Alfred Hitchcock Presents Psycho

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Alfred Hitchcock films never grow old. Give the ladies the latest hair styles and bring the clothes up to date and it looks as fresh as a film released last week. That’s saying something for a fifty year old film like Psycho. The principle photography on Psycho started on Nov.30, 1959 and was a wrap on Feb.1,1960.

I remember seeing the movie when it was released and it was so terrifying and startling that I can still remember the hair standing up on my head. You must remember we knew very little about serial killers at the time. And few movies were made about them if any at all.

The most horrifying scene in Psycho for me was Norman Bates sitting in the rocking chair speaking as his mother. I think it was even scarier than the shower scene where he murdered Vivian Leigh. The film makes me wonder if Psycho was in part responsible for all the gory murder films that came afterwards.

David Thomson says in his book that in November 1959, Truman Capote came across an article in the New York Times describing the murder of a Kansas family that would become “In Cold Blood.” So maybe Hitchcock just saw the time was ripe.

Hitchcock said he made Psycho after seeing how healthy a string of violent B movies made in the 1950s by William Castle and Roger Corman were for the box offices. Hitchcock was also determined to prove he didn’t need famous stars and hot locations to make a sucessful film.

To keep costs down he used his crew from his show,Alfred Hitchcock Presents and shot Psycho in black and white. Bosco chocolate syrup was used for blood in the shower scene. He photographed a Phoenix office worker’s wardrobe to get his character, Marion Crane’s, clothes just right. He ended up making the movie for about $80,000. I feel sure it was beyond Hitchcock’s imagination to dream Psycho would still be a success fifty years later.

Psycho made horror films more socially acceptable,and now they have become so acceptable that nothing can stop them. There is no end to the slashing, dicing, and chain sawing we see on film now. Not many of them are worth seeing a second time, but Psycho still holds it’s own and is worth seeing again and again. It still makes my hair stand on end. I can’t think of another movie that compares to the horror of Psycho.

It was the first movie that theater owners closed their doors when the movie started. Hitchcock didn’t want people coming and going after the murder scene and wondering where Janet Leigh had gone. When the film was over the theater was cleared. If you didn’t go to the movies before the 1970s you might not understand this.

Before that time people could come and go as they pleased or sit through the film a second time. We can’t do that anymore and we have Hitchcock to thank for that. We know about serial killers now. We see them played out on the news, TV, theaters and our own neighborhoods. But there is only one Psycho. It is a kind of Dorian Gray movie. We get older but it doesn’t.

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