The Novel

Author: Robert Bloch (1917-1994)

First published: 1959

The Film:

Year released: 1960

Director: Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

Screenplay by: Joseph Stefano

Starring: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam

Context

Author Robert Bloch made his name in the 1940s and ‘50s with horror tales and science fiction in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and pulp magazines like Weird Tales. In his 1959 novel Psycho, however, he pioneered a more psychological brand of horror inspired by Freudian psychiatry, then in its heyday. His protagonist, Norman Bates, has murdered his domineering mother and her lover years ago, but remains so obsessed with her that he keeps her corpse in her bedroom (taxidermy is his hobby), deluding himself that she’s still alive. Driven mad by his guilt, jealousy and anger toward her, he lives with her in an imaginary, nightmarish relationship in which he plays both parts. He can even mentally “become” her, dressing in her clothes and acting out her homicidal rages against anyone who threatens her emotional stranglehold on him. Thus, Norman exemplifies concepts in Freudian psychology like split personality, emotional repression and the Oedipus complex.

Alfred Hitchcock was intrigued by the cinematic challenge of the novel’s narrative strategy: to keep the audience from realizing that Norman and his murderous mother are the same person until a revelation at the very end. But in choosing to adapt Bloch’s novel, he surprised his audience himself. The popularity of the Hitchcock brand was based on suavely entertaining suspense films like North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring glamorous types like Cary Grant, James Stewart and Grace Kelly, while his weekly TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, made his portly profile and mischievous humor a welcome presence in homes across America.

Psycho was a radical departure. Filmed in stark black-and-white on a shoestring budget, it featured shocking violence instead of Hitchcock’s trademark winking ironies and exuded a low-rent atmosphere—part film noir, part gothic—that had more in common with Bloch’s pulp-fiction roots than with Hitchcock’s customary urbanity. The darker sides of human nature had provided him with disturbing undercurrents in films like Vertigo, with its portrayal of morbid sexual obsession, and Rear Window, with its theme of the wages of voyeurism. But the blood-splattered psychosis of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) was darkness of a degree unprecedented, not just for Hitchcock, but for mainstream movies in general. Critics recoiled, accusing the “master of suspense” of stooping to vulgar sensationalism, but audiences screamed their approval.

Film Analysis

When novels are turned into movies, fans of the book are typically disappointed. The camera can view characters only from the outside, whereas a novelist takes us inside their heads to reveal their most intimate thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Because of their strictly external perspective, many movie adaptations merely skate over the novel’s emotional and psychological depths. But thanks to Hitchcock’s cinematic virtuosity, Psycho is an exception—a film that’s even more insightful and compelling than the page-turner it’s based on.

While Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano follow the novel’s plot closely, they rearrange its structure to dramatic effect. Bloch’s first chapter takes place entirely in the mind of Norman Bates. He’s alone with a book on some gruesome Incan ritual involving flaying people alive—a book he’s enjoying with a bit too much relish—when his mother interrupts and they get into an argument that dramatizes the sickness of their relationship. His mother lives only in his mind, of course, though the reader doesn’t know that yet. But we do know straightaway that he’s the main character and that his mother will be a driving force in the plot.

Hitchcock, by contrast, begins by focusing on the woman who becomes Norman’s first victim, a secretary named Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). In an opening scene that was daring in 1959, she’s on a hotel bed with her lover Sam (John Gavin) enjoying the languid afterglow of non-marital afternoon love-making, Marion clad only in a slip and bra. In the novel she isn’t introduced till Chapter 2, so that we naturally view her as a secondary character who’s therefore potentially disposable. But Hitchcock’s opening attention-grabber leads us to believe that the movie will be about Marion and her love life. Little do we suspect that she’ll be brutally murdered well before the halfway mark, and that the film is really about her murderer. Hitchcock redoubles our shock by casting the movie’s biggest star, Janet Leigh, as Marion. Never before or since has a director killed off his leading lady so early.

Since Sam refuses to marry her until he has paid off the large business debts he inherited from his father, Marion impulsively steals forty thousand dollars from her employer to help him out. Hitchcock reinforces our false assumption that the movie is about her by devoting the first third of Psycho to building suspense around the question of whether she can get away with her theft. It’s a long drive to the town where Sam lives, and she has to run a gauntlet of obstacles ranging from a suspicious policeman to a blinding rainstorm after dark. Only when she seeks refuge from the storm at the ramshackle Bates Motel do we finally meet the movie’s real protagonist.

Thus, when Marion is stabbed to death that night in the shower, the structural shock—the sudden death so early in the film of the woman we thought was its heroine—dramatically intensifies the visceral shock of the stabbing itself. The same scene in the novel relies entirely on horrific violence for its shock value (Bloch has Marion not just stabbed but beheaded). Since Bloch has made the menacing dynamic between Bates and his mother the center of our attention from the start, there is no comparable element of structural surprise when that menace turns lethal.

Not that Hitchcock relies on structural shock alone— far from it. Psycho is one of the greatest visceral shockers in film history, and to maximize its impact he exploits a set of resources unique to cinema. His mastery of the medium is exemplified by the movie’s two great murder scenes. In both, Hitchcock transforms a few workmanlike lines in a pulp novel into classics of movie magic.

The craftsmanship of the famous shower scene is legendary. Packing 52 edits into 45 seconds, it took 78 camera set-ups and over a week to shoot. The result seems to show us much more than it actually does. Though we never see more of Marion’s naked body than the strict censorship rules of the era allowed, we could swear we see more. Neither, amazingly, do we see the knife make contact with her flesh. Hitchcock achieves the illusion that we do by timing the sound of each slash (created by stabbing a melon) to coincide with an edit. Thus, when we hear the slashes, we think we’re seeing a knife repeatedly cut into Marion’s body, but what we’re really seeing is cuts from shot to shot in the film.

Psycho‘s other murder—of the private detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam)—also outdoes the novel with distinctively cinematic panache. Both movie and book have him meet his demise when he ventures up to the spooky old house behind the motel to interrogate Norman’s mother. In both, Norman, cross-dressed and taken over by the mother side of his split personality, greets Arbogast by slashing him to death. Both Bloch and Hitchcock are still trying to sustain our assumption that Norman and his mother are two separate people. Bloch has the novelist’s advantage of writing from the viewpoint of Norman’s deluded mind, where they are two separate people. Hitchcock, confined to the camera’s external viewpoint, can only show us what’s actually going on, not what Norman imagines, and so he needs a cinematic way of concealing the truth.

To accomplish this sleight of hand, he needs to avoid showing us the murderer’s face without the audience noticing the trick. He does it by having Arbogast ascend the staircase toward mother’s bedroom with the camera positioned at the top of the stairs, watching him from above. As Arbogast nears the landing, a smooth and subtle edit elevates our perspective even further, so that the camera is looking directly down on him from the ceiling—an appropriately doom-laden angle. Thus, when Norman-as-mother emerges from the bedroom for the kill, we see only the top of his bewigged head. Hitchcock not only conceals her identity this way but creates a scene more suspenseful and terrifying than in the novel’s, where Norman-as-mother merely responds to Arbogast’s knock on the front door by dashing downstairs to open it, blade in hand, calling out “I’m coming!”—a scene more blackly comic than horrific.

Having established that overhead angle, Hitchcock uses it again when Norman must move his mother’s corpse out of the bedroom and hide it in the cellar. While we overhear Norman arguing in the bedroom with his mother (or rather with his own mother-voice, unbeknownst to us), the camera stays outside the room, gradually levitating above the empty stairwell. By the time Norman emerges with mother in his arms, we once again see only the top of her head. Hitchcock thus prevents us from seeing that she’s a decayed corpse, but by distracting us with eavesdropping while the camera moves into position, he also prevents us from noticing what it’s doing or growing suspicious of why. Bloch the novelist can keep his story’s secret by keeping us inside Norman’s mind. Hitchcock’s camera can’t go there, but he finds a purely cinematic solution to the problem.

And then there’s the music—another resource at Hitchcock’s command that has no literary equivalent. Those shrieking violins are as famous as the murder scenes they punctuate, and Bernard Herrmann’s score is an indispensable dimension of Psycho‘s power right from the opening credits. Orchestrated for strings only, it’s calculated with uncanny psychological acuity to create a “high-strung” atmosphere of anxiety, foreboding, and—especially in the shower scene—hysteria. And such a great score gives the absence of music in certain key scenes a spellbinding effect of its own, as when Marion drives up to the motel that fateful night, accompanied only by the ominous sound of the rain.

After the hideous corpse is discovered and the story’s great secret revealed, both Bloch and Hitchcock feel obligated to end with a lengthy explanation of Norman’s psychosis from a psychiatric professional. Here Bloch the wordsmith has the advantage over the filmmaker. As a visual medium, film is impatient with long lectures, and Hitchcock isn’t entirely successful in preventing the psychiatrist’s disquisition from becoming an anti-climax.

He redeems the letdown, however, in the film’s final frames, where Norman faces the camera in his cell. He has completely become his mother now, and though he remains outwardly silent we hear “her” mentally talking to herself in voiceover. Anthony Perkins’s acting here, consisting entirely of subtle shifts in facial expression and ending with a chilling little smile, caps an unforgettable performance. He’s a far cry from the Norman of Bloch’s novel, who is plump, balding, middle-aged and bespectacled. But Perkins’s boyishly handsome, shyly vulnerable charm makes him both a more sympathetic and a more unsettling madman.

Significance

A smash success with audiences in 1960, Psycho was dismissed by many critics as a trashy exploitation flick beneath Hitchcock’s dignity. Time has proven the audiences right, and most critics now agree that Psycho stands as both a Hitchcock masterpiece and a landmark in twentieth century culture. It has deeply influenced the entire film genres of horror and thriller and spawned the subgenre of slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th.

By the standards of the time, it was scandalously erotic, and its heady brew of sex and violence had a transformative impact both on movies and on the culture at large. Janet Leigh was the first woman in American film to appear in her underwear, and her Marion does so twice, once in white in the opening tryst, and once while stripping for her shower, this time in black to match the darkness of Norman’s gaze as he watches her through a peephole. That gaze itself, like the stuffed corpse of his mother, suggests a creepy dimension of sexuality where few had ventured before.

Hitchcock’s taboo-breaking includes another first: the toilet in Marion’s motel bathroom. No previous American movie had dared to reveal that bathrooms have toilets, and Hitchcock even added insult to injury by having Marion flush it. Perhaps the master was still winking ironically after all, even behind the scenes of Psycho.

Further Reading

Bibliography