The director knew producer Val Lewton, and seems to have admired Lewton's modest, impressive horror films at RKO. Hitchcock chose to make Psycho for a number of reasons, beginning with a desire to make a truly frightening horror film. Does your teacher look at you funny sometimes? Who's that walking behind you? Madness could hide behind "normal behavior". Political Science Fiction initiated the idea of random paranoia, but movies like Psycho made paranoia personal.
Hitchcock dispenses with the 'official investigation' subplot as we watch the likable Arbogast (Martin Balsam) wander into the same deadly trap. The independent, foolhardy Marion Crane never realizes what horror awaits her, and neither does her tough-minded sister Lila (Vera Miles) or her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin). Back in 1960 the instant diagnosis concocted by the psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) sounded like clinical voodoo, but the audience needed it anyway.Īfter Psycho we'd fear the boy next door, not demons that go bump in the night. The psychological possession of human beings is very real, and the logical successor to hysterical religious explanations of mental illness. Many people fear death, when they should fear the loss of psychological liberty. He's been cursed by a back-story welter of sex and violence: a dominating parent was just too much strain on Norman's mind. The fact that Norman Bates' motel has been bypassed by progress is only a symptom.
Sam has inherited his father's debt as if it were a gothic curse, and is forced to live in the back room of his hardware store. In her nothing job Marion watches a parade of money paying for the happiness of others, especially a rich client (Frank Albertson, the "Hee-Haw" joker from It's a Wonderful Life). He's not the only one caught in the "personal traps" that everyone seems to share, with Marion Crane and Sam Loomis struggling in financial woes. The pathetic Norman Bates has lost control of his personality. He begins by stating that the film is a bona fide work of art to stand beside Shakespeare's MacBeth, and by the time he's elucidated his themes of guilt transference, subjective entrapment of the viewer and post-Freudian angst, we're in total agreement. Robin Wood's analysis of Psycho still reads the best. Raymond Durgnat and Robin Wood wrote incisive essays about Hitchcock's long chain of masterpieces. The air has the slightest tinge of dust particles, and after a while the flowered wallpaper patterns seems to crawl on their own.Īlfred Hitchcock was one of the first film directors to be canonized by the Auteur Theory, a critical approach that fits his career like a glove provided one ignores the work of dozens of fine writers. The interior of the Bates house somehow captured the dry desert feel and even the smell I remembered from my grandmother's house in Nevada. But on a big screen in a good print it communicated a very specific experience.
#Psycho 1998 dvd cover tv#
Reviewers often remind us that Psycho was a low-budget production filmed by Alfred Hitchcock's TV outfit, Shamley. The new Hi Def version straightens out these anomalies and dazzles us with its sharp rendering of the crisply shot B&W original. The latest DVD looked unusually soft and indistinct. The first DVD was not enhanced for widescreen and was also mis-framed. Well, they finally got Psycho right! Universal's new Blu-ray corrects the disappointing transfers of older DVDs.
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