If you are looking for a black-and-white horror film for this Halloween, Psycho is the one for you. Usually, in traditional horror films, you know what you’re getting into, you know what you’re watching, and where the dangers of the movie lie. But Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film doesn’t begin as a horror film. It starts as a crime thriller of a woman on the run after stealing her employer’s money. The horror comes much later, when you’re not paying attention. That misdirection from the director is not a trick, but the entire argument of the film.
The most iconic scene from the film is the shower scene. What is remarkable about the scene is not the violence itself, but how unprepared the viewer is for that scene. For the first 40 minutes, we follow Marion Crane, who is on the run. We have been with her thoughts, watching her weigh her choices and feeling her guilt. And then suddenly she is murdered, in the middle of the film. The film quickly moves on without leaving time to address her murder.
The film’s most incredible feature is its ability to show how normal it makes everything look before it doesn’t. The Bates Motel is quiet and empty, but not sinister. Norman Bates is awkward and lonely, but obviously not dangerous. He talks about his mother affectionately, who has not been to leave home. The actor, Anthony Perkins, plays him so well with the nervous energy of a person who doesn’t see many other people. Hitchcock misdirects the audience into thinking Norman Bates is the last person to be associated with the horror to come later on in the film. If anything, it probably will come from Bates’ mother whose voice we only hear but never get to see.
At the center of the film is the question of what and how we project onto the people we meet. Marion sees a lonely young man in Norman Bates and feels a sense of recognition as she is running away from her old life and unable to return back to it. What Psycho does well is that the danger is never announced and comes from directions the audience is never prepared for. Hitchcock spends much of the start of the film making the audience believe in certain people and not so much in others. Then he slowly starts dismantling that.
Underneath the tension and suspense, the film is about the weight of the past. Bates’ house is on the hill, looming and overlooking the motel; it is a visual representation of something left unresolved. Every scene at the motel carries a sense of dread of a place where something unfortunate happened a long time ago. It is almost as if the house is watching over everything in the motel.
The scene that stayed with me is Norman’s conversation about his feelings about being trapped with Marion while eating sandwiches in the office of the motel among his stuffed birds. It is the only honest scene in the movie, and it works on two levels: the meaning for Marion and the meaning for the audience. The way Hitchcock creates the scene makes it interesting not only for first-time viewers, but also for those who watch it for the second time, and that is the perfect illustration of what Hitchcock does for this film.
Psycho is not a film about violence. It is a film about perception and how we perceive strangers, how we see danger, and how quickly a story can make us look at something in the wrong way. Hitchcock turns the story into an everlasting classic not because of the violence or special effects, but because of the misdirection, empathy, and the perfect understanding of how the audience thinks. Psycho does not try to scare the viewer with the monsters that hide in the dark. It questions whether you really know the quiet, polite person in front of you.
