Hitchcock's Psycho: His "Little Joke"

Say "shower" and "movie" to anyone and the response is invariably the same: Psycho. It is a movie that has become larger than its infamous parts by outgrowing the confines of the horror genre to become a part of our cultural language" (Hunt 1). The fact is that, despite being as successful as Hitchock was, the studio gave him a hard time for this particular film. Hitchcock liked to call his 47th movie "my little joke." (Hunt 2). He said that what intrigued him was the fact that the heroine was killed off so early in the original novel. When the major studios refused to put up financing, Hitchcock waived his original director's fee ($250,000 or so) in return for 60% of the ownership of the negative. He obviously made a fortune.

Of course, there are really two key scenes: the infamous shower scene, and then the revelation of Norman Bates' "mother." One of the reasons the shower scene was so effective was its very carefully planned out sequence. It is said that Hitchcock literally drew up a frame by frame storyboard of what he wanted and how he wanted some close-ups of blood, of the knife, of the shower curtain, but never the horror of seeing the body during this attack. There is no doubt that the music by Bernard Herrmann helped make this scene as memorable and truly chilling. Of course, there was a careful, character build-=up that made the audience identify with what it thought would be the heroine of the entire movie. "It ignores the fact that the scene would not have been as effective if Hitchcock had not developed the audience's fascinating ambiguous/sympathetic identification with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh)." (Hull 4).

Of course, the audiences were not really ready for the movie, which seemed to be made on the cheap- much unlike his previous success, North by Northwest. Except for Leigh (who obviously didn't last very long) there was no major bankable star in the film (Neither Martin Balsam not Anthony Perkins were stars that could sell a movie) it depended on the Hitchcock name. And, at first it was a real disappointment, receiving fairly lukewarm notices from critics.