Psycho (1960 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Psycho, the 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, opens on a specific Friday: December the Eleventh, in Phoenix, Arizona. A real estate secretary named Marion Crane has just stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer and is driving toward a future she will never reach. Within the first act of the film, Marion is dead. The biggest box-office name in the picture is gone before the story is half over, and the audience is left with a shy, bird-obsessed motel proprietor named Norman Bates and the unshakeable feeling that nothing in cinema will ever be quite the same again.

  The film earned fifty million dollars at the box office worldwide from a budget of under a million dollars. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Hitchcock. It prompted the British critic C. A. Lejeune to resign permanently from her post at The Observer in protest. It became the most commercially successful film of Hitchcock's entire career. And in 1992, the Library of Congress declared it culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant, selecting it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

  How did a low-budget black-and-white film made by a television crew change American cinema forever? The answer begins with a novel, a real-estate deal, and a director who was willing to bet his own money.

• 2. A Deal Made on Stubbornness

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  Hitchcock acquired the rights to Robert Bloch's 1959 novel for nine thousand five hundred dollars. Bloch's book was itself loosely inspired by the case of Ed Gein, a convicted Wisconsin murderer and grave robber whose deceased, domineering mother and isolated rural existence shadowed the fictional Norman Bates.

  Paramount Pictures, which had a contract guaranteeing another Hitchcock film, refused to finance the project. The studio called the source material "too repulsive" and "impossible for films," and studio readers had already rejected the novel's premise before Hitchcock even made his pitch. Paramount executives also claimed their soundstages were fully booked.

  Hitchcock's response was characteristic. He offered to finance the film himself through his own Shamley Productions company, use the crew from his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, shoot in black and white, and keep the budget under a million dollars. In place of his usual fee of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he negotiated a sixty percent stake in the film negative. Paramount ultimately agreed to distribute the picture under these terms, and filming began on the 11th of November, 1959, at Revue Studios, shooting mostly with fifty-millimeter lenses on thirty-five-millimeter cameras.

  To protect the novel's surprises, Hitchcock reportedly ordered his assistant Peggy Robertson to buy up all available copies of the book. Robertson had been the one to bring the novel to his attention in the first place, having read a positive review by Anthony Boucher in his "Criminals at Large" column in The New York Times.

• 3. The Script and Its Secrets

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  James P. Cavanagh wrote the first draft of the screenplay, but Hitchcock found it pedestrian, comparing it to a television short horror story. He then agreed to meet Joseph Stefano, who had worked on only one film before. Despite Stefano's inexperience, the meeting went well and he was hired.

  Stefano found the character of Norman Bates in the novel unsympathetic. In Bloch's book, Norman is middle-aged, overweight, and more overtly unstable. Hitchcock's suggestion to cast Anthony Perkins changed Stefano's perspective entirely. Perkins was agreed to at a fee of forty thousand dollars. Stefano also eliminated Bates's alcoholism and his interest in spiritualism, the occult, and pornography.

  One of the script's most consequential decisions was structural. Writer Joseph W. Smith later observed that Marion's story occupies only two of the novel's seventeen chapters, but Hitchcock and Stefano expanded it to nearly half the film's running time. This gave the audience time to invest in Marion before her death, making the killing far more disorienting.

  Smaller changes had outsized effects. The female protagonist's first name was changed from Mary to Marion because a real Mary Crane lived in Phoenix. The location of the private investigator Arbogast's death was moved from the foyer to the stairwell, which helped conceal the truth about Norman's mother without signaling that something was being hidden. And a detail that shocked 1960 audiences almost as much as the shower itself: Marion flushes a toilet on screen, with the torn-up note paper fully visible. No flushing toilet had appeared in mainstream American film and television up to that point.

• 4. Shooting on the Edge

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  Filming wrapped on the 1st of February, 1960, after a tight production that stayed disciplined on schedule. Hitchcock assembled his crew largely from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: cinematographer John L. Russell, art directors Robert Clatworthy and Joseph Hurley, set decorator George Milo, and assistant director Hilton A. Green. The crew's total cost came to sixty-two thousand dollars.

  Hitchcock hired regular collaborators Bernard Herrmann to compose the score, George Tomasini as editor, and Saul Bass for title design and storyboarding of the shower scene. The Bates house was modeled on Edward Hopper's painting House by the Railroad, a depiction of the Second Empire Victorian home at 18 Conger Avenue in Haverstraw, New York. The original Bates Motel and house sets were constructed on the same stage as Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera from 1925, and both still stand at the Universal Studios backlot today.

  Janet Leigh was cast for a quarter of her usual fee, agreeing to twenty-five thousand dollars. She had only read the novel and made no inquiry about her salary. Lead actors Leigh and Perkins were given freedom to interpret their roles and improvise, provided they did not move the camera. One of Perkins' improvisations was Norman's habit of eating candy corn. Throughout filming, Hitchcock hid various versions of a "Mother corpse" prop in Leigh's dressing room closet as a running joke.

  The shower scene, shot between the 17th and the 23rd of December, 1959, required exhausting retakes. The final shot, an extreme close-up on Marion's eye that zooms in and out, proved difficult for Leigh because the water splashed in her eyes made her want to blink, while the cameraman had to manually focus while moving the camera simultaneously. Leigh had twice postponed shooting the scene: once because of a cold, once because of her menstrual period.

• 5. Herrmann's Strings

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  Bernard Herrmann had refused to accept a reduced fee for the film's lower budget. Hitchcock insisted anyway, and the resulting score became what Christopher Palmer, writing in The Composer in Hollywood in 1990, called "perhaps Herrmann's most spectacular Hitchcock achievement."

  Hitchcock had asked for a jazz score. Herrmann ignored the request and wrote instead for a string orchestra alone, reasoning that the single-tone color of an all-string soundtrack mirrored the black-and-white cinematography of the film. Hitchcock later acknowledged that thirty-three percent of Psycho's effect was due to Herrmann's music and that the film "depended heavily on Herrmann's music for its tension and sense of pervading doom."

  The strings play con sordini, meaning muted, for all the music except the shower scene, producing a darker and more intense sound. Film composer Fred Steiner, in a published analysis of the score, noted that string instruments gave Herrmann access to a wider range of tone, dynamics, and instrumental special effects than any other single instrumental group could provide. The main title music is a tense, hurtling piece that returns three times across the soundtrack, planting a sense of impending violence even during the calm first fifteen to twenty minutes.

  In 1968, Herrmann reworked the score into a concert piece called Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra, which he recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra the following year. Most of that suite went missing afterward. In 1999, conductor John Mauceri reconstructed the work with help from Herrmann's widow and edited it for publication, producing a revised edition in 2013 that restored Herrmann's original string bowings.

• 6. The Controversy That Made It

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  On the 16th of June, 1960, Psycho opened at the DeMille Theatre and the Baronet Theatre in New York City. Hitchcock forbade Leigh and Perkins from giving television, radio, or print interviews, fearing they might reveal plot details. Even critics were not given private screenings; they had to queue with the general public, which several British reviewers cited as a reason for their hostility.

  In its opening week, the film grossed forty-six thousand five hundred dollars at the DeMille and a record nineteen thousand five hundred dollars at the Baronet. It went on to become the second highest-grossing film of 1960, behind Spartacus. Hitchcock personally earned in excess of fifteen million dollars from the picture.

  Initial reviews were sharply divided. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it an "obviously low-budget job" and contested its psychological points, but revised his opinion within months and included the film in his Top Ten list of 1960. C. A. Lejeune of The Observer walked out before the film ended and resigned her post as film critic. Meanwhile, the Catholic Legion of Decency gave the film a B rating, meaning "morally objectionable in part."

  Censors around the world cut different sections. Ireland's censor Gerry O'Hara banned the film outright in 1960, then the following year requested an additional seven cuts from an already edited version, including all repeated stabbings, with a note reading "One stab is surely enough." Singapore removed the murder of Arbogast and the shot of Norman's mother's corpse while leaving the shower scene untouched. The British Board of Film Classification required cuts to stabbing sounds and visible nude shots and did not accept the uncut version until 1986. CBS purchased television rights for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars but twice postponed its planned broadcast before the film reached general television syndication in 1970.

• 7. What It Left Behind

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  Psycho is considered by many scholars to be one of the earliest examples of the slasher film genre, though some historians point to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, released a few months earlier in 1960, as sharing similar themes of voyeurism and sexualized violence. Because Peeping Tom received a critical drubbing at the time and had a short run at the box office, Psycho was the more widely seen and imitated film.

  In the American Film Institute's rankings, the film holds the top position on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills list and ranks Norman Bates second on its list of greatest villains. The line "A boy's best friend is his mother" appears at number 56 on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes. Bernard Herrmann's score ranks fourth on AFI's list of greatest film scores. In the British Film Institute's 2022 Sight and Sound poll, the film ranked 31st among critics and 46th among directors. In 2022, Variety named Psycho the greatest movie of all time.

  The film's cultural reach extended well beyond film rankings. The 1978 horror film Halloween cast Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh's daughter, in its lead role and gave a character the name Sam Loomis. Bernard Herrmann's main title theme was sampled by rapper Busta Rhymes on his 1998 song "Gimme Some More." And until her death in 2004, Janet Leigh received strange and sometimes threatening letters, calls, and tapes directed at her character Marion Crane. One letter was so alarming that she passed it to the FBI, and two agents subsequently visited her.

  After Hitchcock's death in 1980, Universal Pictures produced three sequels, a remake, a made-for-television spin-off, and a television series. In 1992, the Library of Congress deemed the film culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 97% approval rating based on 118 reviews. The site's critical consensus: "Because Psycho was filmed with tact, grace, and art, Hitchcock didn't just create modern horror, he validated it."