Original subtitles

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[water trickling]

[melancholic violin music playing]

[thunder rumbling]

[Marli] I was, 21 years old.

I was a pinup model

I was working with a photographer...

and he said that Universal...

or UI as it was called then,

are looking for somebody to pose in a film.

So I called and made an appointment.

I went and spoke with Mr. Hitchcock,

and basically had to strip down.

Got dressed again and then

was interviewed by uh, Janet Leigh,

and I had to strip down for her, too...

Oh, just in my underpants, but anyway...

my body was very similar to hers.

So I got hired.

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

and there's the red light flashing and...

"No admittance" and all of this and I thought...

"Oh, God...

You know, here they're expecting a stripper."

I was not quite completely nude.

I had what we called a crotch patch.

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

I told Hitchcock, I said,

"Why don't we take this thing off?" and he says, "No. No."

The whole time he wore a suit,

black tie, white shirt.

I was hired for two or three days

and wound up working for seven.

It's extraordinary that it took so long to do that

one particular scene, because that was...

about a third of what Janet Leigh had to work for the movie.

[Alfred Hitchcock] There were 78 pieces of film

in about 45 seconds.

[Alan Barnette] Spending seven days on one small set

shooting, you know, such a short scene, was pretty much unheard of.

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

Oh, it has to be an obsession.

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

that is absolutely an obsession.

[Bret Easton Ellis] Hitchcock thought to film this murder

separately from the rest of this movie,

which meant in a way that murder

was now going to be an acceptable part of entertainment.

There was violence in American films,

but nothing like Psycho,

nothing that intimate,

nothing that designed, nothing that kind of remorseless.

I think he knew what he had on his hands.

And he probably felt like

the whole film hinged on that moment,

that's this crucible moment.

You should have seen the blood.

The whole-- The whole place was-- Well, it's too horrible to describe.

Dreadful.

It's...

I think, the first modern

expression of

the female body under assault.

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

Because it is devastating.

Women had top billing in the 30s,

and 20s.

And that slowly evaporated during the 40s.

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

you know, secondary in movies. And Hitch sort of--

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

He's killing off the woman.

And It was really the first A-movie

to deal with this kind of horror, trashy, tabloid stuff.

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

You just did North by Northwest, this incredible hit,

now you want to do this, like, black and white, what is this thing?"

I have just made a motion picture,

North By Northwest.

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

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

And it-- You know, it was beautiful, was colourful.

So, how are you going to follow that up? With a prank.

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

-Yes. -It was a big joke, you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wanted to stray beyond his comfort zone.

One of the things he was up to is, "You don't know me at all."

And that's what Psycho is really about.

[François Truffaut] What attracted you to this one, then?

[Hitchcock ] I think the murder in the bathtub.

Coming out of the blue, you know.

That was about all.

Hitchcock was very, very aware of his competition.

He realized that Clouzot had done

the kind of movie that he felt that he should and could be making.

And of course, when critics started calling Clouzot "the French Hitchcock"

well, you were invading his territory then and he...

Believe me, he took notice.

Psycho is really the moment where the gloves come off.

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

On so many levels, it's his masterpiece.

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

-against his fans, his critics, actors. -Yeah.

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

The sudden violence of the shower scene in Psycho...

was meaningful to him

for reasons that dated back, you know, 20 years,

[Marco] to the origins of World War II.

Hitchcock thought that the UK and the United States

were insufficiently prepared

for the dangers and horrors of World War II.

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

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

Don't tune me out. Hang on awhile,

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

It's too late to do anything here now,

except stand in the dark and let them come.

What's the matter with us?

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

Ye gods and little fishes!

[Marco] One of them was Shadow of a Doubt

only about a year and a half after Pearl Harbour

set in Santa Rosa in California.

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

for being naive.

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

How do you know what the world is like?

Do you know the world as a foul sty?

Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses,

you'd find swine?

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

You think you're safe in your shower at home

with, you know, your family and loved ones nearby?

No. You're not. Sorry.

Hitchcock had many obsessions, but one of them that he talked about

with The Birds was the randomness of life.

There is no explanation for the birds attacking.

[Eli] To him that was life.

There you are, everything's fine,

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

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

[Marco] Hitchcock was someone who, for several years now,

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

The victim tumbled and fell with a horrible--

I think the back broke immediately it hit the floor.

It's... It's difficult to describe the way the--

[Marco] He was an icon. He was this sort of

avuncular, yet creepy guy

who was presenting sex and violence to Americans...

leavened with black humour, every Sunday night.

And Americans were comfortable with him by 1960.

If someone else had made Psycho,

it's quite possible that the reaction would not have been the same.

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

[Stephan] It almost pre-dates

the turmoil and the shock and the trauma

that were to come in the 1960s

with racial violence, with political assassinations.

I'm not saying that Hitchcock anticipated it

and knew what he was up to,

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

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

it was not a time any more for

what he called "beautiful, Technicolor baubles."

When you look at Psycho, and you look at those magnificent,

elegant, big, rich Technicolor films of the ‘50s,

you know that something changed.

I think that Psycho was his response to movies changing

and to upping the ante

and not wanting to be forgotten.

[Marco] 1959 is-- That was the year of Some Like it Hot

Suddenly, Last Summer,

and Anatomy of a Murder.

All three of those movies pushed boundaries.

So, there was something in the air, culturally speaking,

that Hollywood was already tapping into.

[explosion]

[Eli] Psycho comes out at this period where we're post-atomic age

but pre-civil rights.

[Eli] You know, if you think about the horror movie violence

they were, science gone wrong

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

Psycho you felt could happen to you.

This was the first movie that showed yeah,

you can be vulnerable, naked, alone in a shower.

[Eli] And someone who is wearing the clothes of their dead mother

is going to come in and just stab you

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

[Marco] Americans were kind of obsessed with domesticity.

They wanted to tell themselves that

in their private personal domestic spaces

at least there, they were safe.

[Marco] The Soviets and whomever else

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

A few days after Psycho begins shooting,

in November of 1959,

[Marco] the Clutter family in Kansas is murdered.

Those are the In Cold Blood murders.

You're not living next door to the Norman Rockwell family anymore.

You're living next door to the Manson family.

This is the new, modern American family,

which is what very much inspired

Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

[woman screaming]

The first Playboy Club opens in Chicago.

The most famous sitcom stars of the 1950s,

Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo, are divorced.

The birth control pill is approved by the FDA.

[Eli] You could look at the shower scene as this buildup of tension,

of all of these things, all of these American fears in the-- Of the quiet ‘50s.

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

[comical instrumental music playing]

Well, I was on the critic's list in New York for review.

The press was all invited to the theatre the day it opened.

[Peter] At 10:00 or 10:30 in the morning with the first performance.

As you went in, Hitchcock's voice was blaring on loudspeakers saying,

"Nobody will be allowed in after the picture starts

and please don't reveal the ending."

Before Psycho, you know, movies for--

As a form of entertainment, were relatively disposable.

Well there was a tremendous, compared to today,

a tremendous coming and going in movie theatres.

[Walter] And Hitchcock brilliantly said,

"We don't want anyone coming in after the beginning of this film."

It changed the way films are exhibited.

The reason was because the leading lady, Janet Leigh,

was killed off a third of the way through.

And I didn't want people whispering to each other

"When is Janet Leigh coming on?" [chuckling]

[Stephan] He wanted to build anticipation.

The bathroom.

[Stephan] Something terrible happens in a bathroom.

We know this from the trailer.

We don't know it's Janet Leigh,

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

[screaming]

The minute the curtain opened and started stabbing,

there was a sustained shriek

from the audience.

[screams] like that,

you know, you couldn't hear anything of the soundtrack

through the entire shower scene.

So, you had the screams from Janet Leigh

the screams from all the women surrounding you in the theatre

and the high shrieking strings from Herrmann.

That must have been total mayhem.

It was actually the first time in the history of movies,

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

And when I walked out into Times Square at noon,

I felt I had been raped.

[shower water trickling]

In 1895, when the Lumière Brothers really first showed film

to an audience,

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

And the legend has it they thought the train was going to hit them,

and they were screaming and it-- Like, caused a stampede of people

trying to evacuate this room that it was screened in.

They didn't understand the concept.

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

It's the only movie in my childhood that my mom wouldn't let me go and see.

Which was kind of ridiculous because I was seeing nothing but horror films,

every single weekend, two of them, in fact.

But, Psycho? No. I couldn't go.

As a kid when I would hear about it, I thought the name was "Cycle"...

like it was about some killer on a motorcycle.

But, I actually got this Super-8 version

and just, like constantly ran the movie over and over again.

[Stephen] When audiences

saw this really likeable character,

someone who is quite relatable in terms of, "I need more money,

I'm growing older

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

they were really hooked.

Oh, Sam, let's get married.

Yeah.

And live with me in a storeroom behind a hardware store in Fairvale.

We'll have lots of laughs.

Of course, she's going to survive the movie. It's Janet Leigh.

Instead, she takes a shower.

Out of nowhere, she's murdered,

by an old lady?

Who I can't even see?

What the fuck is going on here?

He has broken the covenant of filmmaker and audience

and the audience cannot wait to see more.

He was a respected director,

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

and I think you kind of get into the thrill of that

possible shockwave, which obviously happened.

And I think that moment signalled new American cinema.

Maybe new world cinema in certain ways.

Now I don't know that that had ever been done, you know.

Or maybe there's some obscure Czechoslovakian film that did it,

and there's a guy going like--

-I did it first! -Yeah.

I can think of things that culturally

have got us thinking about that structure

for instance, the first season of Game of Thrones ,

in which our most appealing character of Ned Stark is just sort of

cruelly killed in front of us.

[swish of the sword]

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

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

as a ruse to get you to this house.

And the only way you're going to get to this house is if you believe

that she's someone who's stolen $40,000

and that she's gotten off on the wrong freeway exit

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

There's a lot of things he's saying here

about our society that was changing at that point.

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

And going into these little towns was not necessary anymore.

And Norman doesn't even seem to mind.

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

One by one, you drop the formalities.

I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets,

but old habits die hard.

[Marco] When she's driving off with the $40,000

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

There's something fundamentally American about that

dating back all the way to Manifest Destiny.

"Go west!

Find your fate, find your freedom."

Marion tries to do just that

and that's where she meets her fate.

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

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

So on page 28, um, here's the shower scene.

[water trickling]

[Narrator] The roar was deafening. The room was beginning to steam up.

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

or note the sound of footsteps.

And at first, when the shower curtains parted,

the steam obscured the face

Then she did see it there, just a face,

peering through the curtains, hanging in mid-air like a mask.

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

But it wasn't a mask. It couldn't be.

The skin had been powdered dead white

and two hectic spots of rouge centred on the cheekbones.

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

Mary started to scream and then the curtain parted further,

and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife.

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

and her head.

[John] The fact that Hitchcock brought Saul Bass

in to work on the shower scene

as its own kind of independent thing,

uh, says to me that he knew

that, uh, he had to do something special with the shower scene.

[narrator] Interior, Mary in shower.

We see the bathroom door being pushed slowly open.

The noise of the shower drowns out any sound.

The door is then slowly and carefully closed.

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

Mary's back is turned to the curtain.

The white brightness of the bathroom is almost blinding.

Suddenly we see the hand reach up,

grasp the shower curtain, rip it aside.

Cut to Mary, extreme close up,

as she turns in response to the feel and sound

of the shower curtain being torn aside.

A look of pure horror erupts in her face.

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

A hand comes in the shot.

The hand holds an enormous bread knife.

The flint of the blade shatters the screen to an almost total, silver blankness.

The slashing.

An impression of a knife slashing

as if tearing at the very screen ripping the film.

Over it the brief gulps of screaming.

And then silence.

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

Reverse angle, the blank whiteness,

the blur of the shower water,

the hand pulling the shower curtain back.

We catch one flicker of a glimpse of the murderer.

A woman, her face contorted with madness,

her head wild with hair,

as if she were wearing a fright-wig.

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

and hear the rush of the shower water.

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

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

Cut to the dead body

lying half-in, half-out of the tub,

the head tumbled over, touching the floor,

the hair wet, one eye wide open as if popped.

One arm lying limp and wet along the tile floor.

Coming down the side of the tub,

running thick and dark along the porcelain,

we see many small threads of blood.

Camera moves away from the body,

travels slowly across the bathroom, past the toilet,

out into the bedroom.

I think that the shower scene elevated film,

not the horror genre specifically, but filmmaking in general.

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

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

The film is moving inexorably to that scene.

You don't know it as a viewer.

Sam, this is the last time.

I pay, too.

They also pay who meet in hotel rooms.

There are plenty of motels in this area.

You should've-- I mean, just to be safe.

Mother-- My mother, what is the phrase?

She isn't quite herself today.

Hitchcock was amazing at setting everything up.

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

you see the showerhead in the background.

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

You know, when it comes to Norman, when he talks about the bathroom

and he like stutters and he can't really say

"toilet", you know, or "bathroom".

And the, uh,

over there.

-The bathroom. -Yeah.

That's what's great about Hitchcock.

I mean, he's really, like, tunes into those character moments.

That desperate drive at the beginning.

It's crazy good.

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

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

which is really beautiful, because she's drowning in her worry and fear.

[Perkins] The slashing of the wipers presages the slashing of the knife.

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

sharp, stabbing motion.

And it's a long buildup,

but we have no idea that the rain that's going to come down upon her later

is going to include her own blood.

I certainly get the sensation that the shower scene was something

that Hitchcock had probably been working towards all of his life.

Is he cleaning house?

He's washing down the bathroom walls.

Ooh. Must've splattered a lot.

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

He killed her in there, he has to clean up those stains before he leaves.

Oh, you really can't talk about the shower scene

without talking about the rest of the film.

Without the parlour scene,

obviously the shower scene doesn't really work nearly as well

because the parlour scene is a sort of really sad, beautiful connection,

that comes before this savagery.

Is your time so empty?

No.

Well, I run the office,

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

the ones she allows I might be capable of doing.

And do you go out with friends?

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

There's a very loaded preamble to the shower scene.

Wouldn't it be better if you put her

some place--

You mean an institution?

A mad-house?

Look, how still he is.

Whereas before he was fidgety and moving around,

suddenly became very still.

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

-Yeah. -Yeah.

[Josh] Yeah, he's super confident now.

[Elijah] Yeah, he's barely moving his head.

[chuckling]

-Just his eyes. -Wow.

Oh, he's so angry.

-And she just got terrified. -Yeah.

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

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

It's been lovely to chat.

Terribly sorry about your loneliness.

Whoa.

[Daniel] This is the first moment you're with him and not her.

[Elijah] Yeah, she literally walks away from camera.

-Yeah, right. -And then we're with him.

[Daniel] My job here is done.

Yeah.

I'm no longer the protagonist of this story.

There was a private supper here.

And, uh-- Oh, by the way,

this picture

has great significance,

because--

Uh, let's go along to cabin number one.

[Timothy] The painting that Mr. Bates removed

to become the peeping Tom, was actually a 16th or early 17th century painting.

Susanna and the Elders is actually a morality story

about a virtuous woman who bathed in her garden

and was spied on by two elder men.

And the theme burgeoned

possibly as the result of counter reformatory motives.

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

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

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

is kind of cleansing herself of committing adultery with a married man.

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

of how artists depicted Susanna and the Elders.

Lucas Van Leyden shows the two elders in prominence,

whereas the small Susanna is bathing in the far distance.

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

Rubens, begins to take and probe

the psychological intensity of the moment.

Rembrandt's using the power of lightness and darkness

of highlights to enhance the drama.

The interesting thing about the painting is that

you've got full frontal nudity of Susanna

and yet the two elders are not simply looking at her

they're actually groping and violating her.

It's almost a rape scene

that's taking place before our eyes.

It's an amazing painting that he picked.

It's not any old baroque painting.

It's voyeurism.

He removes the voyeuristic painting

to become the voyeur looking in on the shower.

He could have picked from 50 different examples

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

that he could use for his film.

[Innis] Well, I love that there is a hole in the wall the size of his face

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

and he's made it comfortable for himself.

[man] The notion that he's looking just as you are,

it binds you with him.

And when you eliminate those walls,

and you're now watching him

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

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

Psycho is delineated from the other works of his oeuvre

by those gazes.

[Mick] The birds are looking at us, each individual bird,

dead bird, is looking at us.

Mother is looking at us from eyeless sockets.

Dead Marion with her eye open.

The stare includes and indicts us at the same time.

It's a mirror image, you know, it goes both ways.

We're looking into the eyes of death

and the eyes of death are looking at us.

And it's inclusive, and horrifying.

The laughing and the tears

and the cruel eyes studying you.

My mother there?

[Stephen] God is studying you, because there are a number of, you know...

God point-of-view shots in Psycho just as there are in The Birds.

[man] Hitchcock's God is cruel and arbitrary

a bit like some kind of bird of prey or raptor which is

gazing down rather coldly and disinterestedly on its human subjects.

In the shower sequence, the violence is directed

and that knife coming towards us. So we're being punished

for being the voyeurs.

There are consequences to watching and being watched.

In the character of James Stewart, if we identify with him in Rear Window,

has a very literal, great fall at the end of it where he breaks the other leg,

meaning another six, eight months of pain and itchiness,

and not being able to screw Grace Kelly.

All of those things are pertinent to Hitchcock.

[Hitchcock ] I'll bet you nine people out of ten...

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[Hitchcock ] If they see something across

like a woman undressing and going to bed

or even sometimes a man

puttering around his room doing nothing.

Nine people out of ten will stay and look.

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[Hitchcock ] They won't turn away and say,

"It's none of my business."

And pull down their own curtain. They won't do it.

[Innis] In the beginning in the movie,

you're flying into a window with the blinds closed.

so you're starting off as a voyeur.

And if you think about it,

if the movie's opening from the point of view of a fly,

it changes the whole context of what the meaning of the movie is.

[woman] I'm not even going to swat that fly.

I hope they are watching.

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

"Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly."

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

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

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

[man] Four people are sitting around a table,

talking about baseball, whatever you like.

Five minutes of it, very dull.

Suddenly, a bomb goes off.

Blows the people to smithereens.

What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock.

Now take the same scene,

and tell the audience there's a bomb under that table,

and will go off in five minutes.

Now the whole emotion of the audience is totally different,

because you've given them that information.

You've got the audience working.

Hello.

I think at this point, we start to wonder what's going on in his head,

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

This is so interesting, as an actor, what is he playing.

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

[Jeffrey] Norman Bates is presented in all these little

you know, encapsulated moments throughout the film

and in much the same way that the murder

is presented in encapsulated moments

of images and compositions cut together.

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

It is fragmentation.

[Innis] Norman goes up to the house.

[Guillermo] It is very important that the audience sees him leave,

because he is reacting to a third character

that we think is in the house, Mother,

but that is really in his mind.

[Innis] He goes to the stairs and he looks up and he looks like he's sad

‘cause he realizes Mom's not at home upstairs.

And he goes and flops into the kitchen like a dejected little school boy.

Then he sits there like, "Oh rats.

I can't have dinner with the lady I want to have dinner with."

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

That she must have yelled at him

and he would just go in the kitchen when he couldn't get what he wanted

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

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

[melancholic music playing]

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

to capture the rich Alex Sebastian for a husband?

Now, get shaved before your father gets home.

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

When you talk about what is sacred in America,

people talk about Mom and apple pie.

Mom is good, we love Mom.

We are Mom. We are good.

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

in 1950s American culture and society

where Mom is also suspect.

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

One thing that this social panic resulted in was this fear

that moms were going to shelter and spoil children

possibly America itself, to death.

[James] All of the sitcoms,

Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriett

where mother never did anything.

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

Lunch is practically ready and David has to get dressed.

Get dressed? You mean dressed up?

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

he director who exposes

the horror of the American family in the ‘50s,

without making a horror movie is Douglas Sirk.

You see Kay, I love Ron,

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

-You can't really think that. -What else can I think?

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

It's not until Psycho, though, where the mother is literally a monster

when you see her at the end.

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

[audience laughing]

You see, she said, "Boo!"

I don't know how many times in Psycho

do people talk about Mother.

Oh, we can see each other.

We can even have dinner.

But respectably.

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

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

And after the steak, do we send sister to the movies,

turn Mama's picture to the wall?

Sam!

Patricia Hitchcock talks about-- She offers her a tranquillizer.

-Have you got some aspirin? -I've got something, not aspirin.

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

Teddy was furious when he found out I'd taken tranquillizers.

-Any calls? -Teddy called me.

My mother called to see if Teddy called.

Even in that office,

the influence, the negative influence of mothers--

And here it's on women, not on men.

So, the fact that Norman Bates' mother,

we realize eventually it's Norman Bates himself,

might have, on an unconscious level, the audience is saying,

"Aha! I knew it! Mom is gonna kill us!

Mom is going to be the death of us all."

[melancholic violin music]

[water trickling]

Okay, once more onto the bridge.

[Richard] Back to the primal moment.

[Walter] Marion is doing her accounting here

figuring out how much she spent on the car.

She's making the decision to return the money.

Nice little bit of handy exposition.

I always write down my math.

It's charming, you know.

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

[Walter] She throws the paper in the toilet bowl

and then to cap it off, she flushes it.

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

In 1960, nobody had shown a toilet before.

The flushing toilet is a clear indication that

the scene to come is going to break one or two taboos.

Details are important, you know, in the building of suspense

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

much more monumental than the simplicity of these shots.

[Stephan] Hitchcock was a Victorian.

Victorians thought that a bright, white, tiled bathroom

was sanitary. That's the term they used.

His bathroom in his home was bright, white tiles.

He thought that invading the sanctity of the bathroom

was a cool and subversive thing to do.

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

But showing that brightness, it was a way of saying,

"Look at how I'm defiling the sanctity of the bathroom.

And I'm doing it almost bloodlessly."

Coincidentally, this scene was extremely influential

on a scene in The Conversation

which I edited back in 1973.

A murder has been committed and Gene Hackman

comes into the bathroom of a hotel room,

but the room is completely clean.

And he pulls the curtain apart

just as in Psycho, the mother pulls the curtain apart

but it's empty.

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

to see if there was any tell-tale signs of blood, and there's nothing.

He goes over to the toilet to jiggle the handle

and the toilet suddenly backs up.

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

The toilet and the flushing of the toilet

the shower curtain, the drain,

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

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

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

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

Man, that must have been crazy racy for 1960.

I don't even understand.

[Stephan] Hitchcock knew that American men were curious about Janet Leigh.

And so the idea of having her in a shower,

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

Seeing her full body behind that curtain,

it's brilliant because it's translucent.

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

Enough to see her and titillate us,

but not enough to really be graphic yet.

Whole theory is that you have to discover the sex in the woman

and not have it

stuck all over her like labels, you know.

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

[Perkins] Do we know anybody who turns a shower on before it gets--

I mean, I don't act that way. I don't turn a shower on

like that.

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

[Mick] And look at that almost sexual expression on her face.

She's being rained upon, and it's cleansing.

It's warm and she's happy and she's like, made up her mind.

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

we all become Janet Leigh, but not as attractive.

Through other movies like Rear Window and The Birds

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

[Hollyn] I think there's almost no moment

when we see Marion with a genuine smile.

There's almost no moment where she's allowed to feel

good about what her life is like

She's happy for the first time.

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

is quite liberating for the character, but at the same time,

it's clearly really what we're watching is the liberation of Hitchcock,

of his own repressed desires finally being writ large on screen.

Hitchcock viewed the world as a very imperfect moral machine.

And he always had this

biblical, almost, sense of doom and punishment, you know,

that befalls those that tangle with sin in a casual way.

Even his most un-Hitchcockian movie which is Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that I love,

punishes banality.

She makes a moral decision to take back that money,

and in, you know, and suffer whatever punishment will come her way.

I stepped into a private trap back there.

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

before it's too late for me, too.

This is very important.

It's very important narratively because

it doesn't come in the middle of a heist,

or in the middle of the robbery,

or as she's escaping with the money on the road.

And it turns out, bang, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference

because the universe doesn't give a shit.

I think that is a true sign of his Catholicism

and his sense of doom

about a sin that cannot be washed away, literally, with water.

You know, it cannot be purged

except by blood and violence and paying the price.

She's punished for the worst crime which is sexually arousing Norman Bates.

You know, you get this strain again and again.

I mean, think of Strangers on a Train

where Robert Walker, you know, strangles this poor girl.

Again, what does he strangle her for?

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

I mean, that's a foreshadowing of Psycho.

[Innis] That's her point of view of the shower

that puts us, the audience, as if we're in the shower with her.

It makes us feel just as vulnerable as she is.

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

She can't hear him coming.

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

And, that's why that shot is bad news.

You know, the shots change in their level of symmetry

during the course of the sequence.

That's order at the beginning

and then oddly, it'll be echoed by the eye, and the drain

and Norman Bates' peep-hole through his office,

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

[Stephan] How do you point a camera

at a shower head without the lens getting sprayed?

Move the camera back enough,

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

Very simple and elegant solution.

[Walter] There's nothing unusual about the pacing here.

It's at a rather leisurely

four and a half seconds per cut on average.

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

And now here's what I would call a strange cut

what I call "the wet hair cut"

which is her washing herself with her head tilted back,

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

really a jump cut,

except now her hair is completely wet.

This would give the lie to somebody who said

this scene was shot exactly as the storyboards were done

because you never would storyboard a moment like that.

[Jeffrey] You think you're going to be watching her

go through the whole process in real time,

but that cut jumps you ahead.

It feels very bold and confident.

Now, we cut to the showerhead

but it's a side angle on the shower head

not this sort of subjective point of view.

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

away from the shower,

and when we cut back to her,

we come around to the other side of the stage line.

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

And now there's another cut, again it's a kind of awkward jump cut.

Objectively, there would be no reason to do that.

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

which is itself unsettling.

What is going to fill that empty space?

The audience starts to look over into that negative space

and feeling like, why am I looking over here?

The door opens, you see the shadow, and then Norman's figure.

And that's the mounting terror,

where you say to yourself,

"Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

And that is the difference between suspense and surprise.

[Ileana] The idea of menace in a shadowy figure.

I think that that's Hitchcock's fear.

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

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

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

How do you not reveal who that is?

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

but that's not me behind the curtain.

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

[Stephan] Every time they kept shooting it,

you kept seeing the stunt woman's face.

One of the make-up men decided what if we blackened her face?

And so they tried that a couple of times

and they went darker and darker and darker

until they achieved that effect.

I talked with Janet Leigh about what she thought she saw coming at her

and she clearly saw Norman coming at her

and that's what she played.

So the reality for her was

I'm going to die this way by this person

who tried to befriend me and I tried to be polite to.

You're very kind.

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

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

[Eli] And that wallpaper in the background,

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

perfect Hitchcock Bates Motel wallpaper.

This floral pattern that juxtaposed with this black silhouette

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

[Bob] The shape always kind of tortured me.

Almost like a weird mushroom-shaped head.

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

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

When my grandfather first saw the first rough cut of Psycho, um,

he didn't like it at all.

He was just going to cut it down to an hour and make it part of the TV show.

Bernard Herrmann convinced him to create the most like,

famous scared chord music in horror cinema history.

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

-It is transcendent. -My seven year old daughter knows that

-but she doesn't know what it comes from. -Yeah.

But, you know, she's made that joke...

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

-That's incredible. -She has no idea it's from Psycho.

It's evolutionary, like we're just born knowing the shower scene from Psycho.

I wanted a tattoo

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

the most amazing cue ever made in cinematic history.

It has so little to do with harmony.

It is just sheer terror.

The way that music was used in movies to scare people

really changed after Psycho.

If you wanna make something scary,

you put in those strings, and you're like...[high pitched sounds]

If you slow it down you get-- [mimics low pitched sounds]

[Kreng] What I really adore about Herrmann

is the that way he realized that in the limitation.

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

He did The Day the Earth Stood Still

and he wrote it for seven Theremins and only copper horns.

[ominous instrumental music]

[Danny] Herrmann wrote, Living Doll

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

It's like a bass clarinet,

or it might have been a contra bassoon,

a glockenspiel and a harp.

He was definitely an experimenter.

He's the one who taught me that you can kind of do anything anywhere if it works.

What I think is also absolutely genius about the shower scene

is that the way Herrmann spotted it.

The spotting is deciding when do you start a cue,

when do you end a cue.

It starts with the toilet flushing.

She steps into the shower, there is no music at all whatsoever.

This composer does not prepare us

for the onslaught that is about to happen.

When Janet Leigh walks into the shower and she pulls the curtain closed,

you can actually hear the sound

of the rings on the bar that-- It goes... [sound of curtain closing]

You see the villain coming too, no music, no music at all.

The curtain gets swept aside, we get the first sting--

[imitating "Psycho" music]

This is the rush of Janet Leigh's heartbeat.

From the moment that we, as an audience, completely realize,

"Okay, this girl is being brutally butchered here,"

and we see this and the music goes-- [mimics low pitched sounds]

She falls to the floor, the heartbeat slows because she's dying.

And then, in her last gasp,

that music basically leaves her,

and all we have is the sound of the falling curtain

and her head smacking to the ground.

How genius is that?

That's Herrmann. That's not Hitch.

That's Bernie.

We used the original score

uh, Bernard Herrmann's original score for our temp music of course,

while we were editing the film,

and then Danny came and re-recorded it and it was so beautiful.

[screaming]

It's a perfect score.

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

There was one beat in a meeting with some of the producers,

of like, maybe because it's in colour, we should do it with

brass and woodwinds and percussion and do it for the full orchestra.

I was like no, no, no, no.

Please, please. I beg you. Don't make me do that.

I had visions of a very grumpy, Bernard Herrmann,

his ghost coming into my room

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

"You little asshole, what have you done?"

[Walter] A knife is raised up,

and now the murder scene begins

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

And there it is beautiful, cathartic, unbelievably savage,

intimate and just wrong on so many levels.

That looks awful. That is--

Wow. Wow.

Man, oh, man.

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

and saying, "Look. Look! You will look at this."

It was a perfect, stainless steel trap.

You could not run away from it,

it was inflicting damage,

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

There was nothing to do but submit.

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

George Tomasini was a master.

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

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

You had to think about a cut

cause a cut was going to take you

four minutes to make and splice and check it.

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

The planning, the consideration,

the thinking that went into designing some of these films is astonishing.

Motion pictures were 14 years old before somebody got the idea

that you could make a cut.

Because it's violent what's happening, you're looking at an image,

a visual field that is very detailed and full of motion,

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

In a sense, the audience should kind of

crash through the windshield of this experience.

Hitchcock and Tomasini knew exactly where the audience was looking.

They ended up working the disorientation,

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

[John] Every single cut that Tomasini does is you--

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

he's already cut to another shot.

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

but it's very planned, and it feels that way.

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

-It's a magic act. Truly. -Yeah.

‘Cause people walked out of the cinema feeling like they had seen--

Like shocked, you know, beyond belief,

‘cause there was nothing like that in cinema prior to that.

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

That's an incredible thing.

The use of the sound effects

um, are I think a huge contributor to the violence of the scene.

The stabbing sounds in particular.

How do you come up with the sound of

what happens when a butcher knife strikes flesh?

The soundman came up with the idea of

what about a knife stabbing melons?

[ominous instrumental music]

So, knowing Hitchcock, you would have to bring

lots of melons and arrange them on a big table.

There'd be Crenshaw melons, and you know any kind of melon

that you can imagine of very, very different sizes

So, I think they had about two dozen and some backups.

So, there's the prop man, stabbing melon,

melon, melon, melon. Next melon, melon, melon.

And so by the end of it, Hitchcock knew the one

that sounded most like sinew

and sounded the way he thought it should sound.

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

all he said was

"Casaba."

That's all they needed to know.

[thumping]

[thumping]

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

is that the inner gooey part is very small.

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

-It's very dense. -Dense?

Not hollow like a lot of the other melons sounded a little bit hollow.

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

To my ear, the Casaba melon sounds more like dry, bony stabbing

as opposed to wet, gooey stabbing.

The starchiness and the thickness probably gives you more of that viscera,

the crunchiness or the--

-Viscera. -Viscera.

Hitchcock also had them bring a sirloin, a really big thing of sirloin.

I don't eat meat, and so I'm nearly nauseous telling you this

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

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

And so that sound is interspersed with melon

And the soundman took it home, and had it for dinner that night.

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

it is a natural sound effect, which makes it all the more horrible.

You could take the combination of like,

an arrow, a literal arrow or an axe hitting,

and you add to that a pipe in the mud kind of gush

and you add to that some sort of like, leather rip

and you can make the sound design stab

that would feel horrible.

[Walter] Marion turns. We have three close-ups

getting increasingly tighter to the point that now we're looking

at nothing but her open mouth.

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

I've seen some of Saul Bass' boards and you'll see cut one and cut three,

but the idea of drawing the three together

really feels like something that's kind of a joyful discovery

in feeling your way through things in the cutting room.

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

to show something that's shocking.

An on-axis cut. Boom, boom, boom.

It's a psychological cut.

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

but I actually always traced it back to the original Frankenstein,

directed by James Whale in 1931.

In a way it was the same effect because

they were showing you something so grotesque

something that you had never seen before.

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

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

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

And I know whenever I do it in a movie when I'm working with like, Sam Raimi,

he's always like tortured.

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

And I always go, "It's an American cut"

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

There's something really visceral

about cutting from a wide shot jumping into a close-up.

[Walter] Now we have a lower angle that is not a subjective angle,

this is not what Marion sees

but it's maximized for threat.

[Innis] There's a lot of defensive shots

that make it look like she's trying to fight him off

that makes you feel that you're there.

With jump, states line here which is another disorienting thing,

in violence, and in love interestingly,

it's actually good to cross the stage line

because it gives you that subjective sense of a kind of dizzy delirium.

[John] You see Norman's hand with the knife come laterally

across and break the lines.

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

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

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

German expressionist cinema that Hitchcock had been exposed to

in the early ‘20's when he first started his career.

[man] This overhead shot, it's like the whole shot is out of focus.

And, you know they used it anyway.

I can imagine sitting in with studio executives now

and them saying, you know, you've got this one shot that's so out of focus.

We really need to take that shot out of the edit.

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

[John] The knife is already through the frame before we, the audience,

are really able to lock onto what we're looking at.

Our face gravitates to Marion

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

They force the audience to fill in the blank.

Her right to left movement carries us right to the cut

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

That knife never makes connection with her

but in my mind I see him stabbing her.

It's crazy.

Hitchcock is going in 360 degrees.

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

he's doing to give you this feeling of complete disorientation.

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

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

Cut to Marion, we are tighter. Norman, tighter.

And then, in the intersecting water over and over again,

to the shot, the one shot,

that convinces me as a viewer that Marion has been stabbed.

The knife never connects with the skin, but what about this shot here?

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

Hitchcock got away with showing my belly button on film.

All the beach towel movies, you know, with Annette Funicello

they had bikinis but they had to have them up over their belly button.

He explained to me that he says

"The Paramount Special Effects Department made for me a torso of rubber.

You plunge the knife in, blood would spurt out.

Oh, it was wonderful.

I didn't use it at all."

You didn't use it at all? No, no. The knife never touches the body."

Goes back to Eisenstein

and the whole idea of editing, cutting. Montage.

He didn't want a plastic knife or anything. Use the knife.

He had marks on there like blood,

and he pressed it against my stomach,

and then pulled it out.

And then in the film, they reversed it,

showing it going in.

Hitchcock, I think it's safe to say spent an entire career

thumbing his nose at the censors.

The last shot of North by Northwest is a,

train entering a tunnel, like a,

very unsubtle sexual metaphor.

and then we pick that up post coitus in Psycho.

That's interesting.

[Marco] You know, the Production Code Administration...

still mattered at that time.

And then in trying to get the movie approved

by the Legion of Decency.

If either one of those had been a problem

as far as the production and distribution of Psycho

it would not have been the phenomenon that it was.

There was a little negotiation going on.

He said, "I'll reshoot the beginning. You can come and watch me shoot it."

They never showed up.

All he did was tell the whole crew,

"We're gonna just send the scene back.

We're not going to cut one frame from it." And he didn't.

He just kept basically telling them, "You're prudes,

and you're actually horn dog prudes."

Because you're seeing something that isn't there.

So everything stayed in the way he wanted it.

He got away with it.

You contrast Hitchcock,

making a disturbing, shocking movie

that revolves around sex and violence and a deeply disturbed protagonist

with a movie that came out the very same year, within a few months of it,

like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.

That movie, a lot of people see as having ruined Michael Powell's career.

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

but you know, he was the master of, you saw nothing, ever.

There's no cat in Cat People.

[chuckling] Right.

-There's no cat people in Cat People. -There's shadows.

There's some shadows.

Every one of his films was the title promised something

that you never actually saw.

[Daniel] You never-- There's no leopard man in Leopard Man.

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

takes place on the other side of a closed door

from the perspective of a mother,

who is hearing her daughter get slaughtered.

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

You never see it, you never see it at all.

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

Totally.

I would like to throw one in there like, one film into the mix.

which has one particular mind-blowing scene

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

And here's the thing about that rape scene.

It's like-- What is it like, 15 minutes long. So it's something--

And they don't really show anything

There's no nudity, there's no nothing.

It's just one shot that lingers.

[speaking in foreign language]

The rape scene in Irreversible and the shower scene in Psycho ,

are exact inverses.

The shower scene is incredibly close,

-and frenetic... -Yeah.

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

[Walter] The shots of the mother are out of focus,

the focus is on the water, not the mother.

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

that she doesn't see who it is clearly,

because she's so confused.

Very quick cutting here, on the average one shot every

three-quarters of a second, 18 frames.

And the audience in 1960, would be having, um,

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

[man] I was always surprised that they got away with this.

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

It had to be done impressionistically.

So it was done with little pieces of film.

The head, the feet, the hand.

Parts of the torso.

[John] The shot of her feet is the very first cut of blood

that we've had in this entire piece.

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

You know, you see spots hitting like a dark rain

and then it just is absorbed by the water and it spreads out

in a very kind of haunting, haunting way.

My mom loves to tell me that,

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

-is chocolate syrup, right?" -Chocolate syrup. Yeah.

So, is anyone in this room

going to tell us that that's not actually chocolate syrup?

[Marli] They had a can of Hershey's syrup, which was watered down

and that's what they used for blood.

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

I deliberately made the film in black and white because I knew

that if it has been in colour,

uh, the draining away of blood would have been too repulsive.

[John] The knife comes through,

and even though it's just swinging through frame

my brain is telling me she's just gotten stabbed squarely in the back.

And then to the sneaky cut

that Tomasini has put into the film.

Starting here with her hand out of focus at the front

it's going towards the wall.

Your eyes are super confused here

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

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

If you watch that at full speed,

it just looks like, bam.

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

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

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

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

And I think part of it is they were really

trying to hide, you know, who it was.

And they were tired of showing that lame shot

where his head looked like a mushroom.

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

It's just a hand, the least important part of her body right now

after she's been hacked to death.

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

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

Hand. And then, hand.

And you watch it go.

Trying to grab onto something.

Hand going down the wall. She turns around, where's her hand?

You know, that's kind of the-- That's the big question.

If you watch the opening scene of Jurassic Park, it's the same thing.

You know, it doesn't matter that the guy that got eaten by the velociraptor,

you barely see his face. But, what's important

when you watch it is, he's grabbing onto his hand.

Hand reaches out. Hands touching the thing.

And I think that's part of the ways that he kind of is able to bring the audience

into her death, rather than just watching her die.

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

[Mick] The way that her hair leaves like a trail behind her,

it follows her down.

I mean, it's an incredibly haunting image.

And, it's a wall.

You know, you had depth before

and now she's just flat against nothingness.

Nobody did this before.

Deaths were quick in movies.

And although actors loved to make the most of them

this is so obviously directed in such a way.

You know, in Torn Curtain,

there's this endless scene of trying to kill someone.

It's not bloody but it's graphic.

Even Frenzy is fairly graphic compared to Psycho.

But Psycho has the effect of being graphic

much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre later was.

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

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

This is absolutely intentional.

Hitchcock is mirroring the shot at the beginning of the sequence

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

It is the book end that makes the shower scene.

My favourite cut is the hand coming around onto the curtain

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

you end up with this really fluid shot

that has a sort of almost kind of poetic and sad quality to it.

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

and it makes it just instantly emotional.

It's really, really a great cut. It's one of the best cuts I've ever seen.

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

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

The ring finger is disfigured a bit.

The nail is darker than a regular fingernail.

When I was three years old,

I reached down to help my brother on a lawn mower

a push lawn mower and, puff, cut it off.

[Howie] This is he shot that Cecil B. DeMille actually did

first in The Ten Commandments

where Sally Lung pulls down on the curtain.

[Bob] This shot, the down shot, she just feels so vulnerable,

like a dying animal.

It's just such a, again, such a bold shot because so much like, nudity is revealed.

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

that is one of the most heartbreaking shots I've ever seen.

[Amy] Anne Heche, she was definitely willing to do stuff.

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

that was the shot that Hitchcock could not use.

But it was storyboarded.

There were objections to using that

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

[John] Then we return to the motif of the showerhead, the impassive eye

which has just watched this horrible thing happen.

This shot of the showerhead at the beginning of the scene,

was one of joy, she was going to get a new start.

And now that same water is washing away

the evidence of her existence and the murder.

[man] The water keeps running

and the blood flows, but the heart is stopping.

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

You know, what a metaphor that is.

And then switches to the eye, right?

Aw, come on.

That's so good.

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

-To get her eye to stay open? -She has to make sure that...

her eye didn't twitch, you can-- You see a tiny bit--

Oh, my god, that's incredible.

[man] The pointless spiralling of the universe

and the way that everything is ultimately drawn down the plughole towards oblivion,

towards meaningless death.

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

as well as his obsessions.

[man] You see it in Barton Fink, you see it in so many movies.

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

Are we going to go inside? Are we going to go inside?"

That is the moment of Psycho where everything changes.

This was made by an auteur filmmaker,

and that is a very personal stamp.

[Bret] It's a rupture in the movie

but the movie never achieves this kind of poetry again.

And you begin to realize that

oh, this was what really mattered most to Hitchcock.

[John] Tomasini has done a clockwise turn optically,

which then right about here,

hooks back up to the 24 frame footage.

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

Usually, when you do an optical, it's pretty grainy.

But it looks so smooth and so beautiful.

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

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

[Innis] It's also kind of like what the title sequence is doing in Vertigo.

It's a theme that runs through this film, and then later on, of course,

it's not style just for style's sake. It's got content.

The cameras were huge

and very difficult to manipulate

You can actually see pictures of Hitchcock behind a Mitchell

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

behind that huge locomotive of a camera.

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

In the remake, he did it all live action.

[water draining]

[Amy] The pullback from her eye was a whole robotic camera move.

I seriously followed the original film shot by shot.

was able to cut it exactly like the original

and we watched it,

and it was weird and it didn't work.

I said, well Gus, you know, come over, watch the scene.

I said, I have a few reservations over like how it's playing right now

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

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

To duplicate something as iconic as the shower scene

I really think it was just--

it wasn't going to work. It just didn't... And it just didn't.

[Stephan] I always love the placement of those drops

of water because they're like tears.

[Walter] Right at the end, there's a little flicker in her eye,

a little highlight in her eye

yeah, and you can see her eye move.

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

Hitchcock almost fetishistically

lingers in this post-mortem moment.

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

Hitch had a little snap of the finger

to let Janet know when the camera had passed

and was going to pan into the room.

It took a lot of takes.

I could feel the moleskin pulling away

from my top part.

And so, I could feel this. It was just kind of like going--

[mimics high pitched sounds]

And I thought, "You know what?"

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

I really don't want to."

And there're all the guys on the scaffolding.

And I said, "I don't-- I'm not going to be modest, you know.

Let ‘em look."

[Walter] Why would you cut to the shower there?

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

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

[Tere] After my grandfather filmed Psycho,

it had been shown to all the executives,

the last person he showed it to was my grandmother,

and they were sitting in the screening room,

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

"Hitch, you can't release this." And he said, "Why not?"

And she goes, "Janet Leigh took a breath."

They couldn't reshoot it, Janet was gone.

They didn't have the budget.

So they simply cut back to the showerhead

spewing water.

[Howie] And then, that cynical camera move.

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

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

[John] And you see the headline there, "Okay". It is not okay.

Nothing is okay.

[Innis] He always comes back to his McGuffin, which is the $40,000.

[Peter] Then he throws the newspaper into the quagmire.

It goes down with the car.

And the audience says, that's the money

that we thought was important in this story. It's totally unimportant.

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

The greatest scene in movie history ends on a sour note

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

[Norman] Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood!

Blood!

Here comes Norman, just wondering what happened, and oh my,

he can't believe it.

Another murder at the motel. How did that happen?

[Karyn] It's an extraordinary aftermath.

It's a crucial piece of the filmmaking

to sort of let the consequence of it actually land.

[Howie] It's not about getting the bloodstains out of the tub.

It's about this incredibly laborious process

that this unbearably damaged soul

needs to work through.

It demands not just that we watch

as we watched the murder of Marion Crane,

but we're also voyeurs to the horror of Norman's world.

[Ileana] For me, the cleanup represents

Alfred Hitchcock's sense of orderliness,

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

and I'm just going to pretend that

this unhappy episode just didn't even occur.

I think cleaning always represents sexual guilt.

[Jeffrey] You care about this guy.

And I know it sounds crazy, but you do.

You want to know what's going to happen to him.

You want to know is he going to be free of this

or is it going to consume him?

The fact that he is able to get you to care

is one of the miracles of the movie.

[Marco] Psycho obviously has

influence on a whole host of movies.

Psycho is the mother of the slasher genre.

The shower scene is really

the first time fully sexualized on-screen knife attack.

You have Mario Bava in Italy

and he's taking the visuals of the Psycho scene.

In Italy in the ‘60s, they didn't have

the same censorship laws that we had in America.

Bava takes the Hitchcock style and really creates the Italian Giallo film.

[man] Dario Argento burst onto the scene with Bird with the Crystal Plumage

determined to present murder as a form of fine art

consistently sexualizes and fetishizes the killings

and tries to present them as something beautiful, cathartic

and almost orgasmic which happens again and again in his work.

Then, of course, the American films started imitating the Italian films.

And you get the wave of slasher films of the ‘80s

kicking off with John Carpenter's Halloween.

Psycho might have also really have started the rather negative

trend of victims undressing before they're butchered

which is something that haunted slasher cinema throughout the ‘70s.

Martin Scorsese talks about

the construction of the fight

in Raging Bull, with Sugar Ray Robinson

[Martin] I literally got shot by shot breakdown,

of the shower scene in Psycho

and really got my original storyboards for this one sequence shot by shot

and shot it in that order.

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

[Bret] When a moment of violence is so suggestive, so new

so unlike anything we've seen...

that it just becomes part of the cultural conversation

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

[melancholic violin music playing]

[melancholic violin music continues]

I'm on this TV show called Scream Queens.

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

I've been asked to recreate it.

And I've said no every time because, of course,

um, this is my mother's legacy, and it is not mine to play in.

It's her sandbox.

But, my mother's been gone now over ten years.

And, this is a great show.

And it was a really respectful, funny,

homage.

And so the Red Devil comes along, he rips open the curtain,

but I'm not there.

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

attack him,

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

"I saw that movie like 50 times!"

[Marli] I went back to Chicago,

shot the September 1960 cover.

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

I was one of, uh, the original, uh, bunnies there.

I never mentioned Psycho.

The shot I didn't like was when

Tony Perkins pulls me out of the tub

and wraps me in the shower curtain.

He picks me up to carry me out to the trunk.

Well he gets me up about, I don't know, six, nine inches off the floor,

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

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

and that's me.

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

[ominous instrumental music]

[creaking]

[creaking]

[suspenseful music playing]

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