I just watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller, “Psycho.” Being a classic crime “wannabe” sleuth, as was Hitchcock, this movie has always been very interesting to me. I’ve watched it a few times and still am captivated, uh, horrified by it. Virtually everything about this movie is amazing, no other film can compare although many have tried to copy it. Hard to believe that this film was done on a budget. The film was nominated for 4 academy awards and I don’t think any other horror film will ever achieve that.
Alfred Hitchcock has his main star (Janet Leigh) die half way in the movie and although she is dead for the second half, you can’t help but keep her in your mind. I remember when I was in High School, one of my teachers, who was in college when Psycho was released, told me that after seeing this film many women did not take showers! And she wasn’t kidding. Even today many of us will have a hard time turning our backs in the shower after seeing this movie. For me, the most frightening thing about the film is the eerie, and ominous, violin music and the murder scene. The dark imagery in the film is unforgettable. The house on the hill, the Bates Motel off some lonely, forgotten and abandoned road, Anthony Perkins nervously looking for words to cover his most atrocious act. It’s all unforgettable and will leave a long and lasting impression.
The movie begins with a woman on the run from the law and quickly turns into a horrible story of a sick man who murders her. In a scene before the murder, villain and victim to be, are having a “life” conversation. Ironically it is this very conversation that turns this woman around. She realizes she has done wrong and must turn back to make things right. Her intentions were good, but her fate was sealed.
In the murder scene the camera pans out to the woman reaching out in vain, hanging on to dear life, but instead she gets a hold of a shower curtain which is neatly torn away from it’s hooks. The same shower curtain which will be used by the killer to bury her in. The camera continues to pan around the bathtub and woman’s body lying dead in a pool of blood . The eerie silence and the camera focusing on her lifeless eyes, made me think how sad it all was for her. How very sad. The bloodied water as it went down the drain, a metaphor of her very life gone down the drain.
All I could think of at the end of the movie is how a woman’s hopelessness caused her to cross paths with a killer, a psycho. It all seemed so sad and unfair to me. She didn’t get her break after all. So I guess we can say that “Psycho,” isn’t all horror, but also, a sad story of a woman who thought that the answers to her problems was running away to an “island,” but what she found instead was a road that led to her destruction.
