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Clio: WCSU History Journal
Through a Lens Darkly: Horror Cinema as Historical Artifact
and an Examination of Hitchcock’s Psycho
Vincent Pisano
Horror Cinema as Historical Artifact
The story of the motion picture was from its beginning a tale of horror.
While the earliest films have generally been accredited to the efforts of
Thomas Edison in the United States and the Lumiere brothers in France, a
little-known pioneer had previously made a motion picture in Leeds, England
in October of 1888, but his story would be one of tragedy and mystery. Louis
Le Prince invented a camera and recorded his family including his son,
Adolphe, his in-laws Joseph and Sarah Whitley, and family-friend Annie
Hartley dancing in a garden behind the Whitley’s home. The film runs only
about two seconds. Within ten days of the filming, 72-year-old Sarah Whitley
was dead.
In 1890, Le Prince prepared an exhibition of his work in New York but
first returned to France to take care of family business. There he boarded a
train, waved good-bye to his brother, and was never seen again. Many
theories tried to account for his mysterious disappearance, including one
which accused Edison of an assassination plot, but Le Prince was likely the
victim of robbery and murder, an unfortunately common fate among lone
travelers at the time. In 2003 a photo was uncovered of an unnamed
drowning victim in the Paris police archives, dated the year of his vanishing. It
strongly resembles Le Prince. With Le Prince unable to unveil his creation to
the world, his son Adolphe fought against Edison through court proceedings
to gain his father recognition as the inventor of the motion-picture camera, to
no avail. Another horrible ending: two years after testifying against Edison, in
1902, Adolphe was shot dead while duck hunting on Fire Island, New York.1
Ian Young, “Louis Le Prince, Who Shot the World's First Film in Leeds,” BBC News, June
23, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-33198686; "BBC Education –
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Horror and cinema have always been inextricably linked. For instance,
the Edison produced The Execution of Mary Stuart, an eighteen-second film
from 1895, shows the beheading of the titular Mary, and is the first film to not
only employ trained actors but also to use editing effects (a jump-cut to
replace the actor playing Mary with a dummy at the moment of decapitation).
Viewers’ tastes for the grizzly and macabre were already whetted when the
nickelodeons began rolling. Around the same time in France, Georges Méliès
was also discovering the jump-cut, and put it to work in 1896 to direct what
historians consider the first horror film, Le Manoir du diable or The Devil’s
Castle (released in the United States as The Infernal Palace). In this work,
Méliès incorporated a plethora of gothic imagery, from a skeleton and ghosts
and bats to Mephistopheles himself. The fantastical works of Méliès reveal,
from their earliest incarnations, why the genre of horror and the art of motion
pictures are so perfectly suited. As Mark Gatiss has eloquently mused, “The
cinema was made for horror movies. No other kind of film offers that same
mysterious anticipation as you head into a dark auditorium. No other makes
such powerful use of sound and image. The cinema is where we come to share
a collective dream. And horror films are the most dream-like of all, perhaps
because they engage with our nightmares.”2 These collective nightmares contemporary anxieties, cultural traumas - are the subject of this writing.
Historians have long examined film as artifact, using the moving image
to glean insights into a variety of realms. They have looked at film’s
representation of history, at its use as evidence of historical fact, and at the
history of the film industry and the art form itself.3 The horror genre offers a
prime opportunity to study the fourth dominant reason for the historical
study of film, as it reflects the social and cultural history of its time. Horror in
particular exploits the fears and societal wounds which mainstream culture all
too often dismisses or ignores. An examination of horror films exposes the
historical traumas from which a culture is recuperating, and may even serve
Local Heroes Le Prince Biography," BBC Education, November 28, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/19991128020048/http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/local_hero
es/biogs/biogleprince.shtml
2 Mark Gatiss, A History of Horror, directed by John Das (2010; London: BBC).
3 For more on this, see John E. O’Connor, Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film
and Television (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1990).
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to help heal those exposed wounds. Linnie Blake has stated that nations tend
to deny trauma’s role in national identity or that they bind up the wounds of
trauma too soon, while horror denies them this and exposes nerves that may
be raw or festering.4 She argues that a “critical engagement with a nation’s
horror cinema offers a significant means of not only grappling with the
traumatic past and in so doing measuring the effects of social, political and
cultural transformation of the nation on its citizens, but of exposing layers of
obfuscation, denial or revisionism with which those wounds are dressed in
service of dominant ideologies of national identity.”5 Horror also functions
beyond peeling back the bandage, for it can also administer a rehabilitation
(no matter how painful the process):
Horror cinema’s specific subgenres… have been shown not only
to allow for a mediated engagement with acts so disgusting or
violent that their real-life realization would be socially and
psychologically unacceptable, but for a re-creation, re-visitation
and re-conceptualization of traumatic memories that lie buried
deep within the national psyche… In this, the power of horror
may be to effect a certain productive re-engagement with the
traumas of national history, their cultural legacy and the
possibility of being (and narrativizing) otherwise.6
When real horrors are too hurtful, their artificial representation on the screen
can assist in cultural processing. It may be safer to engage them through the
security of cinema, where the traumas can manifest as monsters, maniacs, or
malformations and the like. There, at least, for ninety or so minutes, they can
be confronted and their power as trauma diminished. The historian may
analyze the horror film to discern the unresolved cultural wounds that the
filmmakers are exhuming to reveal the effects of recent events upon society
and the ways in which they have chosen to deal with or to ignore the injuries.
Horror films have engaged with historical trauma since the silent era. A
prime example is 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a masterpiece of
German Expressionism which emerged just after the cataclysmic violence of
Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National
Identity (Manchester University Press, 2008), 6.
5 Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 23.
6 Ibid., 187.
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the Great War. The film depicts the titular Dr. Caligari sending out his
sideshow somnambulist to murder in the night. In a twist, the film is actually
the delusion of a madman, and the oddly angled artificial sets help to visualize
that insanity to the audience. The film’s writers, Hans Janowitz and Carl
Mayer, both veterans of the war, insisted that their script was a clear
injunction against the atrocities and betrayal that they had experienced. As
Janowitz would write: “It was years after the completion of the screenplay
that I realized our subconscious intention… The corresponding connection
between Doctor Caligari, and the great authoritative power of the Government
that we hated, and which had subdued us into an oath, forcing conscription
on those in opposition to its official war aims, compelling us to murder and be
murdered.”7 The trauma of the war also appeared in American horror cinema
in the embodiment of Lon Chaney, star of The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
and many Tod Browning collaborations, whose depictions of deformed
characters and amputees evoked the war-scarred soldiers who returned from
the front lines to haunt the psyche of a nation. W. Scott Poole writes that
“Chaney had replicated, as film after film in this era did, the disfigured faces
of veterans, exploded by shrapnel and Maxim guns. No one in the Western
world could have looked at the visage of Lon Chaney and not thought of”
those “who hid their injuries with marionette-like facsimiles just as the
Phantom did… No longer could the gore of battle be unseen.”8 The trauma of
the war can still be seen in the following decade’s horror films, such as 1934’s
The Black Cat, in which two veterans plot each other’s demise. At one point
Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Boris Karloff, intones to his rival, “You say your
soul was killed and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me?
Did we not both die here… fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the
war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living
dead?”
The historical analysis of horror films offers a second benefit - it
reveals the contemporary cultural fears and anxieties under which the motion
Quoted in Steve Haberman, Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Horror Film
(Baltimore: Midnight Marquee Press, 2003), 36.
8 W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror (Berkeley:
Counterpoint, 2018), 94
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picture was created. Often filmmakers, sometimes consciously but more times
not, tap into the zeitgeist of unease that permeates a culture. They exploit the
growing tensions and worries of their era to create their monsters and
madmen. Sometimes the films reflect these fears and anxieties overtly, or
sometimes function through allegory. There have been moments when these
films have resonated with audiences on powerful levels, even reshaping the
culture.9 They become the stuff not just of nightmares but of folklore, staining
the fabric of cultural and national identity. Whether the viewer who watches
the flickering images understands it or not, the horror film appears to
understand them. The abyss gazes back and looks with recognition.
One period in which horror cinema clearly channeled newfound
anxieties was in the alien and creature-features of the 1950s. The U.S. had
closed the Second World War, humanity’s bloodiest conflict, with two atomic
detonations on Japan, unleashing an unprecedented terror upon the modern
world. As the yield of these weapons increased, it seemed as though
civilization was creating the means to its own end. The Doomsday Clock,
introduced in 1947 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, illustrated how
close to “midnight” society was in terms of nuclear threat, meaning how close
the world stood to destroying itself through nuclear means. In 1953, at the
height of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union built its own arsenal, the clock
stood at two minutes before midnight, the closest it had come during the time
of tension between the aggressive superpowers.10 In the fifties, it was no
longer the figure in the dark that struck terror in people’s hearts, but the
blinding flash and what would follow. The nuclear bomb was a Pandora’s box
of deadly possibilities, and what it meant for humanity’s survival no one could
say with certainty. Enter Howard Hawkes’s production of The Thing From
Another World (1951), one of the first American horror films to be “no longer
removed to the Gothic world of the past but placed squarely into the
continuous world of the present.”11 A vegetable-based alien is a stand-in for
Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2005), 7.
10 As of this writing, in 2019, the Doomsday Clock has sat at two minutes before midnight for
the past three years.
11 Phillips, Projected Fears, 58.
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the unknown scientific horrors that await society, and the film reveals the
possibility that neither science nor the military may be enough to save us.
Instead, it is the ability of unconnected individuals to band together that wins
out. As Kendall R. Phillips writes, “Such good [personal] character could, the
film suggests, overcome any invading threat.”12 This trend moves through the
decade and sends a clear message: if Americans can stick together and not
destroy the country from within, it may yet survive the unknown future.
However, the anxieties persisted, seen more clearly in the giant creature films.
While Japan was working through its nuclear trauma in the embodiment of a
rampaging Godzilla in 1954, America was wrestling with its own atomic
demons, displaying senses of guilt and anxiety about the monster it had
created in the deserts of New Mexico in less than a decade prior. In Them!,
the first “giant bug” feature, huge ants, products of atomic test radiation, have
killed a number of citizens. The film closes with this telling exchange:
Robert Graham: Pat, if these monsters got started as a result of the first
atomic bomb in 1945, what about all the others that have been
exploded since then?
Dr. Patricia Medford: I don’t know.
Dr. Harold Medford: Nobody knows, Robert. When Man entered the
atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we’ll eventually
find in that new world, nobody can predict.
The preceding examples demonstrate the from every decade since the
birth of the motion picture, horror has held a lens (and sometimes a mirror)
to the dark dreams of its time. It is arguably the genre that reacts quickest to
the occurring zeitgeist. It operates in the psychologically charged modes of
allegory, expressionism, myth and folklore.13 Yet despite its deep connection
to human culture and society it has unfortunately been met with little respect.
Horror, it should be clearly understood, deals with the negative emotions:
fear, dread, disgust, paranoia, and terror. Its intention is not to coddle or
reassure, but to confront and challenge, to shock and speak uncomfortable
Ibid., 58.
Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 231.
12
13
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truths. The horror genre does not necessarily create new fears for audiences,
but rather exploits those which are already present. To be sure, most horror
films are of low quality and formulaic, following the tired rituals set forth by
superior predecessors, and these films generally aspire to heights no grander
than the lowest common denominator. If these films tap into the fears of the
time, it is likely accidental. Others seek to offer pure exploitation with little to
no pretense of artistry. For these reasons, and despite horror as having been
an integral part of cinema from its conception, the genre has been at most
times reviled, ignored, or condescended to by mainstream Hollywood and
film critics. The term “horror” as been seen as anathema to good taste and
respectful standing, leading even some filmmakers to avoid identifying their
disturbing and terrifying films with the genre. For instance, William Friedkin,
director of one of the genre's most revered films, The Exorcist (1973), for
decades refused to call the film horror. “It won ten Academy Award
nominations,” he once said. “How can that be horror?”14
Horror is undoubtedly the black sheep of cinema, yet therein lies its
power to the historian. It is film unfettered by the niceties of etiquette. It is
naked and raw, and it does not ask to be liked. The films are almost always of
relatively low budgets, meaning lower financial risk and fewer studio heads
interfering in the director’s vision. In these ways, it is more honest than other
genres, and offers the historian an avenue through which to view society in
the places where it tries to hide. Blake has written that “horror cinema can be
seen to fulfill a function that sets it apart from other more ‘respectable’
branches of the culture industry: providing a visceral and frequently nonlinguistic lexicon in which the experience of cultural dislocation may be
phrased; in which the dominant will to repudiate post-traumatic selfexamination” and contemporary anxieties “through culturally sanctioned
silence may be audibly challenged.”15 There are many possible reasons for
this, though a compelling one is offered by Carol J. Clover, who has
recognized that “horror is a marginal genre that appeals to marginal people…
Quoted in Jason Zinoman, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us
Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (New York: Penguin
Press, 2011), 236.
15 Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 189.
14
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who may not have the same investment in the status quo.”16 Regardless of the
reasons, one lesson remains clear: where mainstream culture seeks to
obfuscate, horror exposes. The historian who watches the skeletons on the
screen need not look far to find them within the closet.
By way of example, we will examine Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film,
Psycho. There are several reasons for choosing this film. Firstly, it has been
long revered and exhaustively studied. Indeed, analysis of this film helped to
develop American film studies. Its story is ingrained within American culture
as it “remains one of the most-seen black-and-white movies of all time,”17 and
the infamous shower scene the most studied sequence in film history.18
Psycho is also a cultural touchstone within the horror genre and within
American culture at large. During this period, films such as Michael Powell’s
Peeping Tom, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, and Mario Bava’s Black
Sunday also saw their release, and with them “there seems ample support for
the notion that this is the time when modern cinematic horror came into
being.”19 As Stephen Prince has written on the film’s role in creating modern
horror:
Things have changed in the modern period, with Psycho (1960)
being one of the threshold films that mark a separation between
eras. In that terrible killing in the shower, Hitchcock put horror in
the here and now and linked it with graphic violence. It has stayed
there since. As that film ended with the shot of Norman’s (and
Mother’s) grinning face, Hitchcock suggested that madness and
chaos endure because they are not explicable. This is a deeply
disturbing admission, which undermines our belief in rationality
and an existence whose terms can be controlled or, at least,
understood. In its savage assault on the audience and its belief
systems, Psycho furnished the signpost for modern horror and for
our contemporary sense of the world. Monsters today seem to be
everywhere, and they cannot be destroyed.20
Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 231.
David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and
Faber, 1993), 323.
18 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 41.
19 Stephen Jay Schneider, “Toward an Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror,” in The Horror Film,
ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 143.
20 Stephen Prince, “Introduction,” in The Horror Film, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2004), 4.
16
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Within the horror genre, Psycho’s impact was profound. It had wide reaching
influence, the most obvious being that the film “revolutionized the then small
sub genre of serial killer movies”21 and served as the “progenitor of slasher
films.”22 More profoundly, though, it proved that horror could be found next
door, and the monster could be us. It revealed a world in which there were no
easy answers, or answers at all. This uncertainty affected the horror films that
followed, for “post-1960s horror can be seen to actively discourage an easy
acceptance of cohesive, homogenizing narratives.”23 Culturally, Psycho
represented a transition in American culture. For Wheeler Winston Dixon,
Psycho was “the film that truly put an end to the 1950s.”24 The fifties, a decade
largely associated with rigid conformity, family values, economic security, and
censorship, was directly assaulted by a knife-wielding crossdresser. In truth,
the film could be viewed as both a culmination of that decade and a departure
from it. Nevertheless, it served as the hinge by which cultural change swung.
A historical reading can reveal why the film resonated with audiences and
what anxieties were exploited.
Hitchcock’s Psycho
Moviegoers walking out the theaters after seeing Psycho in 1960 didn’t
know what hit them. The film had defied expectations, challenged social
norms, and pushed the boundaries of decency. It had also tapped into their
creeping fears and validated them. They now believed that Alfred Hitchcock, a
household name, was dangerous. “I felt raped,” confessed filmmaker Peter
Bogdanovich, who saw the film in an initial press screening.25 Some critics
turned against Hitchcock; however, it wasn’t long before film theorists and
general audiences alike began to see something truly revolutionary within the
film.
Zinoman, Shock Value, 29.
Caroline J.S. Picart and David A. Frank, “Horror and the Holocaust: Genre Elements in
Schindler’s List and Psycho,” in The Horror Film, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2004), 212.
23 Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 14.
24 Wheeler Winston Dixon, A History of Horror (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2010), 75.
21
22
25
Quoted in Zinoman, Shock Value, 41.
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Hitchcock could have anticipated a backlash. Getting the film made
posed its own challenge. As Robert Bloch, author of the novel upon which the
movie was based, recalled, “Paramount absolutely didn’t want to make it.
They didn’t like the title, the story, or anything about it at all.”26 David
Thompson writes that “Paramount said they were frightened of Psycho. The
killing was brutal yet ordinary. The setting was commonplace. The script
called for a bathroom and a lavatory, as well as an extended slaughter!”27 In
the end, Paramount agreed, but there were catches, including providing a
meager budget of $800,000 (compared to North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s
previous release, which had been given $3.3 million), and barring the director
from using the studio lot for filming.28 Hitchcock figured out ways to proceed,
part of which involved using Universal’s facilities on the cheap.
Paramount had good reason to worry. Powell’s Peeping Tom opened in
March 1960, three months before Psycho. His tale of a young man who kills
women with a spike attached to his camera was met with savage criticism and
nearly ruined Powell’s career. However, Hitchcock preempted criticism in a
number of ways and helped to alleviate it before it erupted. While Psycho was
his first true horror film and a departure from what audiences had come to
expect from him in his already long and successful career as a maker of
thrillers and crime dramas, those who watched him on his popular television
show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, might have recognized similarities with the
tales of killers which appeared on that program. Hitchcock used this familiar
persona to introduce future moviegoers to the Bates house in a tongue-incheek trailer which starred himself touring the Bates Motel. In fact, he used
the same film crew from the show. Due to his deal with Paramount he owned
sixty-percent of the film and had final say on most things like the final cut and
the advertising. He was able to enforce unprecedented rules upon the public
such as, in order to preserve the shocking twist, not allowing audiences into
the theater once the film had started. This went against contemporary
practices of simply showing movies continuously and having ticket buyers
Quoted in Phillips, Projected Fears, 61.
David Thompson, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love
Murder (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 17.
28 Phillips, Projected Fears, 62.
26
27
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walk in at all times during the runtime. A clever businessman, Hitchcock had
no doubt taken note the success of B-movie directors like Roger Corman and
William Castle (who himself copied much from Hitchcock). For instance,
Castle’s fright gimmicks are reflected in Hitchcock’s daring of audiences to
enter the theater. Whereas Castle’s audience was mainly kids and teenagers,
however, Hitchcock’s sights were set their adult parents.
Audiences knew they were in for something shocking, but they were
still unprepared for how deeply Psycho would undermine their expectations
and push the boundaries of accepted decency, in ways both large and small.
An example of the latter is difficult for modern viewers to appreciate:
Hitchcock showed American moviegoers the first flushing toilet on screen. To
understand just how subversive this moment was, one should consider that
the pilot episode of Leave It to Beaver in 1957 was nearly cut because its
script called for a toilet - the censors compromised and only the tank was
shown. Just a few months before Psycho’s release television comedian Jack
Paar had a portion of his show removed by censors because a joke he told
referred to a “W.C.” (water closet), and he quit in protest. As Thompson has
mused, “It really is quite exhilarating to see what tender creatures we were in
1960.”29
“We all go a little mad sometimes”
Of course, audiences wouldn’t have had much time to think about a
toilet, for something far more shocking was occurring in the bathroom. The
killing of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in the shower affected viewers
on a number of levels. From the start of the film, she is shown to be the
central character, and audiences would have fully expected her presence
throughout the entirety of the film. But Hitchcock kills her, “removing our
most beloved character and the apparent star of the film in one frenzy of
violence - perhaps the most violent passage until then in American film.”30
Marion is attacked in her most vulnerable moment, as the water is washing
away her guilt just as she has decided to return the money she had stolen.
29
30
Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 56.
Ibid., 53.
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Norman Bates takes not only her life, but her movie. Hitchcock at turns places
the audience in the position of the voyeur, the killer, and the victim. For the
shower scene, he wanted the audience to feel the blade. He wrote notes in the
margins of the shooting instructions: “The slashing. An impression of a knife
slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film.”31 Death has come
not just for our heroine, but for theatergoers. Harvey Greenberg has noted
that “it is incomprehensible that Janet Leigh should simply cease to be. Never
before had a star of such magnitude, a female sex goddess, been so utterly
expunged in midstream. Thus Hitchcock drives home the incontrovertibility,
the awesome finality of death… With Leigh gone, the comfortable conventions
of the Hollywood suspense vehicle have been totally violated.”32 For
Thompson, “the real measure of the breakthrough that had occurred - in the
name of pure cinema - is in the bloodletting, sadism, and slaughter that are
now taken for granted. In terms of the cruelties we no longer notice, we are
another species.”33
What Hitchcock understood, the censors denied: America was ready
for violent entertainment. In fact, it had long been ready. For instance, during
World War II American soldiers became the primary consumers of the cheap,
portable, and escapist entertainment of comic books.34 After the war they
continued to read comics, gravitating especially to stories with mature themes
of criminal violence and supernatural horror, like those found in the EC
Comics titles Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. By 1954 such comics
were under attack, especially by the publication of Fredric Wertham's
Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed that such entertainment damaged
children's well beings and contributed to juvenile delinquency. To avoid
outside censorship, comic publishers created the Comics Code Authority
(CCA), which instituted a strict policy that, among other things, declared that
“scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture,
excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, gory and
Quoted in Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 52.
Quoted in Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, footnotes, 203.
33 Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 67.
34 For more on this, see Cord A. Scott, “Comics and Conflict: War and Patriotically Themed
Comics in American Cultural History From World War II Through the Iraq War” (Ph.D. diss.,
Loyola University Chicago, 2011).
31
32
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gruesome crime shall be eliminated.” In addition, “no comic magazine shall
use the word horror or terror in its title,” and “all scenes of horror, excessive
bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall
not be permitted.”35 While this effectively ended violent horror in comics,
within a few years Americans could begin to see gore and bloodshed in the
movie theaters via the imports of Hammer Film Productions, whose The
Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) displayed blood
in its full-colored glory. These films, while graphic for their times, were set in
a distant past and were still seen as fantasy violence not intended to be taken
seriously by American adult audiences. Hitchcock, however, brought it right
to where Americans lived.
American adults in the fifties had real violence to worry about. Murder
seemed to be everywhere. The growth of local television news may have
increased the amount of stories reported of spree killings in rural America,
making the violence seem more omnipresent.36 The 1958 killings of the
teenage Charles Starkweather caused an uproar in middle America. Reports
about the quadruple homicide of the Clutter Family began appearing in The
New York Times in 1959, the same year that Bloch’s novel was published.
Bloch had based Norman Bates on the crimes of Ed Gein, also known as the
Plainfield Ghoul. In 1957 police in Wisconsin found a farmhouse of horrors.
After Gein’s mother died in 1945, he had boarded up parts of the house to
leave them preserved as she had them, but the rest of the house contained
human remains used as decorations, upholstery, and clothing. In addition to
repeated grave-robbings, Gein had murdered two women: one of the bodies
was found in a shed - headless, hanging upside down and sliced open as one
would dress a deer.37 Hitchcock sensed the American fear of, and fascination
with, these real-life murders, and pushed against the censors to depict his
extended, violent killing of Marion Crane. He may have been inspired by the
lucrative B-movie trash of Roger Corman, whose horror and exploitation films
targeted and starred young people, for “Corman had seen that rock and roll
Scott, “Comics and Conflict,” 275.
Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 15.
37 Ed Gein would inspire the creation of other horror icons, notably the killers in The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
35
36
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signaled a teenage audience, ready for a new level of violence, splashy, gaudy,
and lip smacking.”38 Whatever the indicator, time would quickly prove his
instincts correct. In 1963 low-budget filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis
released Blood Feast, which in the first two minutes gave audiences that
which was denied to them in Psycho: female nudity, graphic gore, and bright
red blood. Lewis had felt that the film had “cheated.” He complained that
“Hitchcock showed the results but not the action.”39 Lewis’s film was poorly
written and terribly acted, but it gave audiences a full helping of the violence
that they had only tasted in Psycho, and it would go on to earn enormous
profits. That same year Mario Bava in Italy released, Blood and Black Lace,
an early example of a giallo, a horror subgenre which normally features a
crime plot and showcases beautiful women being stalked and killed - themes
brought to light in Psycho. It is therefore noteworthy that, as Jason Zinoman
states, “With the possible exception of Hitchcock, no director working in the
sixties had more influence over the horror genre than Bava.”40 American
directors increasingly chafed at censors, inserting more sex and graphic
violence so that by 1966 only 59% of movies released in the US carried the
Production Code seal.41
And then there’s the shower: a place of privacy where one is supposed
to be hidden. Then, suddenly, the curtain is pulled back and a knife descends.
This violation of assumed security cannot be understated. For Philip J. Nickel,
“horror’s bite is explained as a sudden tearing-away of the intellectual trust
that stands behind our actions. Specifically, it is a malicious ripping away of
this intellectual trust, exposing our vulnerabilities in relying on the world and
on other people.”42 There has been much commentary regarding the scene of
Marion washing as a baptism of sorts - a cleansing of her sins as she commits
to making things right again. David J. Skal’s analysis is typical and insightfully
contextual:
Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 17.
Quoted in Zinoman, Shock Value, 33.
40 Zinoman, Shock Value, 35.
41 Ibid., 105.
42 Philip J. Nickel, “Horror and the Idea of Everyday Life: On Skeptical Threats in Psycho and
The Birds,” in The Philosophy of Horror, ed. Thomas Fahy (Lexington, KY: The University
Press of Kentucky, 2010),
28.
38
39
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Marion Crane…who has impulsively stolen $40,000 and run
away, decides to return the money and return to society. The
shower is a transitional symbol of her purification, of her
reinitiation into the social group. Her murder… became a
powerful image of the collapse of basic social contracts and
human relatedness: like us, Marion Crane wants advancement,
security. She makes a mistake, but plays by the rules and seeks
forgiveness - acceptance, only to have her cleansing
transformation turned into bloody sacrifice. There is no God, it
seems - at least not a just one. The disturbing scene became one
of the most influential images in film history with good reason:
it undermined all expectations and formulas - just as the sixties
themselves were doing on almost every social, political, and
artistic level.43
In addition, some have seen the shower as evidence of evoking past traumas,
especially those involving the Nazi atrocities of World War II. Some
commentators have claimed, for instance, that “the aesthetic of Psycho’s
shower scene evokes images of the prototypical victim of the Holocaust gas
chamber” and that, in the interpretation of Kevin Gough-Yates, the “sequence
relates to the whole social guilt of mass murder and the propensity to pretend
it does not exist.”44 Robin Wood makes another connection:
Psycho is one of the key works of our age. Its themes are of
course not new… but the intensity and horror of their treatment
and the fact that they are grounded in sex belong to the age that
has witnessed on the one hand the discoveries of Freudian
psychology and on the other the concentration camps. I do not
think I am being callous in citing the camps in relation to a
work of popular entertainment… But one cannot contemplate
the camps without confronting two aspects of their horror: the
utter helplessness and innocence of the victims, and the fact
that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some
measure share, were their tormentors and butchers.45
Skal, The Monster Show, 378.
Picart, “Horror and the Holocaust,” 210. Caroline J. S. Picart and David A. Frank also argue
that Psycho’s shower scene had a direct influence on Spielberg’s shower scene in Schindler's
List (1993), which they believe should also be classified as a horror film.
45 Quoted in Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 146-147.
43
44
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The all too human capacity for evil marks Norman Bates as the iconic
monster of the era. He didn’t arrive from outer space or from the misty Gothic
past. He was a human killer whose murderous instincts could be understood
through ordinary psychology (at least the film’s version of the science).
Mankind’s most feared monster is, in the end, itself. We are our own worst
enemy. Even the Norman’s name is suggestive. Noël Carroll believes Norman
stands for Nor-man, meaning that he is “neither man nor woman but both.
He is son and mother. He is of the living and the dead. He is both the victim
and the victimizer. He is two persons in one. He is abnormal, that is, because
he is interstitial.”46 This duality harkens back to Wood’s assessment of abuser
and abused. However, perhaps more useful is Nickel’s assessment where he
suggests that Norman stands for normal: “Norman represents an everyday
person whom we find, in the journey of the film, to have an abnormally dark
side. The paranoid scenario in the film is about the dark side of seeming
everymen.”47 Norman’s crimes are monstrous, yes, but just like the seemingly
unassuming Ed Gein, perhaps what is most disturbing about him is just how
damned ordinary he otherwise is. This helps to understand the effectiveness
of the film, for “if there was a crucial edge in the casting, it was that both
Perkins and Leigh were appealing, and like people from next door.”48 Both
victim and perpetrator are us. Psycho, therefore, “enables us to confront the
fact that this Monstrous Other, Norman Bates, lurks within each of us, with
our voyeuristic and violent impulses.”49
Mental illness and psychiatry were subjects of great interest in postwar
America, especially as soldiers returned home from an environment of
extreme stress and trauma. There was also, more significantly with regard to
Psycho, a movement towards deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Nazi
euthanasia practices gave pause to Americans and led them to examine their
own mistreatment or neglect of mental patients. Photo essays in Life
magazine, such as “Bedlam 1946,” and the 1948 film The Snake Pit, based on
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge,
1990), 39.
47 Nickel, “Horror and the Idea of Everyday Life,” 25.
48 Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 19.
49 Picart, “Horror and the Holocaust,” 217.
46
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the semi-autobiographical novel by Mary Jane Ward, depicted the horrid
conditions of asylums. The film, in particular, led to reforms in the American
institutional system.50 Norman references the negative view towards
institutionalization when Marion innocently suggests he have his mother
committed, and responds defensively, “What do you know about caring? Have
you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing, and the tears,
and the cruel eyes studying you? My mother there?” Mental illness suddenly
seemed far more prevalent than before, or at least more readily acknowledged
within public discourse. By 1963 American psychiatrist Karl Menninger could
declare, ″Gone forever is the notion that the mentally ill person is an
exception. It is now accepted that most people have some degree of mental
illness at some time, and many of them have a degree of mental illness most
of the time.”51 As Norman puts it more simply to Marion, “We all go a little
mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”
“You make respectability sound disrespectful”
If Psycho had only played upon the fears of human violence and
insanity, it would have been enough. Yet Bloch’s story and Hitchcock’s
adaptation play into other more subtle contemporary anxieties. The fifties was
a decade marked by economic prosperity and conspicuous consumerism.
One’s status could be easily read by the suburban home and appliances on
display. However, the pressures of keeping up with this capitalist race proved
to be stressful and burdensome for many. Psycho explores economic anxieties
through its two main characters, even from the opening scene of Marion and
her boyfriend, Sam. The camera pans through their window into a drab rented
room just after they’ve had sex. The conversation quickly turns to money
problems and respectability, which Marion desires. Sam says that he is “all
for” respectability, “but it requires patience, temperance, with a lot of
sweating out. Otherwise though, it's just hard work.” He is currently in
financial straits due to alimony payments and is living in a room behind a
Cynthia Erb. ""Have You Ever Seen the Inside of One of Those Places?": Psycho, Foucault,
and the Postwar Context of Madness," Cinema Journal 45, no. 4 (2006): 45-63.
51 “Menninger’s Thoughts on Mental Illness, Freud, War,” Associated Press, July 18, 1990,
https://www.apnews.com/9b1f6df687fedbe000e64d15bdd35ce1
50
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hardware store, and this is keeping the two from marrying and fulfilling the
societal expectations that their intimacy demands. Thompson makes the point
clearly:
And here we need to stress one quite remarkable thing: an
American film has begun (in the famously developing city of
Phoenix - a miracle of new urban life) in which the hopes and
desires of two mature people are overshadowed by lack of
money and social freedom. Look at a hundred other films from
the ‘50s and you will not find the same cramped air. As a rule,
the rooms are larger and brighter than they would be in reality,
waiting to be filled by the hopes and energies of the era. Most
films of the ‘50s are secret ads for the American way of life.
Psycho is a warning about its lies and limits.52
It is the desire for social conformity - to become a wife with a home - and the
respect which accompanies it that motivates Marion to steal the money. When
she comes across Norman, she finds that economic anxieties exist in the
countryside as well as within the city. The Bates Motel has fallen on hard
times as the highway has moved customers away. Norman and Marion talk of
being in traps. When Norman says he doesn’t mind it anymore, Marion says
he should. He responds, “Oh, I do - but I say I don’t.” The two characters serve
as stand-ins for Americans who felt trapped by circumstances and
expectations, though few at the time were willing to admit their feelings.
The modern world also bred new anxieties. Cities were crowded but
impersonal. New highways not only moved people away from traditional
centers but also isolated them within their own cars, away from the elbowrubbing of public transit. The sought after suburban home was separated
from its neighbors, and frequently the picket fence served as divider both
functionally and symbolically. This had negative effects, for “unlike either the
urban neighborhood or the rural farm, the suburban home was founded on its
separation from both the world of work and from the world of others… Having
achieved domestic seclusion, however, the suburbanite was seen as both
isolated and confined.”53 Bloch drew on the disquieting suspicion that such
52
53
Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 24.
Phillips, Projected Fears, 66.
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settings cultivate, for he “places his novel within the context of the modern
world, a world composed of isolated strangers who know little of one another,
a world in which people are unpredictable and hence potential threats.”54
These fears are essential to the film, and it is for this reason that “Psycho is
the keystone of modern horror, articulating the dread of ordinary people
feeling trapped and immobilized in a world otherwise full of rapid change.”55
It reveals that we can never truly know a person, that each person we come
across can have a hidden existence - potentially vile - that they keep behind
closed doors. For instance, Marion had worked for her employer for seventeen
years and had earned his confidence, thus he never believed she would have
taken the money he had entrusted to her. Additionally, when the sheriff is
approached regarding Norman as a subject of suspicion, he thinks he knows
the young man well enough that he can call him on the phone and take him at
his word. Psycho, in essence, reveals that “the idea of community is hollow.”56
The seclusion promised by suburbia also came with its own anxieties, as
shown through Norman’s story. As Phillips writes, “The Bates family and their
creepy Gothic home suggest the reality lying behind the optimistic veneer of
suburbia. The family, left in isolation, becomes twisted and distorted.”57 Ed
Gein served as an extreme example. Perhaps the often dreamed of “house in
the country” isn’t so appealing a prospect after all.
It is little wonder, then, that the theme of surveillance would play such
a large role in a film which exploits fears of The Other in our fellow man,
especially in the context of Cold War anxieties. This spying is shown to deal
“will almost all aspects of society.”58 The act of watching and being watched
took on a new dimension in American homes in the fifties as more households
began gathering around television sets. Suburbia, as noted above, was a new
concept, and the rules and expectations were therefore unclear. Television
shows set in that environment, in essence, allowed suburbanites to watch
idealized depictions of themselves. Phillips drives the point home: “Television
Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (New York: Manchester
University Press, 1996), 257
55 Skal, The Monster Show, 378.
56 Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 155.
57 Phillips, Projected Fears, 74.
58 Jancovich, Rational Fears, 297.
54
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functioned as a kind of mirror - albeit an unrealistically positive and
optimistic mirror - into which suburban Americans could spend hours gazing.
The narcissism of television was also, of course, voyeuristic. Television
allowed families to spy through the window of other people’s lives, seeing
their dramas and tragedies, their foibles and follies.”59 Psycho is replete with
examples of spying and voyeurism. Marion is a character seemingly under
continual surveillance - from city life which can view her at her desk through
the large windows where she works, to the lustful gaze of the wealthy Tom
Cassidy, to the patrolman in mirrored sunglasses who trails her, to finally
Norman spying on her through a peephole as she undresses. Thompson takes
it further, suggesting that “even as the picture ended - with the whole thing
made clear; too clear, perhaps - there was another face gazing back at us,
grinning or enduring. A face that knew we were watching, with a mind
sensitive or cunning enough to know that maybe the whole thing had been
about watching.”60
The trend toward suburbanization went hand-in-hand with the
primacy of the idealized vision of the nuclear family. Through this search for
security, however, new fears were discovered. Eric Avila writes that:
Suburbanization… inspired a cultural emphasis on the stability
and coherence of the nuclear family. The primacy of the
detached, single-family dwelling provided a space in which
postwar Americans could cherish their idealization of the
nuclear family… Yet the concerted attempt to preserve the
primacy of the nuclear family faced many obstacles.
Communists, homosexuals, and racial minorities, for example,
were viewed as dangers not so much to the individual or to the
society at large, but rather to the stability and coherence of the
American family.61
For Psycho, however, the threat to the American family comes not from
without, but from within. Norman, after all, committed matricide after finding
his mother in bed with her lover. He could certainly be seen as an example of
Phillips, Projected Fears, 68.
Quoted in Picart, “Horror and the Holocaust,” 217.
61 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 100.
59
60
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the juvenile delinquency which so spooked fifties’ popular culture: a young
man unhinged - Ed Gein in the boyish body of Charles Stockweather, who had
murdered his girlfriend’s parents and strangled her two-year-old sister.
Family values, indeed.
“A boy’s best friend is his mother”
However, Bloch and Hitchcock turn to another contemporary anxiety
to explain Norman’s insanity: that of the persona which occupies and
ultimately dominates his psyche - Mother. While many look back at the fifties
as an era which revered the mother figure and the mother’s role in raising
children, the cult of domesticity is really a product of an earlier era. Looking
upon mothers as the ideal cultivator of patriot sons had long since passed,
replaced within the war years by malicious suspicion and condemnation.
Instead, psychologists of the 1950s “warned against the ‘Momism’ that would
result from sexually frustrated mothers who would turn their sons into
passive weaklings, ‘sissies,’ potential homosexuals, ‘perverts,’ or easy prey for
the communists.”62 Stephanie Coontz, writing in The New York Times,
explains further:
Stay-at-home mothers were often portrayed as an even bigger
menace to society than career women. In 1942, in his best-selling
“Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to
describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their
sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and
demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.
Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America
on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher
argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army
as unfit during World War II were the product of overprotective
mothers...
According to the 1947 best seller “Modern Woman: The Lost
Sex,” two-thirds of Americans were neurotic, most of them made so by
their mothers.
Typical of the invective against homemakers in the 1950s and
1960s was a 1957 best seller, “The Crack in the Picture
Window,” which described suburban America as a “matriarchal
society,” with the average husband “a woman-bossed,
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York:
Basic Books, 1999), 102.
62
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inadequate, money-terrified neuter” and the average wife a
“nagging slob.” Anti-mom rhetoric was so pervasive that even
Friedan recycled some of this ideology in “The Feminine
Mystique” — including the repellent and now-discredited
notion that overly devoted mothers turned their sons into
homosexuals.63
Norman appears quintessentially symptomatic of many of these fears. It
should be recognized, of course, that the audience never gets to meet his real
mother, only the version of her which Norman has created in his mind.
Therefore, the film should be viewed as an exploitation of Momism, and not
as an actual condemnation of mothers.64 Nevertheless, his version of Mother,
according to Dr. Richmond after he has examined Norman, “was a clinging,
demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one
else in the world.” Before the viewer is shown the twist, Norman comes off as
a shy, sensitive, reclusive, slightly effeminate young man, who declares that “a
boy's best friend is his mother.” He seems entirely unthreatening to Marion
(let alone to communists). At a time in which mothers were being
characterized as dangerous to young men who must reject their influence to
achieve normal hetersexual independence, Norman proves unable to do so.
His failure is so complete, in fact, that he becomes Mother.
Significantly, Mother is the only actual mother in the film. Marion and
her sister, despite being in their thirties, are childless. Marion mentions that
her mother’s picture is on the mantle, suggesting that she has passed on. The
sheriff and his wife appear to also be without children - highly
uncharacteristic of the idea of family in the late 1950s.65 It is this and only this
version of motherhood that the film wants us to focus upon, and that version
is decidedly old fashioned, tapping into the changing mores of the time,
especially those involving sex. Elaine Tyler May writes that “during the
postwar years, sexual values as well as sexual behavior were in flux… these
years marked the widespread acceptance of ‘sexual liberalism,’ which included
tolerance for noncoital forms of premarital sex, some measure of ‘intimacy
Stephanie Coontz, “When We Hated Mom,” The New York Times, May 7, 2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08coontz.html
64 Jancovich, Rational Fears, 300.
65 Ibid., 296.
63
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with affection,’ a heightened expectation for erotic fulfillment in marriage,
and an explosion of sexual images in the media.”66 The latter can he seen in
Hitchcock’s advertising for Psycho, which overtly emphasized sexuality. There
is no sign of Norman (likely to protect the film’s twist), yet one sees Janet
Leigh in her underwear and John Gavin shirtless. If one did not read the
print, they might be excused for thinking these were still images from a
pornographic film. Truly, the story does not appear to find its fears in sexual
feelings, but rather in their repression. It reveals characters who, like Marion
and Sam, feel that they must bear the burden of shame and hide their coitus
in a rundown apartment, or like Norman, whose sexual attraction to Marion
drives Mother to killer her. Indeed, Mother is the personification of
traditional prudery, as when her voice carries from the Bates house as she
chastises Norman, “No! I tell you no! I won’t have you bringing strange young
girls in here for supper - by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion
of young men with cheap, erotic minds… I refuse to speak of disgusting
things, because they disgust me! Do you understand, boy?” Hitchcock gives us
architectural indicators to reinforce this, making Mother’s domain the old
Gilded Age mansion - a representation of old fashioned values and sentiment
- while Norman finds respite in his cramped office at the modern motel (his
room in the mansion is like a child’s room, once again recalling fears of
Momism). Visually, the vertical mansion on the hill dominates the horizontal
motel, just as Mother dominates Norman. Just as Hitchcock was pushing at
film sensors, so the film seems to be warning audiences against the moral
guardians among them.
“He was always bad”
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho assaulted audiences not only with a knife in
a shower, but with their own fears. It tapped into the anxieties surrounding
violence, financial stress, security, familial relationships, and changing sexual
attitudes. The film inspired future directors in the horror genre, both for what
it did and didn’t do. It showed that America was ready for on-screen violence,
that audiences desired acts more graphic and gruesome to satiate their
66
May, Homeward Bound, 102.
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morbid curiosities and to confront their own fears about death and violence.
Countless imitators followed, including Francis Ford Coppola’s first full
directorial effort, Dementia 13 (1963), and helped give birth to the slasher and
gialli subgenres. It also served to inspire other filmmakers to tackle fears of
rural America, such as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974),
which serves to represent “the inexhaustible rural slasher genre that has done
so much to make the American hinterland a gothic haunted house for
paranoids on the road.”67 Like Norman Bates, the character of Leatherface
was also based loosely upon Ed Gein. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)
makes direct reference to Psycho, naming Dr. Loomis after the character of
Sam Loomis and casting Janet Leigh’s daughter in the lead role. Yet these
directors were as much inspired by as frustrated by Hitchcock’s work. Many
believed that he diminished the film’s power by over-explaining Norman at
the end (which is also in the novel).68 Peter Bogdanovich, for instance, who
had felt “raped” upon seeing the film in 1960, purposefully did not give his
killer a motive in his 1968 horror film, Targets, in direct rebellion against the
esteemed director.69
Whatever its possible faults, Psycho and Hitchcock’s follow-up, The
Birds (1963), resonated with an American culture in transition in the 1960s.
Nickel states that “these films initiate a new era of the horror genre in
contemporary film, and each epitomizes different strands of that genre. The
films are landmark horror films in part because, unlike some of their
predecessors, they offer no moral reassurance that humans can dispel or
effectively fight against the threats they represent.”70 This futility
characterizes modern horror (or New Horror), notable for using familiar
settings and demonstrating that evil can exist in even the most civilized
minds. It showed, too, that evil can exist without explanation.71 The enemy
may not come from beyond, but from within. Hitchcock helped to take horror
to the next step by showing America a vision of itself through a lens darkly. A
Thompson, The Moment of Psycho, 126.
Zinoman, Shock Value, 31.
69 Ibid., 43.
70 Nickel, “Horror and the Idea of Everyday Life,” 19.
71 Zinoman, Shock Value, 208.
67
68
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historical analysis of the film reveals a culture struggling to reconcile
expectations with reality and losing faith in its own optimistic narrative. The
belief in community and cooperation that marked American horror films of
fifties crumbled into the disunity and defeat of sixties horror films such as The
Last Man on Earth (1964) and Night of the Living Dead (1968).72 America,
like Norman, was going through a crisis of identity, struggling between
traditional conservatism and liberal change. And like his victims, there were
bodies in the swamps.
An Italian production but based on the American novel I Am Legend (1954) and starring
American actor Vincent Price.
72
112