Cast: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Joseph Stefano

Genre: Horror/Suspense

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins



CRITIQUE:


It’s a widespread, generally accepted fact that with PSYCHO, the breed of the horror genre was born. Alfred Hitchcock’s unsettling masterpiece is without a doubt The Godfather of modern horror and slasher films. He is the modern horrormeister; manipulating visuals to create a mood, uses his camera in visual flourishes to intensity a story without ignoring the vitality of dialogues, and generate shock value to audience with the use of montage and expert use of sound. In PSYCHO, his dexterity is something to behold, that we are indeed watching a supreme filmmaker in his finest craft.


And who could ever forget the ill-fated tale of a runaway secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who inadvertently steals a stash of forty-thousand Uncle Sam bucks in the name of infatuation, and ends up in a faraway motel, the Bates Motel, in an almost deserted off-road landscape. Now, of course, everybody in the world knows what happens to her eventually. She ended up as that lady who gets stabbed in the shower in one of cinema’s most shocking scenes. Here the art of filmmaking is shown in its most perverted, shocking and rousing form. To add bits of information, this famous, or rather infamous, shower scene took Hitchcock to shot in seven days with forty camera sets, and such effort goes down to history as an auteuristic approach to visual montage. White-tiled shower room, a flash of skin, a knife in the air, plunging down into the skin of our damsel in distress, monochromatic blood spurting and flowing down along with water – yet no exploitation of breast neither gore, knife-into-body explicit show – and all we have is the masterful use of sound (everytime you hear that chilling music, it raises hair), the expert placement of editing, and the claustrophobic setting the elicits voyeuristic shock. This is the power of cinema, and Hitchcock has brutally manipulated the audience, and with good reason.


Repeated viewings might diminish the horror factor, but it will remain to be a scene worth studying in cinematic levels. This iconic scene alone makes this film worth watching, yet one must not forget the dementia of its story and characters. The remarkable Anthony Perkins as the troubled Norman bates is also an excellent study of human character. He delivers a twist, although predictable as soon as you see him, but is never absent with depth. Everything in this film is just creepy. And you wouldn’t want to take a shower in a motel, ever. Or go into houses on haunted-looking hills.


VERDICT:

Seminal and incendiary, cinematic buffs will always revere how Hitchcock pulls out the elements to create a graceful horror film, psychologically complex, and visually masterful that has been highly influential as ever. Not one in cinematic history has surpassed the art of stabbing knives like Hitchcock does.



RATING: A+