of respectability to a genre that had previously languished in B movie purgatory, inviting a spate of imitations that led to the gory horror movies of the 1980s and the recent trend in blood-encrusted slasher movies. With its masterful mix of suspense and surprise, Psycho is a movie whose complexity and touches of cinematic brilliance make it one of Hitchcock’s best and most entertaining movies. The story appealed to Hitchcock because he had reached a point in his career where he needed a major box office hit and he saw that this had the potential to deliver just that. The story also appealed to his sense of the macabre and Psycho is unquestionably one of his darkest movies, albeit with a black comedic underbelly. The longevity of Psycho is most probably down to its terrific set-piece shock scenes, which have rarely if ever been bettered in any horror movies. The most famous of these is of course the shower sequence in which Janet Leigh is carved up nicely by what we think is Norman Bates’ mother. The three minute long sequence took seven days to shoot and includes around seventy shots, mostly close ups. Although we never actually see the knife make contact with the flesh, the way the montage is constructed, in a manic frenzy of quick cuts, the impression is unavoidably one of a beautiful young woman being hacked to pieces by a madman. Bernard Herrmann’s now legendary score accentuates the sense of visceral horror, the screeching violins sounding like a cry from hell, making the audience react to every slash as if it were he, not Janet Leigh, standing in the shower. As shocking as the shower scene is today, it was ten times more so when the movie was first released because at that time it was inconceivable that the lead actress would be killed off within the first half of the movie. On its initial release, Psycho received very mixed reviews from the critics, but it was an instant box office hit and many reviewers later reappraised their opinions. The movie was nominated for four Oscars - in the categories of Best Director, Best B&W Cinematography, Best Actress (Janet Leigh) and Best B&W Art Design - although it won none. Comparing Psycho with the subsequent movies that it inspired, it is surprising how restrained and how much more effective the former movie is. Rather than show explicit scenes of mayhem and bodily mutilation, which is the current tend in horror, it shows just enough to stimulate the audience’s imagination, allowing the mind to conceive images far more horrific, far more real than could ever be portrayed on a cinema screen. Today’s generation of cinematic fear merchants have a great deal to learn from the dark jewel that is Psycho. (JT)

My judgement: **** out of 4 stars