Don’t Be Late
No current horror movie would be quite the same if Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t chosen to scare the living daylights out of us in Psycho (1960). It isn’t just a movie that rises above its genre. Psycho has become a model for any type of film that attempts to creatively disorient the viewer. Similarly, Bernard Herrmann’s musical score is copied — almost note for note — by young composers hoping to set the right mood for a variety of genres, including horror, action, adventure, and science fiction.
This film is so well known you probably have seen it by now. If you haven’t watched it, please do. No director knows more about manipulating the audience than Hitchcock (and that’s meant as a compliment). This is his second best film, after Vertigo (1958). If you haven’t seen Psycho, don’t read the next paragraph or the block-quotes below that paragraph, for I’ll need to touch on a key plot element.
What would be Psycho’s most important innovation? You’re not allowed to identify with any of the characters for very long. Hitchcock explained this strategy in a 1962 interview with Françoise Truffaut:
You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts. . . You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what’s actually going to happen. . . I purposely killed the star so as to make the killing even more unexpected. As a matter of fact, that’s why I insisted that the audiences be kept out of the theaters once the picture had started, because the late-comers would have been waiting to see Janet Leigh after she had disappeared from the screen action.
While it has been widely available on DVD since the 1990s, an anamorphic widescreen version didn’t turn up on DVD until 2005. That format provides a higher resolution for compatible televisions. The anamorphic widescreen print is included in the current DVD and Blu-ray versions.
Psycho
(1960; directed by Alfred Hitchcock)
Universal Studios (Blu-ray and DVD)
Friday, October 27 at 8:00 p.m. eastern on Turner Classic Movies
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