by Andrew Jupin
Continued from Chapter 1: Putting the Monster Away - The Foundations of Classic American Horror
When Psycho was released on June 16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock ushered in a new era for the American horror film. Based on the novel by Robert Bloch, Psycho tells the story of a young woman who steals a large sum of money from an employer to run off with her lover. What starts out as a very conventional, and none too horrific story, turns into something so ghastly, so shocking, audiences and critics were left terrified. A lot of what made this film so different from the horror films of the thirties, forties and fifties, was that this one hit very close to home on many levels. As Linda Williams writes, “the film represents the moment when horror moved from what is outside and far away to what is inside us all and very close to home.” Drastic changes in setting, themes and especially the monster of the film, are all things that flipped the horror genre right on its head. With these changes came a kind of relation. Audiences were brought closer to terror than ever before. Watching the film, it is easier for a spectator to relate to the subject matter simply because the film spends more time making them feel at home. They feel closer to surroundings, people and objects and it is this familiarity that allows people to perhaps, let their guard down just a bit. With the audience set in an incredibly vulnerable, yet comfortable mental state, the shock is infinitely greater when the time comes.
Structurally, Psycho is a very different kind of horror film. The alteration of the film’s structure was crucial to the change the film was taking horror. The slight turn away from Carroll’s Complex Discovery plot played a large part in Psycho’s influence over later horror films. The Complex Discovery plot outline is still somewhat noticeable, but with a few alterations to it. First of all, the Onset is very late in the film. It is almost an hour before anything terrifying even happens. The murder of Marion in the shower is the first true sign that there is anything horrific going on.
In place of the Discovery portion of the structure, there is instead a detective type story involving the search for Marion. As Arbogast, Lila and Sam start to trace Marion’s steps, they are not at all thinking that there is a psychopathic serial killer on the loose that may have murdered Marion. For most of the film Sam and Arbogast keep their cool, while Sam comforts the quick-to-jump Lila. While the investigation is still under way, the audience moves along ahead of the characters when Arbogast is murdered. The spectators have seen the monster strike again while the two other searchers are back at the hardware store waiting.
The film provides two points for Confirmation. The first is when the sheriff informs Lila and Sam that Mrs. Bates has been dead and buried for many years. This turn of events tips off the audience and the characters that something bizarre is going on up at the Bates house. The second part of the Confirmation (and the long-awaited unveiling of the true monster) does not occur until after the Confrontation. As Lila snoops around in the Bates’s fruit cellar, she stumbles across the corpse of Mrs. Bates. As she screams, Norman barges in, dressed as Mother, and tries to attack her, only to be foiled by Sam. Before the audience can even begin to start to piece together what has happened, the film jumps to the police station where a psychiatrist explains the whole end of the story to the characters and the audience; it is finally confirmed that it was in fact Norman that was the monster going the killing and not Mrs. Bates.
Throughout the entire film, Psycho stays away from looking like the Universal monster series’ structure. In the end, the monster is merely captured and sedated, not destroyed and put away. There is still the chance for Norman to break free (or as we find in Psycho II (1983), be released) and unleash his terror once again. But Psycho was not just revolutionary in its structural elements. Thematically, the film deals with many, many issues never before addressed in horror.
One of the first ways Psycho is able to deliver such a different horror experience is through its use of audience/character association. With regard to the type of people this film encounters, David Skal writes, “Psycho is a keystone of modern horror, articulating the dread of ordinary people feeling trapped and immobilized in a world otherwise full of rapid change.” As the film begins, we are immediately introduced to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). She is young, beautiful and blonde; she is everything one has come to expect from a female protagonist in an Alfred Hitchcock film. The film begins with her in a (perfectly safe) hotel room in Phoenix with her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin). We follow her also to her place of employment, a real estate brokerage, where she works a normal, nine-to-five job as a secretary. When we meet her boss, he entrusts her with $40,000 to take to a bank on her way home from work. So far we see nothing wrong with Marion. We understand her plight and when she steals the money and flees the city, we don’t completely condemn her. After all, we are still victims of the repressed society and as such, we know that stealing is indeed wrong. She’s a perfectly nice girl, just trying to marry the man she loves. If this money will get him out of debt and allow the two of them to wed, so be it. When she begins to be hounded by a curious, Arizona state trooper, we worry for her. We want to see her make her way to Sam and give him the money and live happily ever after. We are connected to this character. Being with her from the beginning, as spectators, we relate to her. Which is why, when she is brutally stabbed to death forty-eight minutes into the film, we are at a complete loss. The loss of a main character in the middle of the film was something audience members were certainly not used to. Especially since after her death, the only other person the audience can turn to is the unstable, nervous Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). In his book, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Robin Wood writes, “At the time, so engrossed we are in Marion, so secure in her potential salvation, that we can scarcely believe it is happening; when it is over, and she is dead, we are left shocked, with nothing to cling to, the apparent center of the film entirely dissolved.” Hitchcock explains this to us in one continuous shot right after Marion is murdered. Starting with Marion’s lifeless eyeball, Hitchcock slowly pulls away and the camera leaves the bathroom. Turning so slightly, Hitchcock tracks over to the table and we see the newspaper with the forty thousand dollars inside. After pausing on the money for just a moment, the camera tracks up and out the window and we see the dark, looming Bates mansion with two or three dim lights on. As the camera stops we can hear Norman shouting, “Mother! Oh, God, Mother! Blood! The…blood!” Immediately after the words are spoken we see Norman run out of the house and down the stairs. This shot is an attempt to make the transition a bit smoother for the audience. We see the victim, dead on the floor. Then we move to the reason she had died, the money. She has been killed because of her decision to take the money. Had she gone to the bank, she would have made the deposit, gone home and never encountered Norman or his murderous ‘mother’. Then we move out the window to our last saving grace, Norman himself. Wood again: “Norman is an intensely sympathetic character, sensitive, vulnerable, trapped by his devotion to his mother (a devotion, a self-sacrifice, which our society tends to regard as highly laudable.” He is the only other character the film has spent any time on; the audience was allowed a lengthy scene where they were given Norman’s background, a little about his hobbies and even a little family history. We know Norman and recognize him so unfortunately we’re stuck with him as well. Hitchcock leaves us with no other choice. By the time we meet any of the other characters such as Marion’s sister, Lila (Vera Miles); the private detective, Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), or even the previously introduced boyfriend, Sam Loomis, we are too engaged with Norman. We have a whole ten minutes with Norman while he cleans up the bathroom, wraps up the body, tidies up the motel room and dumps the car (with body inside) into the swamp somewhere behind the motel. During this time, no dialogue is spoken and no new characters are introduced; we are left alone with Norman Bates.
The audience’s relation to Norman is not really that uncomfortable, or at least not as uncomfortable as it should be. After all, it isn’t quite yet known what Norman’s big secret is. All the audience knows is that some older woman ran into the shower and killed off their main character and they’re stuck with this man-child to relate to for the rest of the film. This of course works even better when it is revealed that Norman is actually the killer. The audience feels terrible when they realize that they have been siding with a psychopath. It is all the more shocking when they sit back and realize that the psychopath in question was a person; he was a human being all along, no vampires or werewolves in sight.
Perhaps the most important shift that Psycho brought on was the appearance of the monster. So used to foreign counts and giant bugs, it was very jarring for audiences to see a human being (an American no less) taking the role of the killer. Tony Magistrale writes, “Because of the director’s attention to visualizing the workings of diseased psyches, it is neither a surprise nor an exaggeration to suggest that Psycho altered irrevocably the landscape of the horror film.” Psycho is a film that deals deeply with the psychological problems of its villain. We never got to see what troubled Dracula at the end of the day, or whether or not Dr. Frankenstein had maternal issues. Magistrale again: “Norman Bates bears little in common with his horror cinema ancestry; in fact, he is the harbinger of the monster of the future: the serial killer.” Thanks to Norman, human psychopaths were finally getting the credit they deserved.
Something that makes the concept of the normal man being the killer so terrifying is that finally horror was being put into probable scenarios. It is more conceivable that a man can take a knife to several people dressed as his mother than it is for a vampire to morph into a wolf or a bat and travel around drinking people’s blood. There is no fantastic element in Psycho. The fantastic or paranormal elements of the Universal terrors was what put them at that comfortable distance. Now they were right next-door. “While resembling one of us on the outside (Norman = normal man, the norms of man), Norman seethes on the inside.” The fact that Norman is a man also eases the acceptance of the loss of repression. Here the myth of the monster is somewhat lost because Norman himself does not possess any sort of ability unknown to humans. The one thing he does have the most people do not is the ability, the willingness to take a life. Even though he is not a vampire or a giant bug, Norman is not bound by his surplus repression.
While Dracula stares into his victim’s soul, or the Frankenstein monster roars and charges, there is no telling what can and will set Norman off. The ‘mother’ part of his brain functions as the murder engine. The ‘Norman’ personality is for the most part, fine. It is the mother side that Norman uses to justify the body to do the killing. However, even though he convinces himself that his mother is the one doing all the dastardly deeds, there is no way his actions directly reflect the actual personality of the deceased Norma Bates. As Magistrale points out again, Norman isn’t completely innocent. “As oppressive a figure as we suspect her to have been, there is no evidence that she ever committed murder.”[i]
In other words, because Norman’s horror is an internal, rather than an external one (that can be recognized by some sort of bizarre costume or accent) it is harder to recognize that there anything wrong. However, Hitchcock does give one brief moment where we are clued in. Immediately after Norman watches Marion through the wall (a voyeuristic and fetishistic affair) he walks out of the motel office and glances nervously up at the Bates house. He stops short and pauses, as if he is making a conscious decision. What the decision is we cannot be sure. He rushes up to the house and prepares to climb the stairs. He stops at the first step and wanders into the kitchenette. He looks down the hallway, almost as if he is watching the camera, waiting for it to leave. Hitchcock cuts back to the motel room where Marion is doing her accounting. Repeat viewers know that this is where Norman is changing into ‘Mother.’
The decision to kill is made as Norman stands outside the motel office, and his eyes dart back and forth. That is the only sign we get as a spectator that somebody is going to do something. And on first viewing, it isn’t even acknowledged and you don’t even recognize it while watching the scene. It is so quick that the shot itself is insignificant. This is a much different reaction than the Frankenstein monster roaring as he runs down a flight of stairs or the Wolf Man’s dramatic transformation into the furry killer.
The monster being identified as an average man is indeed a big shift in the structure of the horror film. However, the look of the killer means nothing unless his settings are changed as well. Psycho starts out in Phoenix, Arizona. Already the move has been made. Norman was born and bred in America, making him even more like the rest of the people in the audience.
The first shot of the film is a beautiful scenic shot of downtown Phoenix. We see skyscrapers, cars, factories; it is everything an American city should look like. As the frame fades in, we can see this entire city with a small mountain chain in the background. It’s almost as if the foreground for horror has become America and in the background, are the faded images of the mountain towns of Transylvania and the eerie hilltop that is home to Castle Frankenstein. White titles appear that tell us right away that we are in America; they simply read, “Phoenix, Arizona.” We are given the date and time as well. All of these things produce the feeling of familiarity. We are already becoming able to relate to the situation. It’s a town, during the week, in the afternoon, all things we have been a part of. As Wood puts it, “Arbitrary place, date and time, and now an apparently arbitrary window: the effect is of random selection: this could be any place, any date, any time, any room: it could be us.”
Many of the thematic elements and motivations in the film are also very much a commentary on the lives of post-war America. The first major discussion that Sam and Marion have is one about marriage. I am not trying to suggest that marriage is something only Americans experience; however the immediate situation they are in certainly brings to mind 1960’s America: Sam is divorced.[ii] Marion and Sam’s relationship is not the only marriage mentioned in the film. The marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Bates is discussed briefly toward the end; it is the death of Mr. Bates that is suggested to have pushed Norman over the edge. Unhappy with the suitor Mrs. Bates finds for herself after becoming a widow, Norman poisons the both of them and begins his semi-incestuous/psychotic ‘marriage’ to his mother.
Not only is Sam divorced and wanting to marry Marion, something frowned upon in the Catholic church, an institution of great power in classical horror (Dracula’s damning of the cross, Dr. Frankenstein sinfully playing God) but his ex-wife is also demanding he pay a large sum in alimony. These new ideas of divorce and re-marrying signify a shift in social values. With this change in social values, there must ultimately be a change in the values of horror. Horror cannot function as a device that goes against the norm if it does not keep itself up to date with what is and is not considered normal. As Marion and Sam argue about whether or not to get married, Sam insists that he cannot afford the union at the moment. Marion on the other hand thinks they can make it and imagines a scenario where Sam moves in with Marion and they have a nice cooked meal at her home with her sister at the table and a portrait of her mother looking over the proceedings. Sam wins the argument with his position that their lack of money is a serious concern with regards to their future.
Financial gain, the biggest of American dreams, is the focal point of evil in this film. Money and financial security is looked at as the solver of all problems in this incredibly shallow, materialistic view of America that Hitchcock paints for his audience. The film is a direct criticism of 1950’s consumer society. Marion believes that with the help of a little extra cash, she will be able to move to California with Sam, pay off his ex-wife, get married and start a new life somewhere. It is this financially motivated fantasy that drives her to steal the $40,000 from Mr. Cassidy that day at her office. It is by this little one decision that she unknowingly signs her own death sentence. Hitchcock of course is not subtle about this. Her brutal death is technically because of her theft. If she had deposited the money at the bank and gone home to take a nap, she wouldn’t be lying at the bottom of the swamp behind the Bates motel, shoved into the trunk of her car wrapped in a shower curtain.
Marion’s burial is another interesting social commentary that Hitchcock slides in past the viewer; yet another hint that our possessive American way of life might not be all that it is made out to be. Instead of burying the body in the ground, or simply hiding it away some place, Norman puts Marion’s remains in the trunk of her car along with the $40,000 that he does not know to exist. As the car sinks to the bottom of the aforementioned swamp, so does Marion and her American dream of living the sweet life in sunny California. Her shiny, new automobile that she just traded in becomes her coffin; her factory-built, American-made possession becomes her final resting place.
Aside from the materialistic commentary found within the film, it is also important to note the film’s many nods to American domesticity; something that really helps the audience identify with the characters and in turn brings them even closer to the terror. The murder weapon is a perfect start. When ‘Mother’ enters the shower to murder Marion, she is not strangled or shot or bitten on the neck, she is stabbed by an everyday, household kitchen knife. The same knife used to cook the Bates family meals is turned around and used to viciously take a life. Not to mention that the murder occurs in the one spot in the home where residents are the most vulnerable: the shower.
When Norman returns to the scene of the crime (actually as Norman) his first instinct is to clean up the mess that has been made in the nice, white bathroom. He neatly wraps Marion’s body in the damaged shower curtain and sets her aside. He starts for the office where he grabs a mop and bucket, classic tools of domestic responsibility, and begins washing the floor and tub and sink areas, removing any and all blood. Norman cleans the floor perfectly as if he is just carrying out one of his daily chores, as if just cleaning another motel room after a guest’s long stay. In one classic shot, Hitchcock shows Norman wiping down the floor and also happens to catch Marion’s slippers as they sit by the side of the tub, never to be worn again.
At the same time that Norman shows the responsibilities of domestic life seeping into the now too real world of the American horror film, Hitchcock too shows us that while this horror may have infested Norman’s work ethic, it also has affected his quality of life. One aspect of the family that begins to be featured in horror starting with this film is its very collapse the disintegration of the holy, American family. The first example of this is of course the death of Norman’s father and the imperfect replacement that Mrs. Bates finds for herself. The act to follow, the killing of the mother, is the response to the replacement of the father. Sons killing their mothers: as the psychiatrist at the end of the film points out, “Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all, most unbearable to the son who commits it.” The ‘most unbearable crime of all’ and it is being committed by one American, onto another. The Bates family collapses in on itself first with the death of the patriarch, the fall of the provider and protector, and then collapses even further with the murder of the mother, the only stability for the son.
Ultimately, all of these things are run down because they are not essential to Norman’s existence. The motel exists outside of Norman’s main focus. He acknowledges this at one point in the film when he says that most of the time he forgets to turn the neon sign on. He forgets because the business of the motel is not important in his mindset. The only thing important to Norman is taking care of his ‘mother’. This is why the inside of the house is left in immaculate condition. This is the area where ‘mother’ can exist; this is what was important to her.
Mrs. Bates’s bedroom is well kept by Norman. Magistrale writes, “Her room is still impeccably maintained by Norman as a kind of shrine or sanctuary to her memory, and when Lila pulls down the bedcovers the two lumpy indentations in the mattress eerily suggest the ghostlike silhouettes of the murdered corpses that Norman poisoned years earlier.”[iii] Mrs. Bates’s well-kept bedroom is a drastic contrast to Norman’s bedroom. In the small closet-sized room Norman sleeps on a small sofa with one blanket and a ratty pillow. The room clearly shows the point in his life when Norman’s development ceased and the places where he tried to fill his life with more adult elements. Stuffed animals and children’s toys are scattered throughout the room; a giant rabbit sleeps with Norman in his bed while Beethoven records and pornography sit on a table across from his bed.
The familial deterioration depicted in Psycho is one of the many reasons why the film was the starting point for the horrific revolution of the 1970’s. As explained above, the film altered the way American audiences thought about horror. As Donald Spoto writes, “Psycho postulates that the American dream can easily become a nightmare, and that all its facile components can play us false.” This film turned horror inward, targeting American audiences specifically. With the entrance of Norman Bates onto the scene, no one was safe. Hitchcock had audiences looking over their shoulders, suspecting everyone. Thanks to Norman, anyone could now be suspected of being the monster and the thought of one’s neighbor being a disturbed psychopath is an incredibly unsettling idea to accept.
Continues with Chapter 3 – Larry and George:
The New Model Family
[i] Magistrale goes on to write, “It is Norman’s interpretation and reconstruction of her fury filtered through his own unconscious desires—to possess and vanquish Marion sexually, to thwart the masculine authority figure that Arbogast represents, and Norman’s own Oedipal guilt and rage toward self-destruction, all operation simultaneously—that constructs the deadly amalgamation Bates summons from the unfathomable swamp of his unconscious.”
[ii] The bond of marriage also brings to mind another huge relationship: family. Familial relations is something that horror began to take on with Psycho but became more prevalent with films of the later 1970’s as we will see in the next section.
[iii] Magistrale is incorrect on one important detail. When Lila pulls back the bed covers, there is only one lump, the one belonging to Mrs. Bates. One indentation being there no longer suggests a silhouette of the corpse, but leads one to believe that Norman still puts Mrs. Bates to bed there every night.
