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St. Petersburg Times (13/May/1990) - Psycho: the making of a classic cinematic shocker

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Psycho: the making of a classic cinematic shocker

A few years ago I saw Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho for the second time in a theater and was somewhat surprised at the reaction of the Tampa Theater audience — a lot of laughter and few screams of terror. I guess you had to be there 30 years ago to experience the full shock of the thing. The first time I saw the film, the audience was so noisy — screaming, moaning, gasping and nervously giggling — that some of the dialogue was inaudible.

For moviegoers in 1960, Psycho delivered a crescendo of surprises, some of them like slaps in the face:

The first was the opening scene, showing the star, Janet Leigh, half undressed. There she was, in bra and half-slip, lying on a bed, and beside her sat a man, stripped to the waist. Such goings-on were unheard of in respectable movies.

Next came the sight of a functioning bathroom. The camera actually looked down into a flushing toilet. Toilets had never existed before in movies; the characters apparently had no need of them.

The viewers were next compelled to witness the slasher slaying of Janet Leigh as she stood in a shower. Today's moviegoers, having been treated to every form of death by slashing, hacking, chopping, bashing and blasting in living and dying color, are hard to shock. At the time it was profoundly disturbing to be caught up in such an act, which could not be shut out. Even if you closed your eyes, you could hear, beneath the victim's screams and the shrieking violins, the chunk, chunk, chunk of the knife plunging into flesh.

Another blow followed quickly: the realization that the star of the film, the character with whom you had been led to sympathize, identify, perhaps fall in love, was dead, gone, kaput. For me this did not fully sink in until the car containing her body went blub, blub, blubbing down into a swamp. Viewers were left breathless, disoriented, uncertain where to turn. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the movies.

Next up was a second slasher slaying, as harrowing as the first, perhaps even more so, because even though you didn't particularly like the victim, a sleazy private detective named Arbogast, you anticipated what was coming and dreaded it.

Finally there was the revelation that the woman you thought was the killer was actually a grinning, desiccated corpse and that the real killer was her son, a likable fellow who turned out to be a demented transvestite. Now, again, today's audiences are accustomed to such things, particularly to the special effects creators' efforts to scare them with slimy, slobbering, fabricated specimens of creaturedom. But when Psycho's goggle-eyed skull first leered from the screen, only the semi-comatose among us could keep still.

Psycho is now recognized as a masterpiece, the culmination if not the peak of Hitchcock's genius, but it will never again have the same impact on audiences that it had in 1960. In effect, Hitchcock set the stage for the real violence to come: the public slayings of a president, his assassin, a presidential candidate and a beloved civil rights leader; riots in the streets; televised jungle warfare complete with body bags.

Psycho also marked a turning point in moviemaking — it was the granddaddy of all the chain-saw massacres and slasher rampages — so its origins and development are worth more than passing attention. Stephen Rebello tells the story in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Dembner Books, $24.95).

It all began, Rebello reports, with the exploits of a Wisconsin farmer named Ed Gein (pronounced GEEN), who did unspeakable things to bodies he exhumed and to the remains of 10 or more women he murdered. Newspaper stories about the case in 1957 inspired Robert Bloch, an accomplished horror writer, to produce a novel about a murderous taxidermist. He called the book Psycho. Hitchcock snapped up the movie rights for less than $10,000.

At about the same time, a French film entitled Les Diaboliques was frightening American audiences. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, it told the story of a school administrator whose wife and mistress conspired to do away with him. Photographed in murky black and white in an era when color was becoming commonplace, the film featured a climactic bathroom scene in which the murder victim appeared to return from the dead, rising from a tubful of water to terrify his wife to death. (It is now available on videotape, but the sound track is fuzzy and the subtitles are all but indecipherable.)

The success of Les Diaboliques led Hitchcock, whose recent films had been sophisticated color thrillers featuring major stars, to make a low-budget, black and white shocker and show the world what could be done with limited means. The budget for Psycho was a mere $800,000, which Hitchcock provided from his own pocket.

Like Clouzot, Hitchcock decided on the bathroom, the site of everyone's most extreme vulnerability, as the film's crucial setting. Rebello tells how Hitchcock toned down parts of the film to appease the censors, who were tricked into passing the bedroom and bathroom scenes.

For the shower scene, a set was constructed with four removable walls to allow various camera angles. Graphic designer Saul Bass drew up story boards, but Rebello disputes reports that Bass was allowed to direct the scene. Rebello's interviews support the conclusion that nobody but Hitchcock directed any part of Psycho.

Janet Leigh was not entirely nude in the shower. To protect the star's modesty, costumer Rita Riggs used moleskin at strategic points. As a backup, Hitchcock hired a stand-in, Marli Renfro, who did appear nude.

For the blood that trickles down the bathtub drain in the film, chocolate syrup was used. To get just the right sound effects, Hitchcock listened as knives were plunged into various types of melons, and he finally declared, "Casaba."

The plot ideas came from Bloch's book, and Joseph Stephano wrote the dialogue, but the artful development of the plot was all the work of Hitchcock. He used all of his guile to build sympathy for Leigh's character, Marion Crane, an underpaid, unhappy secretary, and thus increase the impact of her death on the audience. He also carefully constructed the Arbogast death scene for maximum shock value.

There is much more in Rebello's book, which is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature paying tribute to the director who never won an Academy Award but whose profile is still familiar to television viewers everywhere.

In Psycho, Hitchcock set out to scare the socks off the moviegoing public and succeeded beyond his own expectations. In fact, Psycho's success was so great it apparently bedazzled even Hitchcock. As Rebello points out, none of his subsequent films came anywhere close to its stature.

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