Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock had almost fifty films to his name when he decided to take on an adaptation of a Robert Bloch novel that was inspired by a grisly true crime story. The studio didn’t want him to make the movie. He was warned against it, told the subject matter was in poor taste. So he financed it with his own money. The result: the most popular and financially successful film of his already impressive career. And one of the most popular movies in cinematic history. The film was Psycho (watch it HERE), and we’re going to find out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
The story of Psycho begins with the same real world crimes that would also inspire the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deranged, and The Silence of the Lambs, among others. In Wisconsin farmland there lived a man named Ed Gein, whose world fell apart when his overbearing mother passed away. Left alone in the home they shared, Gein boarded up the rooms his mother used the most, leaving them in pristine condition. The remaining rooms would soon be filled with the grotesque evidence of his new hobby; grave robbing. He would keep an eye on the local obituaries so he could dig up the fresh graves of older women who resembled his mother. He would take their unearthed bodies home with him and turn them into twisted art projects. Like the family in Texas Chainsaw, he would make furniture out of their bones and skin. And like Leatherface, he would wear their flesh over his own. His graveyard activities were never noticed. Gein wasn’t caught until he started murdering women as well.
Author Robert Bloch lived just forty miles away from Gein, and he was fascinated by the newspaper reports of his neighbor’s crimes. There wasn’t a lot of information available at that time, as the details of what had been found in the Gein house were too disgusting to print. Nonetheless, Bloch was inspired to write a story to figure out how something so awful could happen. Freudian concepts were popular at the time, so he imagined the perpetrator would be a man who had a twisted relationship with his mother. Just like Gein had with his mother. Unaware that Gein said he carried out his crimes while in a daze, Bloch figured that it would help deflect suspicion if a person committed their crimes while in an altered state of mind. Like being under the control of a different personality. He came up with a character named Norman Bates, who was raised by an overbearing mother – and when he snapped and killed her, he couldn’t accept that she was gone. He dug up her body, kept her in her old bedroom, and carried on as if she were still alive. He would talk to himself like he was having conversations with his mother. And sometimes he would fully slip into her personality and dress in her clothes. This isn’t so far from the reality of Ed Gein. When Bloch learned more about Gein and realized how easily he had managed to create a fictional character who was close to the truth, he had trouble looking at himself in the mirror.
Bloch made Norman Bates the proprietor of a motel, because it would allow him easy access to victims. The unlucky person who checks into Bates Motel at the beginning of the story is named Mary Crane because Gein’s first victim was named Mary Hogan. Bloch built up his Mary with a story in which she has stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer so she can start a life with her boyfriend, a man named Sam Loomis. Sam owns a hardware store not far from Bates Motel. Gein’s second victim, or at least the second of the only two people he confessed to murdering, was the owner of a hardware store. The idea was to present Mary as the heroine of the story, you expect to follow her throughout because she has issues that need to be resolved. Then she steps into a shower at Bates Motel and is shockingly removed from the story early on, murdered by Norman. In the guise of his mother.
The first draft of the Psycho novel was written in just six weeks. The finished product was published in the summer of 1959, less than two years after the arrest of Ed Gein. The film rights were quickly snatched up in a blind bid situation for the price of nine thousand dollars. Bloch didn’t find out until later that the person who had purchased the rights to his novel was Alfred Hitchcock… and he really came to regret the fact that his deal didn’t include any percentage of the film’s profits.
Hitchcock was coming off one of his bigger films, North by Northwest, and was looking to do something different when Psycho caught his attention. He had taken note of how successful low budget horror movies tended to be, and wondered if one from a major director would do even better. He saw Bloch’s story as the chance to make something along those lines – and the fact that it would give him the opportunity to shock the audience by killing off the character who was supposedly the heroine really appealed to his sense of humor. Even though he was one of the most well known and highly respected directors of his time, this project also gave him the chance to prove himself all over again. A few years earlier, a French filmmaker named Henri-Georges Clouzot had beaten him to the film rights to a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called She Who Was No More, which was turned into a movie called Les Diaboliques. That film had been a huge success at the box office and with critics, and led to Clouzot being hailed as “the French Hitchcock”. Hitchcock got the rights to a different Boileau / Narcejac novel, From Among the Dead, which he turned into Vertigo. And while Vertigo is now often referred to as one of the best movies ever made, at the time of its release it was written off as a failure. With Psycho, Hitchcock could make up for missing out on Les Diaboliques – and thrill the audience even more than Clouzot had.
First, Hitchcock had to overcome the fact that the studio he was set up at, Paramount, had zero interest in making a movie based on Bloch’s novel. They didn’t like anything about this project. They refused to finance it, and wouldn’t even let Hitchcock film it on the studio lot. Luckily, Hitchcock had back-up options, since he had a successful anthology series called Alfred Hitchcock Presents airing on television. He would mortgage his house and fund Psycho himself. Then he would use the crew from the TV series to make the movie as quickly and cheaply as possible, almost as if it were just a long episode of the show. It would be shot in black and white to save money. He even deferred his usual director’s fee of two hundred and fifty thousand. In exchange, he wanted sixty percent ownership of the film. All Paramount would have to do is distribute the finished product, which he would shoot on the Universal lot. Paramount agreed to the deal. Years later, Universal ended up owning the film completely.
The Paramount execs weren’t the only ones telling Hitchcock he shouldn’t make Psycho. Joan Harrison, the head of his production company Shamley, told Hitchcock he was going too far with this one and turned down the offer of profit points. Points Bloch would have gladly taken. Hitchcock’s producing partner Herbert Coleman helped him assemble the project, but all along was hoping it would fall apart. When it became obvious that Psycho would make it into production, he stepped away from it.
Hitchcock was undeterred. He kept Psycho moving forward at a quick pace. He hired Alfred Hitchcock Presents writer James P. Cavanagh to handle the adaptation. When Cavanagh’s script wasn’t sufficient, he tossed it out and took the recommendation of hiring Joseph Stefano. Stefano wasn’t a fan of Bloch’s novel and thought this was a disappointing choice for Hitchcock – and he let the director know this in the first meeting they had. He listed the problems he had with the source material, including how unappealing Norman Bates had been on the page. But when Hitchcock mentioned that he envisioned Norman being played by Anthony Perkins, an actor Stefano had previously written an unmade project for, the writer started to see some potential in this story. Stefano turned in a draft that went over better than Cavanagh’s had, and he and Hitchcock worked together to perfect the script. In a couple months, they had it in such good condition that Hitchcock was ready to sit down with Stefano and break down the script shot by shot. Stefano said Hitchcock seemed sad when this process was over, as he enjoyed visualizing the scenes that were on paper more than he enjoyed having to go to set and actually put it all on film.
Hitchcock gathered a strong cast to bring the characters to life on screen. Although he wanted to get away from big name stars with this film, he looked for a known actress to play Mary Crane, who had to be renamed Marion when it was discovered that there were a couple Mary Cranes living in Phoenix, Arizona. The same place the fictional character is from. The more familiar the audience was with the actress, the more surprised they would be to see her get killed off. After going through a list of candidates, which included Piper Laurie, Hope Lange, and North by Northwest star Eva Marie Saint, Hitchcock ended up choosing Janet Leigh, the wife of sex symbol Tony Curtis and mother of toddler Jamie Lee Curtis. Leigh had no prior association with the horror genre, but was about to play a major role in it.
When Marion is murdered with an hour of film left to go, her boyfriend Sam and her sister Lila become the new protagonists. These are characters Hitchcock had very little interest in, and he removed Stefano’s attempts at giving them more depth. The likes of Cliff Robertson, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Loggia were considered to play Sam, but Hitchcock ended up hiring John Gavin at the suggestion of Universal. He wasn’t enthusiastic about this hire, and wasn’t impressed with Gavin when they got on set: he even gave the actor, who actually comes off just fine in the film, the nickname The Stiff. As Lila, Hitchcock cast Vera Miles – an actress he had a complicated history with. At one time, she had been his golden girl, and after they worked together on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents he had signed her to a five year personal contract. But she wasn’t as appreciative of the flowers and telegrams he would send as he thought she should be, and she made decisions he didn’t agree with. Like getting married when they were in the middle of making The Wrong Man. Or getting pregnant and dropping out of Vertigo. Still, she had a contract with Hitchcock, so he cast her in Psycho. In a role he didn’t really care about.
Hitchcock was more interested in Milton Arbogast, the private investigator who is hired by Marion’s employer to find her. And the forty thousand dollars she ran off with. Stefano recommended that he hire Martin Balsam to play the character, and he did.
Of course, he also cast the actor that he and Stefano had both wanted for the role of Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins. Perkins was the highest paid actor on Psycho, and Hitchcock was amused by the coincidence that the actor was paid the same amount Marion steals at the beginning of the film. Forty thousand dollars. A far cry from the four hundred and fifty thousand – plus profit points – that Cary Grant had just gotten to star in North by Northwest. But in addition to earning forty grand to do this movie, Perkins also got to play the biggest role of his career. A role he had trouble shaking for a long time, as viewers only saw him as Norman Bates from this point on. He would eventually embrace his association with the character so tightly, he agreed to star in three more Psycho movies. He even directed one of those himself, while Stefano returned to write one.
Norman’s mother has been dead for years by the time the film begins, but she’s still a presence on the screen. To obscure the fact that her son is attempting to keep her alive by speaking in her voice and dressing in her clothes, Hitchcock hired at least three people to play the character in different moments, and hired at least three more to record her dialogue. A dummy of mother’s corpse was created, with the look of her rotten face being based on specifications provided to makeup artists Jack Barron and Robert Dawn by an instructor of mortuary sciences. Hitchcock wanted to be sure she’d look exactly like an unearthed corpse that has been sitting around for ten years should look. He then had fun startling Janet Leigh by setting up the mother corpse inside her dressing room.
Over twenty thousand dollars went into the construction of the Bates Motel and the Bates home, which towers on a hill behind it. Locations that are basically characters in themselves, the look of them is so memorable. The house, inspired by the Edward Hopper painting House by the Railroad, looks quite creepy, especially with the dark clouds that were added in the background of some shots. Put the corpse of Mother in an upstairs window and it really becomes the stuff of nightmares. Certain interiors of the house were constructed on a stage that was known for being used for the filming of 1925’s Phantom of the Opera.
With a budget of eight hundred thousand dollars, Psycho began filming in November of 1959. Production was supposed to last for thirty-six days, but ended up going nine days over-schedule due to some weather issues… despite the need to get this wrapped up because there was a threat that the actors guild might go on strike soon. For time and budgetary reasons, Hitchcock had to trim some complicated camera moves he had in mind. The heart-breaker of them all was the opening shot, which he had wanted to be a four mile long helicopter shot approaching the window to the Phoenix hotel room Marion and Sam are meeting in. He wanted this to rival the three minute opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. But the shot he envisioned just wasn’t possible to accomplish. He had to settle for something less, and if you’ve ever wondered why he included information on the date and time in this opening, it’s because there were Christmas decorations visible in the footage his crew brought back from the streets of Phoenix. To explain why the holidays are never mentioned in the film, he added text on screen saying it’s December 11th. Christmas is still a couple weeks away.
The opening of Psycho may not be as dazzling as Hitchcock intended, but he still managed to turn in a masterwork on this low budget. He and Stefano had a lot of fun keeping Marion around for as long as possible, getting the audience involved in her story. She’s only alive for two chapters in Bloch’s novel. In the film, we follow her for forty-nine minutes. Early scenes set up her situation with Sam; she lives in Phoenix, he lives in a small California town called Fairvale, so their relationship is confined to the seedy hotel rooms they meet in. Marion wants to get married, but Sam wants to work out his financial issues first. When a sleazy oilman brings forty thousand dollars cash into the real estate office she works at, in a scene that also features appearances by Hitchcock and his daughter Pat, it seems like the solution to Marion’s problems. She steals the forty thousand and hits the road, heading to Fairvale. The audience is invested in seeing how this is going to work out for her. We’re rooting for her to get away with this crime, even though she proves to be a terrible criminal. She’s so bad at this, she trades cars at a used car lot despite knowing that a police officer is watching the entire transaction. The cop is right beside her new car when she pulls out of the lot. She has accomplished nothing by doing this vehicle swap.
Running into a heavy rain, Marion has to stop for the night at a small motel that doesn’t see much business now that the highway route changed. The Bates Motel. She finds out from proprietor Norman Bates that she’s very close to Fairvale, but decides to spend the night there anyway. And accepts Norman’s offer of having dinner with him in the parlor behind his office. An incredible, eight minute dialogue scene plays out in that parlor, during which we get information on Norman’s life: the friendly, endearing young man – who does taxidermy as a hobby – is stuck running this dead-end motel while caring for a hateful, mentally ill, elderly mother. Norman bristles at Marion’s suggestion that he have his mother committed. But the things he says about people being caught in personal traps and everyone going a little mad sometimes makes her decide to reverse her bad choices. Returning to her room, she does some math on a piece of paper to figure out how much of the forty thousand is left; seeing how much she has to make up for. She is going to return the money. She tears up that piece of paper and flushes it down the toilet, a sight that would have been jolting for viewers at the time because a toilet had never been seen in a movie before. Seeing a toilet flush on screen was something new. They didn’t know they were about to see something even more jolting.
The shower scene. When Marion gets into the shower, there’s joy in her expression. She’s washing off the dirt of crime, returning to her normal life. Then, in one of the most famous moments in cinema history, Norman’s mother rips the shower curtain aside and stabs Marion to death. The character we’ve been following the entire time is gone. Knowing the importance of this scene, Hitchcock had graphic designer Saul Bass, who also designed the film’s title sequence, create the storyboards for it. Bass would later claim that he directed the shower scene as well, a claim that was denied by assistant director Hilton A. Green. Green says Hitchcock shot every bit of the shower scene, which took over a week to complete. Hitchcock wasn’t one to do an excessive number of takes, but it took around twenty-five tries to get a satisfactory take of Marion’s death stare at the end of the shower sequence.
Even then, this is a shot that had to be compromised. The plan was for the camera to pull back from Marion’s dead, staring eye and go over to the hotel room window to look up at the Bates house. This would be multiple shots pieced together, but in the film it would look like one long camera move. But Hitchcock’s wife noticed something he and his crew had missed: Janet Leigh blinked before the camera turned away from her. So an extra shot of the showerhead had to be added in before the camera moves over to the window.
As stunned as we are to lose Marion, our sympathy quickly shifts to Norman, who is appalled to see what his mother has done. But he has to keep mother out of trouble, so he cleans up the crime scene… and since we’ve come to like Norman and don’t want him to get sent off to prison, now we’re rooting for him to get away with this crime. And groaning when we see that he unknowingly sends the forty thousand dollars into the swamp with Marion’s car. And her corpse.
For the remaining hour, it’s up to Sam, Lila, and Arbogast to figure out where Marion has gone and what’s happening at that motel where she was last seen. Along the way, we get another terrific dialogue sequence that involves Norman interacting with Arbogast – and proving to be a lousy criminal, just like Marion was. His answers to Arbogast’s questions just bring up more questions, and the private investigator decides he needs to talk to Mrs. Bates. In another sequence that was storyboarded by Bass, Arbogast is murdered in the Bates house, on the staircase that was constructed where the chandelier fell in Phantom of the Opera. This sequence wasn’t initially shot by Hitchcock; Green had to take over that day because the director caught a cold. However, Hitchcock was back at the helm for some reshoots.
With Arbogast out of contact, Sam and Lila go to the Bates place themselves, ultimately discovering Mrs. Bates’ rotten corpse – and Norman dressed in her clothes, wielding a knife. A mind-blowing twist that Hitchcock was so eager to keep a secret, he had an assistant buy up copies of Bloch’s novel so there would be less readers going into the movie with the ending already in mind. He also had theatre owners refuse admission to movie-goers who showed up after the film had already started. Apparently people were really relaxed about going in and out of movies at various points in the running time back then. Hitchcock’s push to keep latecomers out of Psycho was the event that made people start showing up for movies at the listed start time.
According to Pat Hitchcock, there was a moment when her father considered not going through with the theatrical release of Psycho at all. She said he thought of just cutting the film down into an episode or two of Alfred Hitchcock Presents after an underwhelming screening of the rough cut. A screening Stefano walked out of feeling sick because the film seemed overlong and had no tension. Hitchcock knew there was still hope for it, though. While he would end up whittling a couple minutes out of the movie, the most important change that came after the rough cut screening was the addition of the score composed by Bernard Herrmann. One of the greatest scores of all time. Herrmann went against Hitchcock’s wishes and provided more music than the director asked for. Hitchcock didn’t want any music over the shower scene, he just wanted the sounds of water, stabbing, and screaming. But when he heard the music Herrmann came up with for that moment, the shrieking strings that are familiar even to those who haven’t seen Psycho, he admitted that he had been wrong. Hitchcock would even go on to credit Herrmann with being responsible for thirty-three percent of the film’s effectiveness. He was so appreciative, he doubled the composer’s salary.
Paramount didn’t like Psycho even with Herrmann’s music on it and didn’t expect much from it, so they went along with Hitchcock’s release strategy. As plotted by the director, the promotional campaign was entirely based on keeping the film’s secrets. Publicity stills gave nothing away. The previews didn’t contain any revealing footage from the film; the full trailer simply follows Hitchcock as he gives a tour of the Bates Motel and house locations. When he pulls aside a shower curtain to find a screaming woman inside, it’s Vera Miles, not Janet Leigh. There were no advance screenings for critics, and when the film was released there was the rule in place that no one would be admitted after the movie began. As it turned out, Hitchcock putting so much emphasis on the film being shocking and twist-filled really captured the public’s imagination. Everyone involved was stunned by how successful Psycho was. It was an instant hit.
Fans today are familiar with the image of Mrs. Bates’ skull appearing over Norman’s face in the last shot of him, but not every viewer who saw the film during its original theatrical run saw that. Hitchcock was so uncertain about whether or not he should include the skull image, some prints that were sent out to theatres included it, and some didn’t.
Psycho didn’t go over well with everyone. There were negative reviews, especially from critics who were upset they had to see the movie with a regular audience. Some viewers were disgusted by the subject material and let the world know how strongly they objected to it. But that didn’t stop the money from coming in. During its first year of release, the film made fifteen million dollars at the box office, which was a big deal at the time – and it achieved that number by breaking records in several territories around the globe. Critical reassessment quickly followed, and the film was soon viewed in such a positive light that it even earned Oscar nominations. Janet Leigh was up for Best Supporting Actress; art directors Joseph Hurley and Robert Clatworthy were nominated, along with set decorator George Milo; John L. Russell was nominated for his cinematography; and Hitchcock was up for Best Director. The work of Anthony Perkins, Joseph Stefano, and Bernard Herrmann was overlooked. But Psycho didn’t end up taking home the gold statues anyway. Best Supporting Actress went to Elmer Gantry’s Shirley Jones – who had been on the list of actresses considered for Marion Crane. Freddie Francis won Best Cinematography for his work on the film Sons and Lovers. And that year’s Best Picture winner, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, also won in the art direction and director categories. But the fact that a movie like Psycho was nominated at all was already a huge accomplishment. Hitchcock never did win a Best Director Oscar, despite being nominated five times, and even though his film Rebecca won Best Picture.
Hitchcock saw Psycho as a piece of light entertainment, something that would make the audience scream and laugh as if they were on an amusement park ride. He was horrified whenever anyone seemed to take it seriously, like the ones who were appalled by the concept. In a way, you can see why some viewers were so shaken. This sort of realistic horror isn’t something that was seen very often in those days. The things in this film could really happen. In fact, they sort of did. But as scary as it is, it was also always meant to be fun. And a lot of people have had fun watching it. Psycho was the biggest hit of Hitchcock’s career and, due to his profit points, earned the director several million dollars.
It’s no surprise that there were sequels, but they took decades to show up. Hitchcock had passed away by the time Perkins returned for Psycho II, Psycho III, and Psycho IV: The Beginning. Perkins passed away in 1992, just two years after the release of the fourth film. There were a couple attempts to bring the property to television without him as well. The 2013 show Bates Motel started out as a prequel, but in its fifth and final season also overlapped with the events of the original film. That show’s reworking of the story was the second time it had been remade. In 1998, director Gus Van Sant decided to use the clout he earned with Good Will Hunting to get an experimental remake of Psycho into production. He copied Hitchcock’s film shot-by-shot, using the same script, only altering the occasional line and dropping in his own stylistic flourishes here and there. The result of this experiment: a film that isn’t nearly as good as Hitchcock’s. None of the changes that were made were for the better, and the scenes that were straightforward replicas just didn’t work as well as what Hitchcock had done with his cast and crew. But when you try to match yourself up to one of the most legendary directors of all time, can you really expect a positive outcome?
More than sixty years after its release, Psycho still holds up as an excellent, masterfully crafted horror film with awesome dialogue, great performances, and an unforgettable score. It has rightfully been chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Film Registry as a work that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The film is regularly named as one of the best movies ever made… and it really is.
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