The Guardian (08/Feb/2013) - Did Alfred Hitchcock see the funny side of Psycho?
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- article: Did Alfred Hitchcock see the funny side of Psycho?
- author(s): Ben Child
- newspaper: The Guardian (08/Feb/2013)
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho (1960), Universal Studios
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Did Alfred Hitchcock see the funny side of Psycho?
Archive suggesting the film director intended his classic horror to be a 'big joke' shows comedy and horror are closer than we think
Film critics have always seen it as a high water mark in the history of horror: a genuinely frightening masterpiece of perfectly pitched suspense and macabre eeriness that forever changed the face of cinema. But it turns out that Psycho's director, Alfred Hitchcock, may have intended the iconic chiller as a rather more playful affair. In newly unearthed comments made in 1964 he apparently described the film as a "tongue-in-cheek" movie for which "the content was, I felt, rather amusing and ... a big joke". Hitchcock then added: "I was horrified to find some people took it seriously".
If the idea that Psycho was somehow intended as a comedy and we must bear in mind that these are off-the-cuff comments made more than 40 years ago seems to fly in the face of everything we think we know about the 1960s horror widely considered to be the first slasher flick, it's worth bearing in mind that the two genres have never been all that far apart. Moreover, the older the horror film, the more likely it is to be viewed in the modern era as an amusing curio, rather than a source of genuine chills.
Watching early RKO classics of the genre such as 1942's Cat People or the following year's I Walked With a Zombie ought to be enough to convince anyone that times have changed. Neither film is half as frightening as two of the children's movies competing for this year's Oscar for best animated film, Laika's ParaNorman (with its shrieking banshee witch-child) and Tim Burton's Frankenweenie (cute pets are brought back to life as zombies with the help of electricity and a sewing kit). The celebrated yet unmistakably low-budget Cat People could not be sillier if it tried, featuring as it does an obviously French actress playing a beautiful "Serbian" woman with the spectacularly camp habit of transforming into a slinky black panther at unfortunate moments.
Once genuinely scary films such as Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein series from the 1930s have lost much of their fear factor due to being endlessly spoofed. Likewise, George A Romero's zombie movies from the 1960s and 1970s: anyone who has enjoyed Peter Jackson's Braindead or Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead is going to be automatically inured to the sight of denizens of the undead ripping into an unfortunate's solar plexus in search of yummy intestine dessert. Yet at the time of its release, 1968's Night of the Living Dead was described as a film which "threatened the moral health of filmgoers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism" by Variety's critic. These days, horror tropes are so much a part of the film-making lexicon that it takes something a lot more horrendous to churn stomachs.
Horror's link to comedy has also, inevitably, been aided by the less-than-sophisticated nature of some of the chillers on offer during certain periods compared with later challengers. Hammer's slew of films, beginning in the late 1950s with The Mummy, Dracula and Frankenstein pictures, are fondly remembered. But when darker fare such as Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby came along in the late 1960s, they exacerbated the air of camp surrounding their predecessors tenfold.
What's so remarkable about Hitchcock's newly unearthed comments is that Psycho has always been seen as the first of the new vanguard of horror films, rather than a throwaway adjunct to the silliness of the 1950s that somehow got out of hand. Film historians have praised the British director for his bravery in challenging contemporary standards of taste to break new ground, especially at a stage of his career when others might have chosen to rest on their laurels. It turns out that Hitchcock's unique talent for creating suspense may have overwhelmed his original intent with dramatic consequences for the future of film.
While Psycho's ability to shock may have diminished over time, there will surely always be horror that continues to cause genuine unease. One cannot imagine anyone sitting down with a bag of popcorn to laugh at the campness of the first couple of Saw movies, for instance. While diminished by a series of ever-more-vapid sequels, these films shocked by turning the evil inwards: viewers were asked to imagine what horrors they might commit if placed in the same horrific situation, with the answer often resembling a William Goldingesque critique of human nature. Likewise, the genuinely repellent (and not in the least bit worthy of future classic status) Human Centipede films seem too grim and odious to ever be considered a source of camp fun. But then, who is to say that in 40 years' time, cinema-goers may not view them rather differently?
