Psycho is a 1960 American psychological horror thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The screenplay, written by Joseph Stefano, was based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. The film stars Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam.
The plot centers on an encounter between on-the-run embezzler Marion Crane (Leigh) and shy motel proprietor Norman Bates (Perkins) and its aftermath, in which a private investigator (Balsam), Marion’s lover Sam Loomis (Gavin) and her sister Lila (Miles) investigate the cause of her disappearance.
Psycho was seen as a departure from Hitchcock’s previous film North by Northwest, as it was filmed on a lower budget in black-and-white by the crew of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The film was initially considered controversial and received mixed reviews, but audience interest and outstanding box-office returns prompted a major critical re-evaluation. Psycho was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Leigh and Best Director for Hitchcock.
Famous work
Psycho is now considered one of Hitchcock’s best films and is arguably his most famous work. It has been praised as a major work of cinematic art by international film critics and scholars due to its slick direction, tense atmosphere, impressive camerawork, a memorable score and iconic performances. Often ranked among the greatest films of all time, it set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behaviour and sexuality in American films,and is widely considered to be the earliest example of the slasher film genre.
After Hitchcock’s death in 1980, Universal Pictures produced follow-ups: three sequels, a remake, a made-for-television spin-off and a prequel television series set in the 2010s. In 1992, the Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
In Psycho, Hitchcock subverts the romantic elements that are seen in most of his work. The film is instead ironic as it presents “clarity and fulfillment” of romance. The past is central to the film; the main characters “struggle to understand and resolve destructive personal histories” and ultimately fail.
Lesley Brill said, “The inexorable forces of past sins and mistakes crush hopes for regeneration and present happiness.” The crushed hope is highlighted by the death of the protagonist, Marion Crane, halfway through the film. Marion is like Persephone of Greek mythology, who is abducted temporarily from the world of the living.
The myth does not sustain with Marion, who dies hopelessly in her room at the Bates Motel. The room is wallpapered with floral print like Persephone’s flowers, but they are only “reflected in mirrors, as images of images—twice removed from reality”.
In the scene of Marion’s death, Brill describes the transition from the bathroom drain to Marion’s lifeless eye, “Like the eye of the amorphous sea creature at the end of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, it marks the birth of death, an emblem of final hopelessness and corruption.”
Marion is deprived of “the humble treasures of love, marriage, home and family”, which Hitchcock considers elements of human happiness. There exists among Psycho’s secondary characters a lack of “familial warmth and stability”, which demonstrates the unlikelihood of domestic fantasies. The film contains ironic jokes about domesticity, such as when Sam writes a letter to Marion, agreeing to marry her, only after the audience sees her buried in the swamp.
Sam and Marion’s sister Lila, in investigating Marion’s disappearance, develop an “increasingly connubial” relationship, a development that Marion is denied. Norman also suffers a similarly perverse definition of domesticity. He has “an infantile and divided personality” and lives in a mansion whose past occupies the present.
Norman displays stuffed birds that are “frozen in time” and keeps childhood toys and stuffed animals in his room. He is hostile towards suggestions to move from the past, such as with Marion’s suggestion to put his mother “someplace” and as a result kills Marion to preserve his past. Brill said, “Someplace’ for Norman is where his delusions of love, home and family are declared invalid and exposed.”
Light and darkness
Light and darkness feature prominently in Psycho. The first shot after the intertitle is the sunny landscape of Phoenix before the camera enters a dark hotel room where Sam and Marion appear as bright figures. Marion is almost immediately cast in darkness; she is preceded by her shadow as she reenters the office to steal money and as she enters her bedroom. When she flees Phoenix, darkness descends on her drive.
The following sunny morning is punctured by a watchful police officer with black sunglasses. She finally arrives at the Bates Motel in near darkness. Bright lights are also “the ironic equivalent of darkness” in the film, blinding instead of illuminating.
Examples of brightness include the opening window shades in Sam’s and Marion’s hotel room, vehicle headlights at night, the neon sign at The Bates Motel, “the glaring white” of the bathroom tiles where Marion dies and the fruit cellar’s exposed light bulb shining on the corpse of Norman’s mother. Such bright lights typically characterise danger and violence in Hitchcock’s films.