Hitchcock's Shower Scene: 78/52


Hitchcock's Shower Scene: 78/52

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WATER RUNS DOWN A DRAIN

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SOMBRE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

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This film contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

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THUNDER RUMBLES

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SOMBRE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

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MARLI RENFRO: I was 21 years old, I was a pin-up model.

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I was working with a photographer and he said that Universal - or UI,

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as it was called then - are looking for somebody to pose in a film.

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So I called and made an appointment.

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I went and spoke with Mr Hitchcock and basically had to strip down,

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got dressed again and then was interviewed by Janet Leigh,

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and I had to strip down for her, too.

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Oh, just in my underpants.

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But anyway... My body was very similar to hers, so I got hired.

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I had to report for make-up, I don't know, one or two days later.

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And there's the red light flashing and "no admittance" and all of this,

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and I thought, "Oh, God, here they're expecting a stripper."

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I was not quite completely nude.

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I had what we called a crotch patch.

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During filming with the shower going and everything, it would come loose.

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I told Hitchcock, I said "Why don't we take this thing off?"

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He said, "No. No."

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The whole time he wore a suit, black tie, white shirt.

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I was hired for two or three days, and wound up working for seven.

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It's extraordinary that it took

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so long to do that one particular scene,

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because that was about a third

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of what Janet Leigh had to work for the movie.

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There were 78 pieces of film and about 45 seconds.

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Spending seven days on one small set,

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shooting such a short scene,

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was pretty much unheard of.

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Generally these days you're lucky if you get one day to kill someone.

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Oh, it has to be an obsession.

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You're shooting that over the course of seven days,

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that is absolutely an obsession.

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Hitchcock fought to film this murder separately from the rest

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of the movie, which meant in a way

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that murder was now going to be

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an acceptable part of entertainment.

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There was violence in American films, but nothing like Psycho.

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Nothing that intimate, nothing that designed,

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nothing that kind of remorseless.

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I think he knew what he had on his hands,

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and he probably felt like

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the whole film hinged on that moment.

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This crucible moment.

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You should have seen the blood.

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The whole... The whole place was...

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Well, it's too horrible to describe.

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Dreadful.

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It's... I think the first modern...

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..expression of the female body under assault.

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And in some ways it's its most pure expression,

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because it IS devastating.

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Women had top billing in the '30s and '20s,

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and that sort of evaporated during the '40s.

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And by the time we got to the end of the '50s,

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women were secondary in movies and Hitch sort of...

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That's what the movie does, in a way, say that.

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It's killing off the woman.

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And it was really the first A movie to deal with

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this kind of horror, trashy, tabloid stuff.

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Nobody wanted to make it, and they went, "Are you nuts?

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"You just did North by Northwest, this incredible hit,

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"and now you want to do this black and white... "What is this thing?"

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I have just made a motion picture,

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North by Northwest.

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North by Northwest was, like, the ultimate achievement on every level.

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It was grand entertainment, it was classy, it had movie stars.

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It was beautiful, colourful.

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So how are you going to follow that up?

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With a prank.

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I once made a movie, rather tongue-in-cheek, called Psycho.

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-Yes?

-And it was... It was a big joke, you know?

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And I was horrified to find that some people took it seriously.

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It was intended to cause people to scream and yell and so forth,

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but no more than the screaming and yelling on a switchback railway.

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Those of us who work in the horror genre rarely wear tuxedos.

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This is not a movie that wears a tuxedo, either.

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This is a movie that's very much jeans and a T-shirt.

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But it's told by a guy who wears a tuxedo.

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He wanted to stray beyond his comfort zone.

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One of the things he was up to is,

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"You don't know me at all."

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And that's what Psycho is really about.

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What attracted you to this one, then?

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I think the murder in the bathtub coming out of the blue, you know?

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That was about all.

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Hitchcock was very, very aware of his competition.

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He realised that Clouzot had done the kind of movie

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that he felt that he should

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and could be making and, of course,

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when critics started calling Clouzot the French Hitchcock, well,

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you were invading his territory then, and, believe me, he took notice.

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Psycho is really the moment where the gloves come off.

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It does feel like Hitch's revenge on Hollywood, to some extent.

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On so many levels, it's his masterpiece.

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I continue to feel like the movie is an act of aggression.

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-Yeah.

-Against his fans, his critics, actors.

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-Yeah.

-It just feels angry, like he was hurt and he had to hurt back.

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The sudden violence of the shower scene in Psycho

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was meaningful to him

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for reasons that dated back, you know, 20 years

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to the origins of World War II.

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Hitchcock thought that the UK and the United States were insufficiently

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prepared for the dangers and horrors of World War II.

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There were several moments in his movies that spoke to that.

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You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes.

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Don't tune me out, hang on a while,

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this is a big story and you're part of it.

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It's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark

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-and let them come.

-What's the matter with us?

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We not only let the Nazi do our rowing for us but our thinking.

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Ye Gods and little fishes!

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One of them was Shadow of a Doubt.

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Only about a year and a half after Pearl Harbor,

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set in Santa Rosa in California.

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You can see how in that movie he's kind of chastising this town

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for being naive.

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You live in a dream, you're a sleepwalker, blind.

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How do you know what the world is like?

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Do you know the world is a foul sty?

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Do you know if you rip the fronts of houses, you'd find swine?

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He was basically saying, "America, you were way too naive.

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"You think you're safe in your shower at home with your family and loved ones nearby?

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"No. You're not.

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"Sorry."

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Hitchcock had many obsessions,

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but one of them that he talked about with The Birds

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was the randomness of life.

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There is no explanation for the birds attacking.

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To him, that was life.

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There you are, everything's fine

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and then someone gets cancer and they're dead two weeks later.

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Or your life is good and you get hit by a bus.

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Hitchcock was someone who, for several years now,

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was showing up on people's TV sets on Sunday nights.

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The victim tumbled and fell with a horrible crash.

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I think their back broke immediately it hit the floor.

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It was... It's difficult to describe the way that the...

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He was an icon.

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He was the sort of avuncular yet creepy guy who was presenting

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sex and violence to Americans

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leavened with black humour, every Sunday night.

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And Americans are comfortable with him by 1960.

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If someone else had made Psycho,

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it's quite possible that the reaction would not

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have been the same.

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Psycho came at a very unique time in American pop culture.

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It almost predates the turmoil and the shock and the trauma

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that were to come in the 1960s

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with racial violence, with political assassinations.

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I'm not saying that Hitchcock anticipated it

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and knew what he was up to,

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but what he did know is that he was trapped by his past,

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that it was not a time any more for Grace Kelly.

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It was not a time any more for, what you do you call it,

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beautiful Technicolor baubles.

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When you look at Psycho

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and you look at those magnificent, elegant, big,

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rich, Technicolor films of the '50s,

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you know that something changed.

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I think that Psycho was his response to movies changing

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and to upping the ante and not wanting to be forgotten.

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1959, that was the year of Some Like it Hot,

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Suddenly, Last Summer...

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..and Anatomy of a Murder.

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All three of those movies pushed boundaries.

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So there was something in the air, culturally speaking,

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that Hollywood was already tapping into.

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Psycho comes out at this period

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where we are post-atomic age but pre-civil rights.

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You know, if you think about the horror movie violence,

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they were science gone wrong,

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but you didn't really feel like it was going to happen to you.

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Psycho you felt could happen to you.

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This was the first movie that showed,

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yeah, you could be vulnerable,

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naked, alone in a shower and someone who is wearing the clothes of their

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dead mother is going to come in and just stab you,

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because that's what they're going to do.

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Americans were kind of obsessed with domesticity.

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They wanted to tell themselves that in their private,

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personal domestic spaces,

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at least there they were safe.

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The Soviets and whomever else,

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they couldn't possibly get to you in your bathroom!

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A few days after Psycho began shooting in November of 1959,

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the Clutter family in Kansas is murdered.

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Those are the In Cold Blood murders.

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You're not living next door to the Norman Rockwell family any more,

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you're living next door to the Manson family.

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This is the new modern American family, which very much inspired

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Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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SHE SCREAMS

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HE HOWLS IN RESPONSE

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The first Playboy club opens in Chicago.

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The most famous sitcom stars of the 1950s,

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Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo, are divorced.

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The birth control pill is approved by the FDA.

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You could look at the shower scene as this build-up of tension,

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all of these things, all of these American fears of the quiet '50s.

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It's all going to explode, and it comes out in this scene.

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Well, I was on the critics list in New York for review.

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The press was all invited to the theatre

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the day it opened at ten or 10:30 in the morning,

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with the first performance.

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As you went in,

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Hitchcock's voice was blaring on loudspeakers saying...

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MIMICS HITCHCOCK: "Nobody would be allowed in after the picture starts,

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"and please don't reveal the ending."

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Before Psycho, movies, as a form of entertainment,

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were relatively disposable.

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There was a tremendous...

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Compared to today, a tremendous coming and going in movie theatres.

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And Hitchcock brilliantly said

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"We don't want anyone coming in

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"after the beginning of this film."

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It changed the way films are exhibited.

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The reason was because the leading lady, Janet Leigh,

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was killed off a third of the way through.

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And I didn't want people whispering to each other,

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"When is Janet Leigh coming on?"

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He wanted to build anticipation.

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The bathroom...

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Something terrible happens in a bathroom.

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We know this from the trailer.

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We don't know it is Janet Leigh,

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because it's Vera Miles in the trailer and not Janet Leigh.

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SHE SCREAMS

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The minute the curtain opens and started stabbing,

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there was... There was a sustained shriek...

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..from the audience.

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AHHHH!

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Like that. Constant.

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You couldn't hear anything off the soundtrack.

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Through the entire shower scene.

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So you had the screams from Janet Leigh,

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the screams from all the women surrounding you in the theatre,

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and the high shrieking strings from Herrmann.

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That must have been total mayhem.

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It was actually the first time in the history of movies

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where it wasn't safe to be in a movie theatre.

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And when I walked out into Times Square at noon...

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..I felt I had been raped.

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In 1895,

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when the Lumiere brothers really first showed film to an audience,

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one of the fragments they showed was of a train pulling into a station.

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And the legend has it that they thought the train

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was going to hit them, and they were screaming

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and it caused a stampede of people trying to

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evacuate this room that it was screened in.

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They didn't understand the concept.

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You know, Psycho comes along and it has a similar kind of impact.

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It's the only movie in my childhood

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that my mom wouldn't let me go and see,

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which was kind of ridiculous because I was seeing nothing

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but horror films every single weekend, two of them, in fact.

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But Psycho - no, I couldn't go!

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As a kid, I thought the name was Cycle,

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like it was about some killer on a motorcycle.

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But I actually got this Super 8 version and just, like,

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constantly ran the movie over and over again.

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When audiences saw this really likeable character,

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someone who was quite relatable in terms of

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"I need more money, I'm growing older,

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"the man that I love won't marry me,"

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they were really hooked.

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Oh, Sam, let's get married.

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Yeah.

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And live with me in a store room behind a hardware store in Fairvale?

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We'll have lots of laughs(!)

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Of course she's going to survive the movie, it's Janet Leigh!

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Instead, she takes a shower, out of nowhere she is murdered by...

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..an old lady, who I can't even see?

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What the fuck is going on here?!

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He has broken the covenant of film-maker and audience,

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and the audience cannot wait to see more.

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He was a respected director...

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..and, you know, she was a bona fide movie star,

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and I think you kind of get into the thrill of that possible shock wave,

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which obviously happened.

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I think that moment signalled new American cinema,

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maybe world cinema in certain ways.

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I don't know that that had ever been done.

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Right.

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Maybe there's some obscure Czechoslovakian film that did it,

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there's a guy going, like, "Grr!"

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-LAUGHTER

-"I did it first!"

-Yeah.

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I can think of things that, culturally, have got us thinking about that structure.

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For instance, the first season of Game of Thrones,

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in which our most appealing character of Ned Stark,

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is just sort of cruelly killed in front of us.

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Culturally, we had to be reminded of the power of that narrative trope.

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The reality is he used the whole first half of the movie

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as a ruse to get you to this house,

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and the only way you're going to get to this house is

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if you believe that she's someone who's stolen 40,000 and that she's

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gotten off on the wrong freeway exit

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and is on this little tiny road where nobody goes by.

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There's a lot of things he is saying here about our society

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that was changing at that point.

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We were trying to get as fast as we could from Los Angeles to Chicago or

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New York, and going in these little towns was not necessary any more.

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And Norman doesn't even seem to mind.

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He's ready to change the bed sheets every day with nobody there.

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One by one, you drop the formalities.

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I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets, but old habits die hard.

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When she's driving off with the 40,000,

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she's on the road and she's in the West.

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There's something fundamentally American about that,

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dating back all the way to manifest destiny.

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"Go West, find your fate, find your freedom."

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Marion tries to do just that, and that's where she meets her fate.

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PSYCHO VIOLIN STRINGS PLAYED IN SLOWER TEMPO

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It's interesting to compare the novel Psycho with the movie Psycho.

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The shower scene is a lot different, it's really brief in the book.

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So on page 28...

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..um, here's the shower scene.

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SHOWER RUNS

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"The roar was deafening, the room was beginning to steam up.

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"That's why she didn't hear the door open,

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"or note the sound of footsteps.

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"And at first when the shower curtains parted, the steam obscured the face.

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"Then she did see it there,

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"just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in mid air like a mask.

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"A half scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly.

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"But it wasn't a mask, it couldn't be.

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"The skin had been powdered dead white and two hectic spots of rouge

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"centred on the cheekbones.

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"It wasn't a mask, it was the face of a crazy woman.

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"Mary started to scream and then the curtain parted further

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"and hand appeared, holding a butcher knife.

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"It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

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"And her head."

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The fact the Hitchcock brought Saul Bass in to work on the shower scene

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as its own kind of independent thing

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says to me that he knew that he had to do something special with the shower scene.

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"Interior, Mary in shower.

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"We see the bathroom door being pushed slowly open.

0:20:150:20:18

"The noise of the shower drowns any sound.

0:20:190:20:22

"The door is then slowly and carefully closed

0:20:220:20:25

"and we see the shadow of a woman fall across the shower curtain.

0:20:250:20:28

"Mary's back is turned to the curtain.

0:20:300:20:32

"The white brightness of the bathroom is almost blinding.

0:20:320:20:35

"Suddenly we see the hand reach up,

0:20:350:20:37

"grasp the shower curtain, rip it aside.

0:20:370:20:39

"Cut to Mary, extreme close-up.

0:20:390:20:43

"As she turns in response to the feel and sound of the shower curtain being torn aside,

0:20:430:20:48

"a look of pure horror erupts in her face.

0:20:480:20:51

"A low, terrible groan begins to rise up out of her throat.

0:20:510:20:55

"A hand comes into shot.

0:20:550:20:57

"The hand holds an enormous bread knife.

0:20:570:20:59

"The flint of the blade shatters the screen

0:20:590:21:02

"to an almost total silver blankness.

0:21:020:21:05

"The slashing.

0:21:050:21:06

"An impression of a knife slashing as if tearing at the very scream,

0:21:060:21:10

"ripping the film. Over it, the brief gulps of screaming.

0:21:100:21:13

"And then silence.

0:21:140:21:15

"And then the dreadful thump as Mary's body falls in the tub.

0:21:170:21:20

"Reverse angle, the blank whiteness, the blur of the shower water.

0:21:200:21:25

"The hand pulling the shower curtain back.

0:21:250:21:27

"We catch one flicker of a glimpse of the murderer.

0:21:270:21:30

"A woman, her face contorted with madness, her head wild with hair,

0:21:300:21:35

"as if she were wearing a fright wig.

0:21:350:21:38

"And then we see only the curtain, closed across the tub,

0:21:380:21:42

"and hear the rush of the shower water.

0:21:420:21:44

"Above the shower bar we see the bathroom door open again,

0:21:440:21:48

"and after a moment, we hear the sound of the front door slamming.

0:21:480:21:51

"Cut to the dead body.

0:21:510:21:53

"Lying half-in, half-out of the tub, the head tumbled over,

0:21:540:21:58

"touching the floor. The hair wet, one eye wide open as if popped.

0:21:580:22:04

"One arm lying limp and wet along the tile floor.

0:22:040:22:08

"Coming down the side of the tub,

0:22:080:22:10

"running thick and dark along the porcelain,

0:22:100:22:13

"we see many small threads of blood.

0:22:130:22:15

"Camera moves away from the body, travels slowly across the bathroom,

0:22:160:22:21

"past the toilet...

0:22:210:22:22

"..out into the bedroom."

0:22:230:22:25

I think that the shower scene elevated film.

0:22:330:22:35

Not the horror genre specifically, but film-making in general.

0:22:350:22:39

Over and over again, it keeps showing you new things.

0:22:390:22:41

I think it's one of those spectacular pieces of work.

0:22:410:22:45

The film is moving inexorably to that scene.

0:22:450:22:48

You don't know it, as a viewer.

0:22:480:22:50

Sam, this is the last time.

0:22:520:22:54

I pay, too.

0:22:550:22:56

They also pay, who meet in hotel rooms.

0:22:580:23:01

There are plenty of motels in this area, you should have...

0:23:010:23:05

I mean, just to be safe.

0:23:050:23:07

Mother... My mother...

0:23:070:23:09

What is the phrase?

0:23:100:23:11

She isn't quite herself today.

0:23:120:23:15

Hitchcock was amazing at setting everything up.

0:23:150:23:18

When she's packing to go to see her boyfriend,

0:23:180:23:22

you see the shower head in the background.

0:23:220:23:24

It's very specific, the shower is right over her shoulder.

0:23:240:23:28

When it comes to Norman, when he talks about the bathroom,

0:23:280:23:31

he, like stutters and he can't really say toilet or bathroom.

0:23:310:23:35

And the, er...

0:23:350:23:37

..over there.

0:23:380:23:39

-The bathroom.

-Yeah.

0:23:400:23:42

That's what's great about Hitchcock.

0:23:420:23:44

He always really tunes into those character moments.

0:23:440:23:47

That desperate drive at the beginning.

0:23:470:23:49

It's crazy good.

0:23:490:23:50

The notion of getting clean, that's her arc.

0:23:500:23:52

She can't see because of the density of the water,

0:23:520:23:55

which is really beautiful

0:23:550:23:57

because she's drowning in her worry and fear.

0:23:570:24:00

The slashing of the wipers presages the slashing of the knife.

0:24:000:24:04

It's sort of... It's a very violent and wet and sloshy,

0:24:040:24:08

sharp stabbing motion.

0:24:080:24:10

And it's a long build-up,

0:24:100:24:11

but we have no idea that the rain

0:24:110:24:13

that's going to come down upon her later

0:24:130:24:15

is going to include her own blood.

0:24:150:24:17

I certainly get the sensation that the shower scene was something that

0:24:180:24:21

Hitchcock had probably been working towards all of his life.

0:24:210:24:23

Is he cleaning house?

0:24:290:24:31

He's washing down the bathroom walls.

0:24:310:24:34

It must've splattered a lot.

0:24:340:24:36

Well, why not? That's what we're all thinking.

0:24:380:24:40

He killed her in there, and he has to clean up

0:24:400:24:42

those stains before he leaves.

0:24:420:24:44

You really can't talk about the shower scene without talking

0:24:440:24:47

about the rest of the film.

0:24:470:24:48

Without the parlour scene, obviously, the shower scene doesn't really work nearly as well,

0:24:480:24:52

because the parlour scene is a sort of really sad,

0:24:520:24:54

beautiful connection that comes before this savagery.

0:24:540:24:58

Is your time so empty?

0:24:580:25:00

No. Well, I run the office.

0:25:000:25:05

And, tend the cabins, and grounds, and do little errands for my mother.

0:25:050:25:10

The one she allows I might be capable of doing.

0:25:100:25:13

Do you go out with friends?

0:25:140:25:17

Well, a boy's best friend is his mother.

0:25:190:25:21

He has a very loaded preamble to the shower scene.

0:25:210:25:25

Wouldn't it be better if you put her...

0:25:250:25:27

..someplace?

0:25:290:25:30

You mean an institution?

0:25:340:25:36

A madhouse?

0:25:360:25:38

Look how still he is.

0:25:380:25:39

Whereas before, he was fidgety and moving around.

0:25:390:25:43

Suddenly, he became very still.

0:25:430:25:46

-Maybe that's the moment he decided to kill her.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

0:25:460:25:49

Yeah, he's super confident now.

0:25:490:25:51

-Yeah.

-Look at him.

-He's barely moving his head.

0:25:510:25:53

LAUGHTER

0:25:530:25:54

-Just his eyes.

-Wow!

0:25:540:25:57

He's so angry.

0:25:570:25:58

-And she just got terrified.

-Yeah.

0:25:590:26:01

Oh, you're not, you're not going back to your room already?

0:26:010:26:05

Perhaps I'll go back to my room, now...

0:26:050:26:07

..Norman, it's been lovely to chat.

0:26:070:26:10

Terribly sorry about your loneliness.

0:26:100:26:12

This is the first moment that you're with him and not her.

0:26:150:26:18

Yeah, she literally walks away from camera.

0:26:180:26:20

-Yeah.

-Right.

-And then, well with him now.

-My job here is done.

-Yeah.

0:26:200:26:23

I'm no longer the protagonist of this story.

0:26:230:26:25

There was a private supper here...

0:26:250:26:28

..and, er...

0:26:290:26:31

Oh, by the way, this picture...

0:26:310:26:33

..has great significance.

0:26:340:26:36

Because...

0:26:380:26:40

Let's go along to cabin number one.

0:26:430:26:45

The painting that Mr Bates removed

0:26:490:26:52

to become the Peeping Tom was actually

0:26:520:26:55

a 16th or early 17th century painting.

0:26:550:26:58

Susanna and the Elders is actually a morality story

0:27:000:27:03

about a virtuous woman who bathed in her garden,

0:27:030:27:07

and was spied on by two elder man.

0:27:070:27:10

And the theme burgeoned,

0:27:100:27:13

possibly as a result of counter reformatory motives.

0:27:130:27:17

It was either that, or it was simply an excuse for painting female nudity.

0:27:170:27:21

Now, the interesting thing about it, is it's about adultery.

0:27:230:27:26

And it's fascinating because Mary, who's in the shower,

0:27:260:27:31

is kind of cleansing herself

0:27:310:27:33

of committing adultery with a married man.

0:27:330:27:35

In art history, there were about three or four different phases

0:27:370:27:41

of how artists depicted Susanna and the Elders.

0:27:410:27:43

Lucas van Leyden shows the two elders in prominence,

0:27:450:27:49

whereas the small Susanna is bathing in the far distance.

0:27:490:27:54

But by the time you get to Tintoretto, she's full frontal.

0:27:540:27:58

Rubens begins to take and probe the psychological intensity of the moment.

0:27:590:28:04

Rembrandt, using the power of lightness and darkness,

0:28:040:28:08

of highlights, to enhance the drama.

0:28:080:28:11

The interesting thing about the painting is that you've got full frontal nudity of Susanna,

0:28:110:28:16

and yet the two elders are not simply looking at her,

0:28:160:28:19

they're actually groping and violating her.

0:28:190:28:21

It's almost a rape scene...

0:28:210:28:23

..that's taking place before our eyes.

0:28:240:28:26

It's an amazing painting that he picked.

0:28:260:28:29

It's not any old Baroque painting.

0:28:290:28:32

It's voyeurism.

0:28:320:28:33

He removes the voyeuristic painting

0:28:340:28:37

to become the voyeur looking in on the shower.

0:28:370:28:40

He could've picked from 50 different examples,

0:28:400:28:43

but he chose this one because it had the most amount of information that

0:28:430:28:46

he could use for his film.

0:28:460:28:48

I love that there's a hole in the wall the size of his face.

0:28:500:28:54

Which tells you that he's been doing this more than once

0:28:540:28:56

and that he's made it comfortable for himself.

0:28:560:28:59

The notion that he is looking just as you are, it binds you with him,

0:28:590:29:03

and when you eliminate those walls and you're now watching him,

0:29:030:29:08

and you're watching, and you're watching together,

0:29:080:29:11

then you are in a new place where things can get a lot scarier.

0:29:110:29:15

Psycho is delineated from the other works of his oeuvre by those gazes.

0:29:150:29:22

The birds are looking at us, each individual bird,

0:29:220:29:25

dead bird, is looking at us.

0:29:250:29:27

Mother is looking at us from eyeless sockets.

0:29:270:29:31

Dead Marion, with her eye open.

0:29:310:29:32

The stare includes and indicts us at the same time.

0:29:340:29:37

It's a mirror image.

0:29:380:29:40

You know, it goes both ways.

0:29:400:29:41

We're looking into the eyes of death,

0:29:410:29:43

and the eyes of death are looking at us.

0:29:430:29:45

And it's inclusive and horrifying.

0:29:450:29:48

The laughing and the tears,

0:29:480:29:51

and the cruel eyes studying you.

0:29:510:29:54

My mother there?

0:29:540:29:55

God is studying you,

0:29:570:29:58

because there are a number of God point-of-view shots in Psycho,

0:29:580:30:02

just as there are in The Birds.

0:30:020:30:05

Hitchcock's God is cruel and arbitrary,

0:30:050:30:07

and like some kind of bird of prey or raptor which is gazing down

0:30:070:30:12

rather coldly and disinterestedly on its human subjects.

0:30:120:30:15

In the shower sequence,

0:30:170:30:18

the violence is directed and that knife is coming towards us.

0:30:180:30:23

So we're being punished for being the voyeurs.

0:30:230:30:26

There are consequences to watching and being watched.

0:30:260:30:30

In the character of James Stewart,

0:30:300:30:32

if we identify with him in Rear Window

0:30:320:30:35

has a very literal, great fall

0:30:350:30:37

at the end of it where he breaks the other leg.

0:30:370:30:41

Meaning another six, eight months of pain and itchiness

0:30:410:30:44

and not being able to screw Grace Kelly.

0:30:440:30:47

All those things are pertinent to Hitchcock.

0:30:470:30:51

I'll bet you nine people out of ten...

0:30:510:30:53

WOMAN TRANSLATES INTO FRENCH

0:30:530:30:55

..if they see something across, like a woman undressing and going

0:30:550:31:01

to bed, or even sometimes a man pottering around his room

0:31:010:31:06

doing nothing.

0:31:060:31:07

Nine people out of ten will stay and look.

0:31:090:31:12

They won't turn away and say,

0:31:140:31:16

it's none of my business and pull down their own curtain.

0:31:160:31:20

They won't do it.

0:31:200:31:21

In the beginning of the movie you're flying into a window with the blinds

0:31:240:31:28

closed, so you're starting out as a voyeur.

0:31:280:31:30

And if you think about it, if the movie's opening

0:31:310:31:33

from the point of view of a fly, it changes the whole context of what meaning of the movie is.

0:31:330:31:38

-WOMAN:

-I'm not even going to swat that fly.

0:31:380:31:40

I hope they are watching.

0:31:400:31:42

They'll see, they'll see and they'll know, and they'll say...

0:31:420:31:46

..why, she wouldn't even harm a fly.

0:31:470:31:50

I think the voyeurism actually has a payoff in the shower scene.

0:31:500:31:54

It's Hitchcock's way of setting the bomb under the table,

0:31:540:31:57

which is something he liked to do to create dramatic irony.

0:31:570:32:01

Four people are sitting around the table, talking about baseball,

0:32:010:32:07

whatever you like.

0:32:070:32:08

Five minutes of it,

0:32:090:32:11

very dull.

0:32:110:32:12

Suddenly, a bomb goes off.

0:32:130:32:17

Blows the people to smithereens.

0:32:170:32:20

What do the audience have?

0:32:200:32:21

Ten seconds of shock.

0:32:210:32:25

Now take the same scene

0:32:250:32:27

and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table

0:32:270:32:30

and will go off in five minutes.

0:32:300:32:32

Well, the whole emotion of the audience is totally different,

0:32:330:32:37

because you've given them that information.

0:32:370:32:39

You've got the audience working.

0:32:400:32:43

-Hello?

-I think at this point

0:32:440:32:46

we start to wonder what's going on in his head

0:32:460:32:48

and what's going to happen because of this look on his face.

0:32:480:32:52

That's so interesting as an actor, what is he playing?

0:32:520:32:54

He's playing, "Oh, God, don't let my mother kill this girl."

0:32:540:32:57

Norman Bates is presented in all these little, you know,

0:32:570:33:01

encapsulated moments throughout the film

0:33:010:33:04

and in much the same way that the murder is presented

0:33:040:33:07

in encapsulated moments of images and compositions, cut together.

0:33:070:33:13

So, I think that the movie is, it's about fragmentation,

0:33:130:33:18

it is fragmentation.

0:33:180:33:20

Norman goes up to the house.

0:33:230:33:25

It's very important that the audience sees him leave

0:33:250:33:29

because he is reacting to a third character that we think

0:33:290:33:34

is in the house, Mother.

0:33:340:33:36

But that is really in his mind.

0:33:360:33:38

He goes to the stairs and he looks up, and he looks like he's sad

0:33:400:33:43

because he realises that Mom's not at home upstairs.

0:33:430:33:45

Then he goes and flops into the kitchen,

0:33:450:33:47

like a dejected little schoolboy.

0:33:470:33:49

So he sits there, like, "Oh, rats, I can't have dinner with the lady I want to have dinner with."

0:33:490:33:55

I imagine he must've done that a lot when Mother was alive.

0:33:550:33:58

That she must've yelled at him and he would just go into kitchen when he couldn't get what he wanted,

0:33:580:34:02

when she was berating him for whatever he wasn't living up to her standards.

0:34:020:34:06

There's a lot one could say about Hitchcock mothers.

0:34:060:34:09

Are you quite sure she didn't come down here to see you,

0:34:170:34:20

to capture the rich Alex Sebastian for a husband?

0:34:200:34:24

Go get shaved before your father gets home.

0:34:240:34:26

You gentlemen aren't really trying to kill my son, are you?

0:34:260:34:29

When you talk about what is sacred in America,

0:34:310:34:34

people talk about mom and apple pie.

0:34:340:34:37

Mom is good, we love Mom, we are Mom, we are good.

0:34:370:34:44

On the other hand, there's something else going on in 1950s America

0:34:440:34:49

in culture and society, where Mom is also suspect.

0:34:490:34:55

There was a serious social panic in America about juvenile delinquency.

0:34:570:35:02

One thing that this social panic resulted in was this fear that moms

0:35:020:35:07

were going to shelter and spoil children,

0:35:070:35:10

possibly America itself, to death.

0:35:100:35:13

All of the sitcoms - Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet,

0:35:140:35:19

where Mother never did anything.

0:35:190:35:21

All she did was take care of the house and the kids.

0:35:210:35:26

I'm just practically ready and David has to get dressed.

0:35:260:35:29

Get dressed? You mean dressed up?

0:35:290:35:31

Well, yes, you want to look nice when Nancy gets here.

0:35:310:35:33

The director who exposes the horror of the American family in the '50s

0:35:330:35:40

without making a horror movie, is Douglas Sirk.

0:35:400:35:43

You see Kay, I love Ron.

0:35:430:35:46

You love him so much you're willing to ruin all our lives?

0:35:460:35:49

You can't really think that.

0:35:490:35:50

What else can I think?

0:35:500:35:52

In Sirk, it's the whole construction of the family.

0:35:520:35:57

It's not until Psycho, though,

0:35:570:35:58

where the mother is literally a monster when you see her at the end.

0:35:580:36:03

I think my mother scared me when I was three months old.

0:36:030:36:08

AUDIENCE LAUGHS You remember that?

0:36:080:36:10

You see, she said boo.

0:36:100:36:11

I don't know how many times in Psycho, do people talk about Mother.

0:36:110:36:17

Oh, we can see each other.

0:36:170:36:19

We can even have dinner.

0:36:190:36:20

But respectably. In my house, with my mother's picture on the mantel,

0:36:210:36:25

and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.

0:36:250:36:29

And after the steak, will we send Sister to the movies,

0:36:290:36:32

turn Mama's picture to the wall?

0:36:320:36:33

Sam!

0:36:330:36:34

Patricia Hitchcock talks about, she offers her a tranquiliser.

0:36:340:36:39

Have you got some aspirin?

0:36:390:36:40

I've got something, not aspirin,

0:36:400:36:42

my mother's doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding.

0:36:420:36:44

Teddy was furious when he found out I had taken tranquilizers.

0:36:440:36:47

-Any calls?

-Teddy called me,

0:36:490:36:51

my mother called to see if Teddy called...

0:36:510:36:54

Even in that office, the influence,

0:36:540:36:57

the negative influence of mothers, and here it's on women, not on men.

0:36:570:37:03

So, the fact that Norman Bates' mother,

0:37:030:37:06

we realise eventually it's Norman Bates himself,

0:37:060:37:08

might have on an unconscious level audiences saying, "Aha!

0:37:080:37:12

"I knew it! Mom IS gonna to kill us!

0:37:120:37:15

"Mom IS going to be the death of us all!"

0:37:150:37:17

SHOWER RUNS

0:37:340:37:36

OK. Once more into the bridge.

0:37:360:37:38

Back to the primal moment.

0:37:390:37:41

Marion is doing her accounting here,

0:37:430:37:47

figuring out how much she spent on the car.

0:37:470:37:49

She's making the decision to...

0:37:510:37:52

..return the money.

0:37:540:37:55

Nice little bit of handy exposition.

0:37:550:37:57

I always write down my math.

0:37:580:38:00

It's charming, you know.

0:38:000:38:02

It's still an old movie, let's face it.

0:38:020:38:04

She throws the paper in the toilet bowl

0:38:060:38:09

and then to cap it off she flushes it.

0:38:090:38:13

Right from the beginning, you know you're in new territory.

0:38:140:38:17

In 1960, nobody had shown a toilet before.

0:38:170:38:19

The flushing toilet is a clear indication that the scene to come

0:38:190:38:23

is going to break one or two taboos.

0:38:230:38:25

Details are important, you know.

0:38:250:38:27

In the building of suspense,

0:38:270:38:29

you know that those details are all going to add up to something

0:38:290:38:31

much more monumental than the simplicity of these shots.

0:38:310:38:34

Hitchcock was a Victorian.

0:38:350:38:37

Victorians thought that a bright, white tiled bathroom was sanitary.

0:38:370:38:43

That's the term they used.

0:38:430:38:44

His bathroom, in his home, was bright, white tiles.

0:38:460:38:50

He thought that invading the sanctity of the bathroom

0:38:500:38:54

was a cool and subversive thing to do.

0:38:540:38:57

He did it in silent films, he did in Spellbound.

0:38:570:39:02

By showing that brightness it was a way of saying,

0:39:020:39:05

look at how I am defiling the sanctity of the bathroom

0:39:050:39:08

and I am doing it almost bloodlessly.

0:39:080:39:11

Coincidentally, this scene was extremely influential on a scene

0:39:110:39:15

in The Conversation, which I edited back in 1973.

0:39:150:39:19

A murder has been committed and Gene Hackman comes into the bathroom

0:39:190:39:24

of a hotel room but the room is completely clean.

0:39:240:39:28

And he pulls the curtain apart, just as in Psycho

0:39:280:39:32

the mother pulls the curtain apart, but it's empty.

0:39:320:39:35

He goes to the drain of the tub and runs his fingers

0:39:350:39:39

around the drain to see if there was any telltale signs of blood

0:39:390:39:42

and there's nothing.

0:39:420:39:44

He goes over to the toilet to jiggle the handle

0:39:440:39:47

and the toilet suddenly backs up.

0:39:470:39:50

So it's a kind of an inverse version of the Psycho scene.

0:39:500:39:55

The toilet and the flushing of the toilet,

0:39:560:39:59

the shower curtain, the drain,

0:39:590:40:01

all of these things were definitely imprinted upon us by Psycho.

0:40:010:40:06

Now, one of the most beautiful, famous leading ladies in 1960

0:40:060:40:10

just stripped in front of us and stepped into a shower.

0:40:100:40:14

It's like, holy shit, where are we going now?

0:40:140:40:17

Man, that must've been crazy racy for 1960.

0:40:170:40:19

I don't even understand.

0:40:190:40:21

Hitchcock knew that American men were curious

0:40:210:40:23

about Janet Leigh.

0:40:230:40:25

And so, the idea of having her in a shower

0:40:250:40:29

in a stance that seems very suggestive, was a huge deal.

0:40:290:40:33

Seeing her full body behind that curtain,

0:40:330:40:37

it's brilliant because it's translucent.

0:40:370:40:39

It's not transparent, it's not opaque but it's translucent.

0:40:390:40:44

Enough to see her and titillate us.

0:40:440:40:47

But not enough to really be graphic yet.

0:40:470:40:50

The whole theory is that you have to discover the sex in a woman

0:40:500:40:54

and not have it...

0:40:540:40:56

..stuck all over her like labels, you know.

0:40:580:41:01

And there's nothing else to look for, nothing to discover.

0:41:020:41:05

Do we know anybody who turns the shower on before getting in, I mean,

0:41:080:41:11

I don't act that way.

0:41:110:41:12

I don't turn a shower on like that.

0:41:120:41:16

I run it, and then get in when I know that it's safe.

0:41:160:41:18

And look at that almost sexual expression on her face.

0:41:200:41:24

She is being rained upon and it's cleansing,

0:41:240:41:27

it's warm and she's happy,

0:41:270:41:29

and she's, like, made up her mind.

0:41:290:41:31

The natural sounds kind of put you in the perspective of,

0:41:310:41:34

we all become Janet Leigh but not as attractive.

0:41:340:41:37

Through other movies like Rear Window and Birds,

0:41:370:41:39

he knows when the lack of music can be as effective as music.

0:41:390:41:42

APPROACHING FOOTSTEPS

0:41:450:41:47

FLUTTER OF WINGS

0:41:540:41:55

I think there's almost no moment

0:42:000:42:03

when we see Marion with a genuine smile.

0:42:030:42:06

There's almost no moment where...

0:42:060:42:08

Where she's allowed to feel good

0:42:080:42:10

about what her life is like.

0:42:100:42:13

She's happy for the first time.

0:42:130:42:14

We're going into a scene which, on the one hand,

0:42:150:42:18

is, um, quite liberatory for the character,

0:42:180:42:20

but at the same time it's clearly really what we're watching

0:42:200:42:23

is the liberation of Hitchcock.

0:42:230:42:25

Of his own repressed desires finally being writ large on the screen.

0:42:250:42:29

Hitchcock viewed the world as a very imperfect moral machine.

0:42:290:42:34

And he always had this...

0:42:340:42:36

..biblical almost sense of doom and punishment.

0:42:380:42:40

WOMAN SCREAMS You know, that befalls those

0:42:400:42:44

that tangle with sin in a casual way.

0:42:440:42:47

Even his most unHitchcockian movie, which is Mr & Mrs Smith,

0:42:470:42:51

which I love, punishes banality.

0:42:510:42:53

She makes a moral decision to take back that money and, you know,

0:42:550:42:59

and suffer what ever punishment will come her way.

0:42:590:43:02

I stepped into a private trap back there.

0:43:020:43:04

And I'd like to back and try to pull myself out of it.

0:43:050:43:08

Before it's too late for me, too.

0:43:100:43:12

This is very important.

0:43:120:43:13

It's very important narratively

0:43:130:43:15

because it doesn't come in the middle of a heist.

0:43:150:43:18

Or in the middle of the robbery.

0:43:180:43:20

Or as she is escaping with the money on the road.

0:43:200:43:24

And it turns out, bang!

0:43:240:43:25

It doesn't make a damn bit of difference because the universe

0:43:250:43:28

doesn't give a shit.

0:43:280:43:29

And I think, uh,

0:43:290:43:31

that is a true sign of his Catholicism

0:43:310:43:34

and his sense of doom about a sin that cannot be washed away.

0:43:340:43:38

Literally, with water.

0:43:380:43:40

You know, it cannot be purged.

0:43:400:43:42

Except by blood, and violence.

0:43:420:43:44

And paying the price.

0:43:440:43:46

She's punished for the worst crime,

0:43:460:43:48

which is sexually arousing Norman Bates.

0:43:480:43:52

You know, you get this strain again and again.

0:43:520:43:55

I mean, think of Strangers on a Train, where Robert Walker, you know,

0:43:550:43:59

strangles this poor girl.

0:43:590:44:01

Again, what does he strangle her for?

0:44:010:44:03

Because she's a loose woman who is in Farley Granger's way.

0:44:030:44:07

I mean, that's a foreshadowing of Psycho.

0:44:070:44:10

That's her point of view of the shower that puts us, the audience,

0:44:120:44:16

as if we're in the shower with her.

0:44:160:44:17

It makes us feel just a vulnerable as she is.

0:44:170:44:21

It's spraying at us and it's creating a sonic curtain.

0:44:210:44:24

She can't hear him coming.

0:44:240:44:25

Gee, I'm sorry, I didn't hear you in all this rain.

0:44:270:44:29

And that's why that shot is bad news.

0:44:290:44:34

You know, the shots change in their level of symmetry

0:44:340:44:36

during the course of the sequence.

0:44:360:44:38

That's order at the beginning, and then, oddly,

0:44:380:44:40

it'll be echoed by the eye, in the drain,

0:44:400:44:42

and Norman Bates' people through his office

0:44:420:44:45

and those things start to rhyme after a while in a great way.

0:44:450:44:49

How do you point a camera at a shower head without the lens getting sprayed?

0:44:490:44:53

Move the camera back enough,

0:44:530:44:55

plug some of the holes so that the spray shoots outward.

0:44:550:44:57

Very simple and elegant solution.

0:44:570:44:59

There's nothing unusual about the pacing here.

0:45:010:45:04

It's at a rather leisurely 4.5 seconds per cut, on average.

0:45:040:45:10

So, it's a calm before the storm, let's say.

0:45:100:45:13

Now here's what I would call a strange cut.

0:45:140:45:17

What I call the wet hair cut.

0:45:170:45:18

Which is her washing herself with her head tilted back,

0:45:180:45:23

and then it suddenly cuts to the same kind of an angle.

0:45:230:45:28

Really a jump cut.

0:45:280:45:30

Except now her hair is completely wet.

0:45:300:45:32

This would give the lie to somebody who said

0:45:320:45:36

"this scene was shot exactly as the storyboards were done,"

0:45:360:45:40

because you never would storyboard a moment like that.

0:45:400:45:44

You think you're going to be watching her go through

0:45:440:45:47

the whole process in real time but that cut jumps you ahead.

0:45:470:45:51

It feels very...

0:45:510:45:52

..bold and confident.

0:45:530:45:55

Now we cut to the shower head,

0:45:550:45:57

but it's a side angle on the shower head.

0:45:570:45:59

Not this, sort of, subjective point of view.

0:45:590:46:02

When we were looking at her, she was facing left to right,

0:46:030:46:06

away from the shower.

0:46:060:46:07

And when we cut back to her,

0:46:080:46:10

we come around to the other side of the stageline.

0:46:100:46:13

What's behind her now is the shower curtain, not the wall.

0:46:130:46:17

And now there's another cut.

0:46:170:46:20

Again, it's a kind of awkward jump cut.

0:46:200:46:22

Objectively, there would be no reason to do that.

0:46:220:46:26

But it's unsettling because there's a big empty space,

0:46:260:46:31

which is itself unsettling.

0:46:310:46:33

What is going to fill that empty space?

0:46:330:46:37

The audience starts to look over to that negative space.

0:46:370:46:40

And feeling like, "Why am I looking over here?"

0:46:400:46:43

The door opens. You see the shadow.

0:46:430:46:46

And then Norman's figure.

0:46:460:46:47

And that's the mounting terror.

0:46:470:46:49

Where you say to yourself, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

0:46:490:46:52

And THAT is the difference between suspense and surprise.

0:46:520:46:56

The idea of menace in a shadowy figure,

0:46:560:47:00

I think, that Hitchcock's fear.

0:47:000:47:03

Who is the menacing figure in Alfred Hitchcock's own life?

0:47:030:47:08

By the time he gets to Pyscho, that person is unleashed.

0:47:080:47:12

Here you see Margo Epper, the stunt woman, coming toward.

0:47:130:47:16

How do you NOT reveal who that is?

0:47:180:47:20

I've been taking the wrap for that sequence for 20 years now

0:47:200:47:24

but that's not me behind the curtain.

0:47:240:47:28

I was in New York that day rehearsing a Broadway show.

0:47:280:47:31

Every time they kept shooting it, you kept seeing the stunt woman's face.

0:47:310:47:35

And one of the make-up men decided, "What if we blackened her face?"

0:47:350:47:38

And so they tried that a couple of times.

0:47:380:47:39

And went darker and darker, and darker.

0:47:390:47:41

Until they achieved that effect.

0:47:410:47:44

I've I talked with Janet Leigh about what she thought she saw

0:47:440:47:47

coming at her, and she clearly saw Norman coming at her.

0:47:470:47:52

And that's what she played.

0:47:520:47:54

So, the reality for her was,

0:47:540:47:56

"I'm going to die this way by this person who tried to befriend me,

0:47:560:48:00

"and I tried to be polite to."

0:48:000:48:03

You're very kind.

0:48:030:48:04

It's all for you. I'm not hungry, go ahead.

0:48:050:48:08

It really does lend an extra air of horror and pathos to that moment.

0:48:090:48:13

And that wallpaper in the background.

0:48:140:48:16

The Shining - so many horror movies try to have that, like,

0:48:160:48:19

perfect Hitchcock Bates' Motel wallpaper.

0:48:190:48:21

This floral pattern, that juxtapose with this black silhouette of the knife

0:48:210:48:26

and the hair of Mother, it's really, really terrifying.

0:48:260:48:28

The shape always kind of tortured me,

0:48:280:48:30

it was like a weird mushroom shaped head.

0:48:300:48:33

I don't know, kind of lame to me for some reason.

0:48:330:48:35

I'd always wished that the shot looked a little scarier.

0:48:350:48:39

When my grandfather first saw the first rough cut of Psycho

0:48:390:48:42

he didn't like it at all.

0:48:420:48:44

He was just going to cut it down to an hour

0:48:440:48:46

and make it part of the TV show.

0:48:460:48:48

Bernard Herrmann convinced him to create the most,

0:48:480:48:50

like, famous scared chord music in horror cinema history.

0:48:500:48:54

It's so ingrained in pop culture to where...

0:48:540:48:56

-HE MIMICS PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE MUSIC Yeah, yeah.

-It is transcendent.

0:48:560:48:59

Yeah, yeah. My seven-year-old daughter knows that,

0:48:590:49:02

-but she doesn't know where comes from. But...

-Yeah.

0:49:020:49:05

You know, she's made that joke. MIMICS PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE MUSIC

0:49:050:49:07

-Like, I don't know where she got it.

-That's incredible.

0:49:070:49:10

She has no idea it's from Psycho. It's evolutionary.

0:49:100:49:12

Like, we're just born knowing the shower scene!

0:49:120:49:14

LAUGHTER

0:49:140:49:15

I wanted a tattoo,

0:49:170:49:18

and I thought it must be that one cue by Bernard Herrmann.

0:49:180:49:22

The most amazing cue ever made in cinematic history.

0:49:220:49:27

It has so little to do with harmony.

0:49:270:49:29

It is just sheer terror.

0:49:290:49:33

The way that music was used in movies to scare people

0:49:330:49:36

really changed after Psycho.

0:49:360:49:38

If you want to make something scary, you put in those strings.

0:49:380:49:41

And you're like "DE-DE-DE-DE!"

0:49:410:49:42

If you slow it down you get, "Da-ran, da-ran."

0:49:420:49:46

What I really adore about Herrmann

0:49:460:49:48

is the way that he realised that in the limitation

0:49:480:49:53

there is actually a much more powerful statement to be made.

0:49:530:49:58

He did the Day The Earth Stood Still,

0:49:580:49:59

and he wrote it for seven theremins and only a couple of horns.

0:49:590:50:03

EERIE TITLE MUSIC PLAYS

0:50:030:50:04

Herrmann wrote Living Doll,

0:50:150:50:18

which I think is one of the best scores that they had on Twilight Zone.

0:50:180:50:22

It's like a bass clarinet or it might have been a contrabassoon,

0:50:220:50:27

a glockenspiel, and a harp.

0:50:270:50:30

He was definitely an experimenter.

0:50:300:50:31

He's the one who taught me that you can kind of do anything,

0:50:310:50:35

anywhere, if it works.

0:50:350:50:36

What I think is also absolutely genius about the shower scene

0:50:360:50:40

is the way Herrmann spotted it.

0:50:400:50:42

The spotting is deciding,

0:50:420:50:44

when do start a cue, when do you end a cue.

0:50:440:50:47

It starts with the toilet flushing.

0:50:470:50:51

She steps into the shower.

0:50:510:50:52

There is no music at all, whatsoever.

0:50:520:50:55

This composer does not prepare us for the onslaught

0:50:550:50:58

that is about to happen.

0:50:580:50:59

When Janet Leigh walks into the shower

0:50:590:51:02

and she pulls the curtain closed

0:51:020:51:04

you can actually hear the sound of the rings on the bar

0:51:040:51:07

and it goes "qu-ii-ii-th".

0:51:070:51:09

You see the villain coming through.

0:51:090:51:11

No music. No music at all.

0:51:110:51:12

The curtain gets swept aside -

0:51:120:51:14

we get the first sting.

0:51:140:51:15

"Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da!"

0:51:150:51:18

This is... This is the rush of Janet Leigh's heartbeat.

0:51:180:51:22

From the moment that we as an audience completely realise,

0:51:220:51:26

"OK, this girl is being brutally butchered here."

0:51:260:51:29

And we see this and the music goes

0:51:290:51:32

"Ba-bom, ba-bo-oom ba-bo-oom!"

0:51:320:51:36

She falls to the floor.

0:51:370:51:39

The heartbeat slows because she's dying.

0:51:390:51:42

And then in her last gasp

0:51:420:51:44

that music basically leaves her

0:51:440:51:47

and all we have is the sound of the falling curtain

0:51:470:51:50

and her head smacking to the ground.

0:51:500:51:52

How genius is that?

0:51:520:51:54

That's Herrmann. That's not Hitch.

0:51:540:51:56

That's Bernie.

0:51:570:51:59

We used the original score, um...

0:51:590:52:01

Bernard Herrmann's original score

0:52:010:52:03

for our temp music, of course...

0:52:030:52:05

while we were editing the film.

0:52:050:52:06

And then Danny came and re-recorded it.

0:52:060:52:08

And it was so beautiful.

0:52:080:52:09

It's a perfect score.

0:52:110:52:13

When I was given the job, I mean, it really was a holy scripture for me.

0:52:130:52:17

And there was one beat in a meeting with some of the producers of like,

0:52:170:52:22

"Maybe because it's in colour we should do it with brass,

0:52:220:52:25

"and woodwinds, and percussion and do it for the full orchestra."

0:52:250:52:28

And I was like, "No, no, no, no!

0:52:280:52:30

"Please, please.

0:52:300:52:31

"I beg you. Don't make me do that."

0:52:310:52:33

I had visions of a very grumpy Bernard Herrmann.

0:52:330:52:38

His ghost coming into my room.

0:52:380:52:40

I'd wake up in the middle of the night and he'd be there going

0:52:400:52:42

"You little asshole. What've you done?"

0:52:420:52:44

A knife is raised up, and now the murder scene begins.

0:52:460:52:52

And the pace of the cutting, it's going to shrink dramatically.

0:52:520:52:56

And there it is.

0:52:560:52:57

Beautiful, cathartic, unbelievably savage.

0:52:570:53:00

Intimate...

0:53:020:53:03

And just wrong on so many levels.

0:53:030:53:06

That... That looks awful.

0:53:060:53:07

That is...

0:53:070:53:08

SHE SIGHS SLOWLY

0:53:080:53:10

Wow. Wow.

0:53:110:53:13

Man, oh, man!

0:53:130:53:15

He has a way of reaching out and grabbing you by the throat

0:53:150:53:18

and saying, "Look! Look! You WILL look at this!"

0:53:180:53:21

It was a perfect stainless steel trap.

0:53:210:53:25

You could not run away from it.

0:53:250:53:26

It was inflicting damage,

0:53:260:53:29

but at the same time, you knew you were in the hands of a master.

0:53:290:53:33

There was nothing to do but submit.

0:53:330:53:35

The Psycho shower scene is cut very much like an action scene.

0:53:350:53:38

George Tomasini was a master.

0:53:380:53:39

What he did with the shower scene changed the language of cinema.

0:53:390:53:43

The editor suddenly became a much more important piece of the puzzle.

0:53:430:53:46

You had to think about a cut.

0:53:460:53:48

Because a cut was going to take you four minutes to make, and splice, and check it.

0:53:480:53:52

And now you can make a cut every 12 seconds or something.

0:53:520:53:55

The planning, the consideration, the thinking,

0:53:550:53:58

that went into designing some of these films is astonishing.

0:53:580:54:01

Motion pictures were 14 years old

0:54:010:54:03

before somebody got the idea that you could make a cut.

0:54:030:54:06

Because it's violent what's happening.

0:54:060:54:09

You're looking at a image of a visual field

0:54:090:54:12

that is very detailed and full of motion

0:54:120:54:15

and then instantly it is removed and replaced with another image.

0:54:150:54:20

In a sense, the audience should, kind of,

0:54:200:54:22

crash through the windshield of this experience.

0:54:220:54:25

Hitchcock and Tomasini knew exactly where the audience was looking.

0:54:250:54:29

They ended up working the disorientation,

0:54:290:54:32

drawing you into Marion's sense of confusion and terror.

0:54:320:54:34

Every single cut that Tomasini does is you...

0:54:360:54:38

By the time you've caught up to what you're looking at in the new shot

0:54:380:54:41

he's already cut to another shot.

0:54:410:54:43

It's a kaleidoscope of these images crashing into your cranium.

0:54:440:54:48

But it's very planned.

0:54:480:54:49

And it feels that way -

0:54:490:54:50

it's order and chaos come crashing up against each other.

0:54:500:54:53

It's a magic act.

0:54:530:54:55

-Truly.

-Yeah.

0:54:550:54:57

Because people walked out of the cinema feeling like they had seen...

0:54:570:55:00

Like, shocked, you know, beyond belief.

0:55:000:55:02

Because there was nothing like that in cinema prior to that.

0:55:020:55:05

And yet they hadn't actually seen the things that they thought they saw.

0:55:050:55:08

That's an incredible thing.

0:55:080:55:10

SHOWER RUNS

0:55:100:55:11

The use of the sound effects, um, are, I think,

0:55:140:55:18

a huge contributor to the violence of the scene.

0:55:180:55:21

The stabbing sounds in particular.

0:55:210:55:23

How do you come up with the sound of what happens

0:55:230:55:27

when a butcher knife strikes flesh?

0:55:270:55:30

The sound man came up with the idea of,

0:55:300:55:32

"What about a knife stabbing melons?"

0:55:320:55:35

So, knowing Hitchcock,

0:55:400:55:41

you would have to bring lots of melons and arrange them on a big table.

0:55:410:55:47

There would be Crenshaw melons, and, you know,

0:55:470:55:49

any kind of melon that you can imagine

0:55:490:55:51

of very, very different sizes.

0:55:510:55:52

So, I think they had about two dozen.

0:55:520:55:55

And some backups.

0:55:550:55:57

So, there's the prop man stabbing melon.

0:55:590:56:02

Melon, melon, melon.

0:56:020:56:03

Next. Melon, melon, melon.

0:56:030:56:05

And so by the end of it Hitchcock knew the one that sounded most like sinew

0:56:050:56:09

and sounded the way he thought it should sound.

0:56:090:56:11

So, when they were through demonstrating all of these different melons

0:56:110:56:16

all he said was...

0:56:160:56:19

"Casaba."

0:56:190:56:20

That's all they needed to know.

0:56:200:56:23

I think the whole key to the sound of the Casaba melon

0:56:380:56:41

is that the inner gooey part is very small

0:56:410:56:44

and there's a very thick layer of fruit that you have to stab through.

0:56:440:56:48

It's very dense.

0:56:480:56:49

-Dense.

-Not hollow.

0:56:490:56:50

Like a lot of the other melons sounded a little bit hollow.

0:56:500:56:53

And I'm sure with his eyes closed, Hitchcock was probably hearing that.

0:56:530:56:57

To my ear, Casaba melon sounds more like dry,

0:56:570:57:01

bony stabbing as opposed to wet, gooey stabbing.

0:57:010:57:04

The starchiness and the thickness

0:57:040:57:06

probably gives you more of that viscera.

0:57:060:57:07

-The crunchiness, or...

-Viscera?

-Viscera.

0:57:070:57:10

Hitchcock also had them bring a sirloin.

0:57:110:57:14

A really big...

0:57:140:57:16

..thing of sirloin.

0:57:160:57:18

I don't eat me and so I nearly nauseous telling you this

0:57:180:57:22

but, in any case, Hitchcock thought that would be a really great idea.

0:57:220:57:25

And they did in fact stab a big, big, big slab of steak.

0:57:250:57:31

And so that sound is interspersed with melon.

0:57:310:57:33

RECORDINGS OF MELON AND STEAK BEING STABBED

0:57:380:57:40

And the sound man took it home and had it for dinner that night.

0:57:430:57:46

The stabbing sound in Psycho is not a Hollywood sound effect.

0:57:460:57:51

It is a natural sound effect.

0:57:510:57:53

Which makes it all the more horrible.

0:57:530:57:55

Like, you could take the combination of, like, an arrow...

0:57:550:57:58

A literal arrow or an axe hitting

0:57:580:57:59

and you add to that something like, pipe-in-the-mud kind of "goosh".

0:57:590:58:03

And you add to that some sort of a, like, a leather rip

0:58:030:58:06

and you could make the sound designed stab that would feel horrible.

0:58:060:58:11

Marion turns.

0:58:110:58:13

We have three close ups getting increasingly tighter

0:58:130:58:16

to the point that now we're looking at nothing but her open mouth.

0:58:160:58:20

The three quick cuts which makes me happy to be an editor.

0:58:200:58:23

I've seen some of Saul Bass's boards.

0:58:230:58:26

And you'll see cut one, and cut three.

0:58:260:58:28

But the idea of drawing the three together really feels like something

0:58:280:58:32

that's kind of a joyful discovery

0:58:320:58:34

in feeling your way through things in the cutting room.

0:58:340:58:36

Hitchcock does the thing here that he does and The Birds too,

0:58:360:58:40

to show something that's shocking -

0:58:400:58:42

an on axis cut.

0:58:420:58:44

Boom, boom, boom.

0:58:440:58:46

It's a psychological cut.

0:58:460:58:47

People always think it's something that Hitchcock came up with,

0:58:470:58:50

but I actually always traced it back to the original Frankenstein

0:58:500:58:54

directed by James Whale, in 1931.

0:58:540:58:57

In a way it was the same effect

0:58:570:58:58

because they were showing you something so grotesque, something that you had never seen before,

0:58:580:59:02

people wanted to go to the movie just to see how shocking it was.

0:59:020:59:06

There is something called an American cut when you're editing

0:59:060:59:09

which is just like jump-cutting into a close-up from a wide shot.

0:59:090:59:12

And I know whenever I do it in a movie

0:59:120:59:13

when I'm working with Sam Raimi, he is always, like, tortured.

0:59:130:59:16

He's like, "Why do you do those stupid cuts!"

0:59:160:59:18

I explain, "It's an American cut."

0:59:180:59:19

And he says, "That's more like a Canadian cut."

0:59:190:59:21

There is something really visceral about cutting from a wide shot,

0:59:210:59:25

jumping into a close-up.

0:59:250:59:26

Now we have a lower angle that is not a subjective angle.

0:59:270:59:32

This is not what Marion sees.

0:59:320:59:34

But it's maximised for threat.

0:59:340:59:37

There's a lot of defensive shots that make it look like

0:59:370:59:40

she's trying to fight him off.

0:59:400:59:41

That makes you feel that you're there.

0:59:410:59:42

We've jumped the stageline here,

0:59:440:59:46

which is another disorienting thing - in violence.

0:59:460:59:50

And in love, interestingly.

0:59:500:59:52

It's actually good to cross the stageline...

0:59:520:59:54

..because it gives you that subjective sense

0:59:550:59:58

of a kind of a dizzy, delirium.

0:59:581:00:00

You see Norman's hand with the knife,

1:00:021:00:04

come laterally across and break the lines.

1:00:041:00:07

It's so great because it's violating the purity.

1:00:071:00:11

The water is going in the opposite direction of the knife,

1:00:111:00:13

so there's all these great angles that are, again,

1:00:131:00:15

like German expressionist cinema

1:00:151:00:17

that Hitchcock had been exposed to in the early '20s

1:00:171:00:20

when he first started his career.

1:00:201:00:22

This overhead shot - it's like the whole shot is out of focus.

1:00:231:00:25

And they used it anyway.

1:00:251:00:27

I can imagine sitting in with studio executives now

1:00:271:00:30

and I'm saying, "Oh, you've got this one shot that's so out of focus.

1:00:301:00:33

"We really didn't need to take that shot out of the edit."

1:00:331:00:35

But thank goodness they left it in because it's such a great shot.

1:00:351:00:38

The knife is already through the frame before we, the audience,

1:00:381:00:42

are really able to lock on to what we are looking at.

1:00:421:00:45

Our face gravitates to Marion,

1:00:451:00:47

and then to the negative space to see where did the knife go.

1:00:471:00:50

They force the audience to fill in the blank.

1:00:501:00:53

Her right to right-to-left movement

1:00:531:00:55

carries us right to the cut

1:00:551:00:56

and right where her face is, there's the knife.

1:00:561:01:00

That knife never makes connection with her

1:01:001:01:02

but in my mind I see him stabbing her. It's crazy!

1:01:021:01:06

Hitchcock is going in 360 degrees.

1:01:061:01:08

All of these things that you're not supposed to do in narrative

1:01:081:01:11

storytelling, he's doing to give you this feeling

1:01:111:01:14

of complete disorientation.

1:01:141:01:16

Every time we cut back to Norman's form, we're grounded again.

1:01:171:01:21

Back to Norman, but now we're slightly tighter.

1:01:211:01:24

Cut to Marion, we are tighter.

1:01:241:01:25

Norman, tighter.

1:01:251:01:27

And then, ending -

1:01:271:01:29

intersecting water, over and over again - to the shot.

1:01:291:01:32

The one shot that convinces me, as a viewer,

1:01:321:01:34

that Marion has been stabbed.

1:01:341:01:36

The knife never connects with the skin?

1:01:381:01:40

But what about this shot here?

1:01:401:01:42

I'm telling you, folks, THAT is penetration.

1:01:421:01:45

Hitchcock got away with showing my belly button on film.

1:01:451:01:50

In all the beach towel movies, you know, with Annette Funicello

1:01:501:01:54

they had bikinis but they had to have them

1:01:541:01:56

up over their belly button.

1:01:561:01:58

He explained to me that...

1:01:581:02:00

He says, "the Paramount special-effects department made for me a torso of rubber.

1:02:001:02:06

"He plunged the knife and blood would spurt out.

1:02:061:02:08

"Oh, it was wonderful. I didn't use it at all."

1:02:081:02:10

"You didn't use it at all?"

1:02:111:02:13

"No, no. The knife never touches the body."

1:02:131:02:16

It goes back to Eisenstein

1:02:161:02:18

and the whole idea of editing, cutting, montage.

1:02:181:02:22

He didn't want a plastic knife or anything.

1:02:221:02:24

He used the knife.

1:02:241:02:26

He had marks on there like blood.

1:02:261:02:28

And he pressed it against my stomach and then pulled it out.

1:02:281:02:32

And then, in the film, they reversed it

1:02:341:02:36

showing it going in.

1:02:361:02:38

Hitchcock, I think,

1:02:401:02:41

it's safe to say spent an entire career

1:02:411:02:43

thumbing his nose at the censors.

1:02:431:02:45

The last shot of North by Northwest is a train entering a tunnel.

1:02:471:02:52

Like, a very unsubtle sexual metaphor.

1:02:521:02:55

And then we pick that up post coitus in Psycho.

1:02:551:02:59

Wow. That's interesting.

1:02:591:03:01

LAUGHTER

1:03:021:03:04

You know, the production code administration still mattered at that time.

1:03:041:03:10

And then in trying to get the movie approved by the Legion of Decency,

1:03:101:03:16

if either one of those had been a problem as far as

1:03:161:03:19

the production and distribution of Psycho,

1:03:191:03:22

it would not have been the phenomenon that it was.

1:03:221:03:25

There was a little negotiation going on.

1:03:251:03:27

He said, "I'll reshoot the beginning.

1:03:271:03:29

"You can come and watch me shoot it."

1:03:291:03:32

They never showed up.

1:03:321:03:33

All he did was tell the whole crew,

1:03:331:03:36

"We're just going to send the scene back.

1:03:361:03:38

"We're not going to cut one frame from it."

1:03:381:03:41

And he didn't. He just kept basically telling them

1:03:411:03:43

"You're prudes. And you're actually horn-dog prudes,

1:03:431:03:47

"because you're seeing something that isn't there."

1:03:471:03:50

So, everything stayed in the way he wanted it.

1:03:501:03:52

And he got away with it!

1:03:521:03:53

SHE CHUCKLES

1:03:531:03:54

You contrast Hitchcock making a disturbing,

1:03:541:03:57

shocking movie that revolves around sex and violence and a deeply

1:03:571:04:02

disturbed protagonist, with a movie

1:04:021:04:04

that came out the very same year,

1:04:041:04:06

within a few months of it, like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.

1:04:061:04:10

That movie a lot of people see as having

1:04:101:04:13

ruined Michael Powell's career.

1:04:131:04:15

You know, Val Lewton, who these guys know I'm obsessed with,

1:04:151:04:17

but, you know, he was the master of "You saw nothing! Ever!"

1:04:171:04:22

There's no cat in Cat People.

1:04:221:04:24

-Right.

-You know?

-Right, right.

1:04:241:04:26

There's no cat people in Cat People.

1:04:261:04:27

There's shadows. There's some shadow.

1:04:271:04:30

Every one of his films was,

1:04:301:04:31

the title promised something that you never actually saw.

1:04:311:04:34

There's no leopard man in Leopard Man.

1:04:341:04:37

And the most chilling murder in all of Val Lewton's canon

1:04:371:04:40

takes place on the other side of a closed door

1:04:401:04:43

from the perspective of a mother who's hearing her daughter get slaughtered.

1:04:431:04:47

And you just see the blood seep in under the crack in the door.

1:04:471:04:50

You never see it. You never see it at all.

1:04:501:04:53

And that seems to me like the roots of the shower scene.

1:04:531:04:56

-Totally.

-I would like to throw one in there...

1:04:561:04:58

-OK.

-One film into the mix which has one particular mind-blowing scene,

1:04:581:05:03

which I would call horror, and that's Irreversible.

1:05:031:05:06

-Yeah.

-And here's the thing about that rape scene.

1:05:061:05:08

It's like, it's... What is it, like 15 minutes long?

1:05:081:05:11

I think, 10 minutes.

1:05:111:05:12

And they don't really show anything, there's no nudity,

1:05:121:05:16

there's no nothing. It's just one shot that lingers.

1:05:161:05:21

Don't make it...

1:05:211:05:23

The rape scene in Irreversible and the shower scene in Psycho

1:05:231:05:26

are exact inverses.

1:05:261:05:28

-The shower scene is incredibly close and frenetic.

-Yeah.

1:05:281:05:33

And the rape scene in Irreversible is incredibly distant and still.

1:05:331:05:38

The shots of the mother are out of focus,

1:05:381:05:41

the focus is on the water, not the mother.

1:05:411:05:43

You could argue that this is Marion's subjective point of view,

1:05:431:05:47

that she doesn't see who it is clearly because she's so confused.

1:05:471:05:51

Very quick cutting here.

1:05:531:05:54

On the average one shot every 3/4 of a second, 18 frames.

1:05:541:06:00

And the audience in 1960 would be having,

1:06:001:06:05

they would be seeing something

1:06:051:06:06

in a way that they were not used to seeing it.

1:06:061:06:09

I was always surprised that they got away with this.

1:06:091:06:12

Just the amount of, like, naked breast that they were able to show.

1:06:121:06:15

It had to be done impressionistically.

1:06:151:06:17

So, it was done with little pieces of film.

1:06:181:06:21

The head, the feet, the hand, parts of the torso.

1:06:211:06:27

The shot of her feet is the very first cut of blood

1:06:271:06:29

that we've had in this entire piece.

1:06:291:06:32

The blood starts to spatter into the water rather than flow.

1:06:321:06:36

You know, you see spots hitting like a dark rain.

1:06:361:06:39

And then it just is absorbed by the water and it spreads out in a very

1:06:391:06:43

kind of haunting, a haunting way.

1:06:431:06:46

My mom loves to tell me that,

1:06:461:06:48

"Oh, you know that the blood going down the drain in Psycho

1:06:481:06:50

-"is chocolate..."

-Chocolate syrup.

-Chocolate syrup, right?

1:06:501:06:53

So, is anyone in this room going to tell us that that's not actually chocolate syrup?

1:06:531:06:57

They had a can of Hershey's syrup,

1:06:571:06:59

which is watered-down and that's what they used for blood.

1:06:591:07:02

But they had to dribble it around me, and on me.

1:07:021:07:05

I deliberately made the film in black and white

1:07:051:07:08

because I knew that if it had been in colour,

1:07:081:07:11

the draining away of blood would've been too repulsive.

1:07:111:07:14

SHOWER RUNS

1:07:141:07:15

The knife comes through and even though it's just swinging through

1:07:171:07:21

frame, my brain is telling me

1:07:211:07:22

she's just gotten stabbed squarely in the back.

1:07:221:07:25

And then to the sneaky cut that Tomasini has put into the film,

1:07:251:07:31

starting here with her hand out of focus at the front,

1:07:311:07:34

it's going towards the wall, your eyes are super confused here

1:07:341:07:38

because you're looking at a negative space and just the wall tile.

1:07:381:07:42

Her hand starts to come in and instantly there's a jump cut.

1:07:421:07:47

If you watch that at full speed it just looks like...bam!

1:07:471:07:52

It ends up making it feel like she's slamming against the wall.

1:07:521:07:55

His exit is also tremendous, that quick move, without looking back.

1:07:551:08:00

He doesn't even stand there to make sure she's dead. He leaves.

1:08:001:08:03

It's almost like a time cut, where he's already out the door.

1:08:031:08:06

And I think part of it is they were really trying to hide,

1:08:061:08:09

you know, who it was and they were tired of showing that lame

1:08:091:08:11

shot where his head looked like a mushroom.

1:08:111:08:13

The shot of the hand, it looks like a starfish against the wall.

1:08:131:08:17

It's just a hand.

1:08:171:08:18

The least important part of her body right now after she's been

1:08:181:08:21

hacked to death.

1:08:211:08:22

And you see the life ebbing out of her body through her hand.

1:08:221:08:26

So the scene becomes all about her hands, if you watch it.

1:08:261:08:29

Hand. And then hand. And you watch it go.

1:08:291:08:35

Trying to grab onto something. Hand going down the wall.

1:08:351:08:37

She turns around, where is her hand? That's the big question.

1:08:371:08:40

And if you actually watch the opening scene of Jurassic Park

1:08:401:08:43

it's the same thing. It doesn't matter, that guy that got eaten

1:08:431:08:46

by the velociraptor, you barely see his face.

1:08:461:08:48

But what's important is he's grabbing on to his hand.

1:08:481:08:53

Hand reaches out.

1:08:531:08:54

Hand's touching the thing.

1:08:541:08:56

And I think that's part of the way that he kind of is able to

1:08:561:08:59

bring the audience into her death, rather than just watching her die.

1:08:591:09:04

Now she's begging for her life, trying to hold herself up.

1:09:041:09:08

The way that her hair leaves a trail behind her, it follows her down.

1:09:081:09:13

I mean, it's an incredibly haunting image. And it's a wall.

1:09:131:09:17

You know, you had depth before and she's just flat against nothingness.

1:09:171:09:21

Nobody did this before.

1:09:211:09:23

Deaths were quick in movies

1:09:251:09:28

and although actors loved to make the most of them...

1:09:281:09:31

This is so obviously directed in such a way.

1:09:311:09:35

You know, in Torn Curtain is this endless scene of trying to

1:09:351:09:38

kill someone. It's not bloody but it's graphic.

1:09:381:09:41

Even Frenzy is fairly graphic compared to Psycho.

1:09:411:09:46

But Psycho has the effect of being graphic,

1:09:461:09:48

much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre later was.

1:09:481:09:50

I love how slow it is, how much time it takes.

1:09:521:09:56

There's all this negative space on the left-hand side.

1:09:561:09:58

This is absolutely intentional.

1:09:581:10:00

Hitchcock is mirroring the shot at the beginning of the sequence

1:10:001:10:04

where Marion is showering in exactly the right-hand side of the frame.

1:10:041:10:07

It is the book end that makes the shower scene.

1:10:071:10:11

My favourite cut is the hand coming around onto the curtain

1:10:111:10:14

and it's all of a sudden from the staccato rhythms you end up

1:10:141:10:17

with this really fluid shot that has a sort of almost,

1:10:171:10:21

kind of poetic and sad quality to it.

1:10:211:10:23

She's dying and there's a softness to it

1:10:231:10:25

and it makes it just instantly emotional.

1:10:251:10:29

It's really, really a great cut.

1:10:291:10:31

It's one of the best cuts I've ever seen.

1:10:311:10:34

You can just barely see the outline of my breast in that shot.

1:10:341:10:39

That's my hand. And you can tell the difference on my knuckles, there.

1:10:391:10:43

The ring finger is disfigured a bit.

1:10:431:10:46

The nail is darker than a regular fingernail.

1:10:461:10:51

When I was three years old I reached down to

1:10:511:10:54

help my brother on a push lawnmower and - pssht! - cut it off.

1:10:541:10:59

This is the shot that Cecil B DeMille actually did first

1:11:011:11:06

in The Ten Commandments

1:11:061:11:08

where Sally Lung pulls down on the curtain.

1:11:081:11:11

This shot, the down shot, she just feels so vulnerable,

1:11:141:11:17

like a dying animal.

1:11:171:11:20

Again, such a bold shot because so much nudity is revealed.

1:11:201:11:23

There is a shot in the shower scene that was never used,

1:11:231:11:28

it was one of the most heartbreaking shots I've ever seen.

1:11:281:11:32

Anne Heche, she was definitely willing to do stuff.

1:11:321:11:35

That one shot at the end where she's slumped over,

1:11:351:11:38

that was the shot that Hitchcock could not use.

1:11:381:11:41

But it was storyboarded.

1:11:411:11:43

There was objections to using that

1:11:431:11:46

and perhaps Hitch felt it wasn't really necessary anyway.

1:11:461:11:50

Then we return to the motif of the shower head,

1:11:501:11:53

the impassive eye which has just watched this horrible thing happen.

1:11:531:11:57

This shot of the shower head at the beginning of the scene was

1:11:571:12:00

one of joy, she was going to get a new start and now that same

1:12:001:12:04

water is washing away the evidence of her existence and the murder.

1:12:041:12:09

The water keeps running and the blood flows

1:12:091:12:13

but the heart is stopping.

1:12:131:12:14

It's just such an amazing image to see her life flowing down the drain.

1:12:141:12:19

What a metaphor that is.

1:12:191:12:21

And it switches to the eye, right?

1:12:231:12:26

Oh, come on.

1:12:281:12:30

That's so good.

1:12:311:12:33

I wonder how long this shot is, how long she had to hold.

1:12:331:12:36

To get her eye to stay open?

1:12:361:12:37

Just to make sure her eye didn't twitch even a tiny bit.

1:12:371:12:40

Oh, my God, that's incredible.

1:12:411:12:44

The pointless spiralling of the universe

1:12:441:12:46

and the way that everything is ultimately

1:12:461:12:48

drawn down the plughole towards oblivion, towards meaningless death.

1:12:481:12:53

I think to some extent we are looking at Hitchcock's

1:12:531:12:56

fears as well as his obsessions.

1:12:561:12:58

You see it in Barton Fink, you see it in so many movies

1:13:001:13:02

and you're like, "Why is he going inside the drain?

1:13:021:13:05

"Are we going to go inside?"

1:13:051:13:07

That is the moment of Psycho where everything changes.

1:13:081:13:13

This was made by an auteur film-maker

1:13:131:13:18

and that is a very personal stamp.

1:13:181:13:21

It's a rupture in the movie

1:13:221:13:25

but the movie never achieves this kind of poetry again and you begin

1:13:251:13:29

to realise that, "Oh, this was what really mattered most to Hitchcock."

1:13:291:13:34

Tomasini has done a clockwise turn optically which then,

1:13:341:13:38

right about here, hooks back up to the 24-frame footage.

1:13:381:13:43

I'm just amazed they were able to get that clean.

1:13:451:13:48

Usually when you do an optical it's pretty grainy but it looks

1:13:481:13:51

so smooth and so beautiful.

1:13:511:13:53

It's surprising and seamless where they go from live action,

1:13:531:13:56

it's like one of the greatest opticals in the history of movies.

1:13:561:13:59

It's also kind of like what the title sequence is doing

1:13:591:14:02

in Vertigo, it's a theme that runs through this film

1:14:021:14:05

and then later on, of course. It's not style just for style's sake,

1:14:051:14:08

it's got content.

1:14:081:14:10

The cameras were huge and very difficult to manipulate.

1:14:101:14:15

You can actually see pictures of Hitchcock behind a Mitchell

1:14:151:14:20

and you get a sense of what it was like riding on that

1:14:201:14:23

carriage behind that huge locomotive of a camera.

1:14:231:14:27

Whereas today it's a snap, you just do it like Gus Van Sant.

1:14:271:14:32

In the remake he did it all live action.

1:14:321:14:35

The pull-back from her eye was a whole robotic camera move.

1:14:411:14:46

I seriously followed the original film shot by shot.

1:14:461:14:51

I was able to cut it exactly like the original, and we watched it

1:14:511:14:56

and it was weird and it didn't work.

1:14:561:14:59

I said, "Well, Gus, come over, watch the scene. I have a few reservations

1:14:591:15:04

"of how it's playing right now

1:15:041:15:06

"and it doesn't feel like the shower scene yet."

1:15:061:15:09

We went in and tried to make it a little more Gus Van Sant-y.

1:15:091:15:15

To duplicate something as iconic as the shower scene,

1:15:151:15:18

I really think it wasn't going to work.

1:15:181:15:23

And it just didn't.

1:15:231:15:25

I always loved the placement of those drops of water cos

1:15:261:15:30

they're like tears.

1:15:301:15:32

Right at the end it was a little flicker in her eye,

1:15:321:15:35

a little highlight in her eye.

1:15:351:15:38

And you can see her eye move.

1:15:381:15:41

There's a tight, slight flick of the eye, there.

1:15:411:15:44

Hitchcock almost fetishistically lingers in this postmortem moment.

1:15:461:15:52

This is what happens after you die and no-one turns off the water.

1:15:521:15:56

Hitch had a little snap of the finger to let Janet know

1:15:561:15:59

when the camera had past and was going to pan into the room.

1:15:591:16:03

It took a lot of takes.

1:16:031:16:05

I can feel the moleskin pulling away from my top part and so I could

1:16:051:16:13

-feel this, it was just of going...

-SHE SQUEAKS

1:16:131:16:17

..and I thought, "You know what?

1:16:171:16:20

"I don't want to do this damn thing again. I really don't want to."

1:16:201:16:24

And there are all the guys on the scaffolding and I said,

1:16:241:16:28

"I'm not going to be modest. Let 'em look."

1:16:281:16:32

Why would you cut to the shower there?

1:16:331:16:35

I don't think the reason has anything to do with artistic

1:16:351:16:39

decision. It's the solution to some problem that he had.

1:16:391:16:42

After my grandfather filmed Psycho

1:16:421:16:44

and it had been shown to all the executives,

1:16:441:16:46

the last person he showed it to was my grandmother

1:16:461:16:49

and they were sitting in the screening screen,

1:16:491:16:51

and he's panning out and she looks at my grandfather and says,

1:16:511:16:53

"Hitch, you can't release this."

1:16:531:16:55

And he said, "Why not?" She goes, "Janet Leigh took a breath."

1:16:551:16:58

They couldn't reshoot it.

1:16:581:16:59

Janet was gone, they didn't have the budget,

1:16:591:17:02

so they simply cut back to the shower head...spewing water.

1:17:021:17:07

And then that cynical camera move.

1:17:091:17:13

She made her moral decision and this is what it got her.

1:17:131:17:16

There's an image of the uncaring universe, if you want one.

1:17:181:17:21

You see the headline there - "OKAY" - it is not OK.

1:17:211:17:24

Nothing is OK.

1:17:241:17:25

He always comes back to his MacGuffin which is the 40,000.

1:17:251:17:30

He throws the newspaper into the quagmire, it goes down with the car.

1:17:301:17:35

And the audience says, "That's the money

1:17:351:17:39

"that we thought was important in this story,

1:17:391:17:41

"it's totally unimportant."

1:17:411:17:43

This is the thing in the movie that always tortured me.

1:17:431:17:46

The greatest scene in movie history ends on a sour note with

1:17:461:17:49

a bad ADR line. That has been the doom of so many movies.

1:17:491:17:53

Here comes Norman.

1:17:591:18:00

Just wondering what happened and oh, my, he can't believe it.

1:18:001:18:04

Another murder at the motel. How did that happen?

1:18:041:18:07

It's an extraordinary aftermath, it's a crucial piece

1:18:081:18:12

of the film-making to sort of let the consequence of it actually land.

1:18:121:18:16

It's not about getting the blood stains out of the tub

1:18:161:18:20

it's about this incredibly laborious process

1:18:201:18:25

that this unbearably damaged soul needs to work through.

1:18:251:18:33

It demands not just that we watch as we've watched the murder

1:18:331:18:38

of Marion Crane, we're also voyeurs to the horror of Norman's world.

1:18:381:18:44

For me, the clean up represents Alfred Hitchcock's sense

1:18:441:18:49

of orderliness, sense of "I wasn't sexually aroused by this woman,

1:18:491:18:55

"and I'm just going to pretend that this unhappy episode just

1:18:551:19:00

"didn't even occur."

1:19:001:19:02

I think that cleaning always represents sexual guilt.

1:19:021:19:08

You care about this guy. And I know it sounds crazy but you do.

1:19:081:19:11

You want to know what's going to happen to him, you want to know

1:19:111:19:15

is he going to be free of this or is it going to consume him?

1:19:151:19:18

The fact that he is able to get you to care is

1:19:181:19:22

one of the miracles of the movie.

1:19:221:19:24

Psycho obviously has influence on a whole host of movies.

1:19:261:19:31

Psycho is the mother of the slasher genre.

1:19:311:19:34

The shower scene is really the first fully sexualised on-screen

1:19:341:19:38

knife attack.

1:19:381:19:40

You have Mario Bava in Italy and he's taking

1:19:401:19:43

the visuals of the Psycho scene and in Italy in the '60s

1:19:431:19:46

they didn't have the same censorship laws that we had in America.

1:19:461:19:50

Bava takes the Hitchcock style and really creates

1:19:501:19:53

the Italian giallo film.

1:19:531:19:56

Dario Argento burst onto the scene with Bird Of The Crystal Plumage,

1:19:561:19:59

determined to present murder as a form of fine art,

1:19:591:20:03

consistently sexualising

1:20:031:20:04

and fetishises the killings and tries to present them

1:20:041:20:08

as something beautiful, cathartic and almost orgasmic,

1:20:081:20:11

which happens again and again in his work.

1:20:111:20:14

Then, of course,

1:20:141:20:16

the American films started imitating the Italian films

1:20:161:20:18

and you get the wave of slasher films in the '80s,

1:20:181:20:21

kicking off with John Carpenter's Halloween.

1:20:211:20:23

Psycho might have also really started the rather negative

1:20:231:20:27

trend of victims undressing before they're butchered, which is

1:20:271:20:30

something that haunted slasher cinema throughout the '70s.

1:20:301:20:33

Martin Scorsese talks about the construction of the fight

1:20:331:20:38

in Raging Bull with Sugar Ray Robinson.

1:20:381:20:42

I literally got a shot-by-shot breakdown of the shower

1:20:421:20:44

scene in Psycho and laid out my original storyboards for this one

1:20:441:20:48

sequence, shot-by-shot, and shot it in that order.

1:20:481:20:51

I don't believe film influences the culture in this way any more.

1:20:531:20:57

When a moment of violence is so suggestive, so new,

1:20:571:21:01

so unlike anything we've seen that it just becomes

1:21:011:21:04

part of the cultural conversation,

1:21:041:21:06

I think that's what happened with the shower scene.

1:21:061:21:09

I'm on this TV show called Scream Queens.

1:22:071:22:11

I've been asked to get in the shower and take pictures before,

1:22:111:22:15

I've been asked to recreate it and I've said no every time

1:22:151:22:21

because of course this is my mother's legacy

1:22:211:22:23

and it is not mine to play in, it's her sandbox.

1:22:231:22:28

But my mother's been gone now over ten years

1:22:281:22:32

and this is a great show and it was

1:22:321:22:36

a really respectful, funny homage.

1:22:361:22:40

And so the red devil comes along, he rips open the curtain -

1:22:421:22:46

but I'm not there.

1:22:461:22:48

And that second I come from behind the bathroom door, attack him,

1:22:481:22:54

and right before, I do I look at him and go,

1:22:541:22:56

"I saw that movie, like, 50 times."

1:22:561:22:59

I went back to Chicago, shot the September 1960 cover.

1:23:071:23:12

I worked at the Playboy Club until probably October that year.

1:23:141:23:18

I was one of the original Bunnies there. I never mentioned Psycho.

1:23:181:23:24

The shot I didn't like was when Tony Perkins pulls me

1:23:241:23:30

out of the tub and wraps me in the shower curtain.

1:23:301:23:34

He picks me up to carry me out to the trunk, he gets me,

1:23:341:23:37

I don't know, about six, nine inches off the floor and drops me

1:23:371:23:41

back down because he wasn't in a position to pick up a dead weight.

1:23:411:23:45

He picks me up, puts me on his knees and then...

1:23:451:23:48

And that's me.

1:23:491:23:51

And that's out to the car and that's the end of me.

1:23:511:23:55

CHAIR CREAKS

1:24:161:24:20

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