Psycho: Killing The Star Forty Minutes In
Psycho (1960)
Hitchcock spent his own money, shot it with a television crew, and broke every rule about who is safe in a film.
Runtime
109 minutes
Director
Alfred Hitchcock
Budget
$800,000
Box office
$50 million worldwide
Cinematography
John L. Russell
A Structural Trick Nobody Had Tried
For forty minutes the film is about a woman who steals forty thousand dollars and drives away with it. Janet Leigh is the star, the money is the plot, the guilt is the subject. Then she stops at a motel and the film murders her, and the audience has to start again with no one to hold onto. Paramount refused to finance it, so Hitchcock paid for it himself, shot in black and white with the crew from his television series, and used Universal's backlot for a fraction of a normal feature budget. Bernard Herrmann scored it for strings alone, against Hitchcock's instruction that the shower sequence should be silent, and then persuaded him by playing it. Hitchcock quietly bought up copies of Robert Bloch's novel to keep the ending out of circulation.
"We all go a little mad sometimes.
"Norman Bates · Psycho · 1960
Watching Psycho
Momentum
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Act
Hitchcock refused to let anyone into cinemas after the start, a policy that was unheard of and created queues round the block, which he then filmed for the trailer.
Herrmann's decision to use only strings was partly economic and partly because he wanted the score to match black and white photography. Hitchcock later doubled his fee.
The commercial lesson was that horror could be prestige and cheap at once, which reshaped the industry. The structural lesson was bigger: the film proved an audience will follow a story that discards its protagonist, and every subsequent shock built on the assumption that no one is protected, from Alien to Game of Thrones, is standing on this. The shower scene has been analysed shot by shot more than any other forty five seconds in film.