Stephen, in your book you mention that the cleaning up of Marion’s body was more disturbing to audiences than the actual shower murder.
Why is that? SR: When Norman begins to clean up for his mother, like the dutiful son that he is, we are brought into it. We are stunned by what we have just seen: a human being trapped in a shower stall and hacked to death. So when we identify with Norman, what does that say about us?
have been different in colour? HG: He played with the idea of making the blood red when it appeared on screen and that would be the only colour, but then he thought it was too gimmicky. It would have been a different movie in colour, because it would have been bloodier. When you see red blood instead of just chocolate syrup, which we used as
blood...it hurts more. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s gorier and more graphic.
SR: I can’t tell you the number of classes where students came up to me and said, “The movie was in black and white but shot in colour, right?” or “I remember seeing the movie in colour. Why don’t they show it in colour?” What they are doing, besides confusing it with The Tingler, is painting it in. They have imagined it the way Hitchcock wanted them to. Imagery takes on a ferocity that really says more about the internal workings of the person talking to you than the film itself.
WC: I think having it in black and white simplifies things in a way that you can better focus your attention. There’s just more distraction in the frame with colour. I think modern filmmakers have in some ways brought us back to black and white. You know, taking colour out of the prints. The Matrix did that. Modern films tend to have a grey/blue thing going on.
Would you say that Psycho is the first modern horror movie? HG: Yes, you could say that because in the day that we shot Psycho there were
no horror films like there are today. There were Dracula and Frankenstein but no one knew them as people. But they did know the Janet Leigh character, they knew the screwed-up kind of person that Tony Perkins played.
RM22 Why did Hitchcock want the film to be in black and white? How would it
SR:Psycho is the first modern horror movie because it morphed so many things into one movie. It was a mash-up of the detective movie, the Old Dark House thriller, Jekyll and Hyde – all of that mashed up in such a pow- erful way that it felt brand new.
subversive movie? HG: I think he just loved to scare people. He used to tell me over and over that people love to be frightened. As soon as you are old enough to understand, what’s the first thing adults tell us about? The wicked witch, the big bad wolf. ... They’re trying to scare you. He felt that, subconsciously, when people go to the movies they are looking to be scared. So I don’t think he was necessarily trying to be subversive but I think he was always pushing the envelope to get [more] terror on the screen.
SR: I think Hitchcock really wanted to push the envelope, but always felt trapped by his reputation. He used to say, “If I made Cinderella, the audience would be waiting to find her body in the golden coach.” I think with Psycho he was thinking, “What if I gave them what they wanted but I really messed with their minds?” He really wanted to push language and imply an incestuous relationship between Norman and his mother. Even that throwaway line, “My mother and I were more than happy.” Well, how much more do you need? In 1959 this stuff was just taboo. You didn’t show a toilet onscreen and you cer- tainly didn’t flush it. Hitchcock was doing that and saying, “You think you know who I am, you think you know where this story is going, you think you know how far I am going to take you, but you have no idea.”
How did Psychoaffect film censorship? HG: It did give censors a new outlook on things in terms of what you can get
away with. I mean, in the shower scene, for instance, you know there is a nude body behind that shower curtain but you never really see the nude body. You see the knife and the body but you never see a person really getting killed onscreen. It pulls away. He never showed the knife penetrating the body, yet Cont’d on p.24
Psycho has a reputation as a very subversive film, especially in its presentation of sex and violence. Do you think Hitchcock set out to make an intentionally
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