Psycho

15/01/2025

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What better place to start when thinking of Psycho than with the editing? When thinking of the shower sequence halfway through, showing the death of what a viewer would have understandably assumed would be their central character throughout the film, it shows us Alfred Hitchcock’s ability to use cutting as a nasty pun. Hitchcock shows us very little of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a brief series of shots but he manages to make us horrified by this demise that the viewer only half witnesses. The other half is in our mind, placed there by the director’s simultaneously explicit and implicit imagery. In his book on the film, A Long Hard Look at Psycho, Raymond Durgnat quotes Thorold Dickinson saying: “No film ever frightens an audience. The Audience frightens itself.” 

     This is a partial truth but an important one. A film reliant on the suggestive over the graphic is more likely to occur as much in the viewer’s head as on the screen. The more explicit the film; the more it is frightening the viewer; the more implicit, the audience is frightening itself. Francois Truffaut was right when he said to Hitchcock he thought “Psycho was oriented towards a new generation of filmgoers.” (Hitchcock) Part of that newness was a greater violent content Hitchcock would also go on to show in The Birds, Marnie and especially Frenzy. He remains interested in how form can suggest a terror but also allows the violence to become increasingly present. 

    In the shower sequence, Marion steps into the bath and Hitchcock shows the water pleasurably on her skin while simultaneously making us wonder why the film is lingering on her face. When Brian De Palma offers a homage at the beginning of Dressed to Kill, he does so to take advantage of the looser censorship available by 1980: we can linger on the body (double) all the better to get two for the price of one exploitation: the prurience of nudity; the thought of forthcoming slaughter. Hitchcock offers the latter without the former (De Palma reverses this as it turns out to be a dream sequence). But if Hitchcock couldn’t show Marion’s murder in its gory glory, he probably contributed more than most to its possibility. David Thomson says the film cost $1m and made twenty times that, adding “…as for Psycho itself, that word, the name, the film turned it loose on the culture like a mad dog. And it shifted the Freudian age of potential treatment into one of licensed glee.” (Have You Seen…?) We only need to look at Halloween made eighteen years later and see Michael Myer as a punctuated killer with little need of psychological examination, even if in John Carpenter’s film the scream queen will survive (played of course by Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis). The killings are what matters and Carpenter is a talented enough director to offer them up with invention.

    Yet let us return to Psycho's shower sequence and see Hitchcock’s capacity to generate fear through form. All those shots of Marion in the shower seem to be creating anticipation, and sure enough, Hitchcock offers us a high-angle shot with Marion occupying the bottom right-hand side of the frame. On the left of it, the viewer notices through the shower curtain the door opening and a figure with a pudding bowl haircut yielding a knife. The cuts we see aren’t into the body; they are the film cuts that imply it, as Hitchcock and editor George Tomasini frantically edit Marion Crane into mortality, the blood gathering around her ankles, the water turning dark. The figure retreats and Marion is against the wall and slides down it as Hitchcock shows us her outstretched hand before cutting to her fingers gripping the shower curtain - the last lease of life in her clenching fist. The film gives us her lifeless legs on the floor of the bath and follows the water into the sinkhole before match-cutting to Marion’s dead eye. 

   While Hitchcock talks about his debt to Russian montage when seeing similarities between Jefferies in Rear Window looking at various things across the way, and Kuleshov’s experiment where an actor’s reaction can be comprehended less through the acting than what the viewer perceives in the joining of the shot and the counter shot, Hitchcock here in the shower sequence is closer to Eisenstein. As Durgnat notes. “Marion’s death is ecstatic in Eisenstein’s sense, where ‘ecstasy’ means some extreme mental state of horror and pathos.” (A Long Hard Look At Psycho) Durgnat compares the moment to the panic on the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin, the frenzied butchery in Strike.

   Hollywood tamed Soviet montage and learned more from its conservative practitioners like Pudovkin over its more radical wing well represented by Eisenstein. But few more than Hitchcock gave its possibilities serious thought, even when he appears most to retreat from editing, as in the series of single takes in Rope, the extended takes in Under Capricorn and Frenzy. He saw film not chiefly as a recording of a pro-filmic reality with all its surplus material, but more a grammar. “…everything in cinema is a visual statement and the images are its language. Film, therefore, like any language, has its own syntax, which as the word implies, is lining up or ordering of images to create the maximum effect.” (Hitchcock on Hitchcock) However, in Hitchcock, this can come equally through cutting or by camera movement. In Frenzy, the film's most memorable murder scene is antithetical to the one in Psycho if one distinguishes montage from mise-en-scene, but similar in the context of Hitchcock’s syntax. Here we see the murder victim going up to the murderer's apartment with him. As they enter, the camera stays where it is, before retreating down the stairs and onto the streets. The shot is initially silent but, as the camera enters the busy road, the sounds become pronounced while the camera looks up at the apartment. Hitchcock doesn’t want the street sounds because they are realistic; he wants them because they emphasise the horror, the sense that someone has just been murdered while people go about their hectic lives. 

   What is interesting too, of course, is that Hitchcock is much less explicit in this sequence than he is in Psycho, even though Frenzy, made in 1972, was shot in an era when filmmakers no longer had to register the aggressive in the suggestive — in knowing as the viewer knew that censorship would only allow for so much violence to be shown on screen, no matter if Hitchcock is more explicit in other scenes. In Psycho, Hitchcock pushed that envelope with a montage that shocks the viewer by combining vivid cutting with, for its time, strong violence. Hitchcock shocks them all over again by literally retreating from the brutality he could show and creating a disquiet no less great than in his 1960 hit. Quentin Tarantino may have described Frenzy as “a piece of crap” (Indiewire) but he might have borrowed from its syntactical manipulation in Reservoir Dogs. Just as Hitchcock retreats from the extreme even though he need not. Tarantino pans away just as the sadist moves in to take off the cop’s ear. In each instance, the point is made more strongly because the filmmakers themselves insist on looking away. Usually, this expectation is placed on the film through the censor (in cinema before the mid-sixties) or by the audience (afterwards). But by holding the shot and yet eschewing the action, both directors maximise disquiet. The audience frightens itself. 

   For most filmmakers, editing versus extending the take isn’t an either/or even if much theoretical work has gone into playing one off the other. A great example of their combination comes when Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) goes into Norman Bates’ house looking for the mother. He has proved Marion stayed at the motel and she hasn’t been seen since. In two shots, the film shows us Arbogast making his way up the stairs to the house and reaching the door: Hitchcock doesn’t foreshorten these shots, well aware of the suspense they contain even if this is a mundane action. From there, Hitchcock offers an interior shot as Arbogast enters the front door, a point of view shot as the detective sees some stairs in front of him, a cut back to the detective, another cut as Arbogast is in the hall, and then another POV as he looks down the hallway. Hitchcock then cuts back to Arbogast before another POV on the stairs. There are a few more shots but all of them convey well the detective’s thought process: his awareness that he is there secretively and his decision over whether to look first down the hallway or go up the stairs. He chooses the latter, and this is where Hitchcock offers several shots that are masterfully done even if apparently contrary to his general directorial dictum. Speaking in a book-length Francois Truffaut interview of two characters talking in shot/ counter-shot, Hitchcock says you shouldn’t cut to a long shot as one of the characters rises to walk away. Truffaut says this is because “the technique precedes the action instead of accompanying it. It allows the public to guess that one of the characters is about to stand up or whatever. In other words, the camera should never anticipate what’s about to follow.” (Hitchcock) 

   This is an odd exchange because Hitchcock is a filmmaker who frequently anticipates the viewer’s response and he does it sometimes through camera movement and frequently through editing. In this sequence, he does it through editing as he cuts to a shallow focus shot of Arbogast going up the stairs. The detective turns round behind him and the film cuts to a shot of a door opening, but this isn’t a POV shot: it is, we will discover, the killer coming out of the room. Hitchcock cuts back to Arbogast and then to an overhead shot of him reaching the top of the stairs. The door is now wide open, the killer exits the room and strikes the detective with the knife, before another cut shows him falling down the stairs. If Hitchcock insists that in Truffaut’s words the camera should never anticipate what’s about to follow, that high-angle cut surely counters such a claim. We have the briefest of moments guessing why the high angle before the killer comes and takes out the detective. 

     Editing is often used to anticipate the action. A filmmaker who admits that he enjoys playing God with the viewer, as Hitchcock did, is likely to use editing (and camera movement and framing) to create such an effect. It might be the birds gathering behind Tippi Hedren in the film of that title, the door opening in the bathroom here, or in the Arbogast scene. In The Birds, Hedren sits down and smokes a cigarette on a bench, while the film cuts back and forth from her seated there, occasionally looking to the right where she can hear kids singing, to the birds, behind her to the left, gathering on a frame outside the school. First, it is one or two crows, then three or four and so on until the frame is covered with birds and Hedren turns around and sees them. The use of cutting like in The Birds is often an anticipatory device, and what might distinguish a more realist aesthetic from a more deliberate one is how editing helps us second-guess the action. After all, a filmmaker can cut to any number of things — why the knife on the table, the rope on the chair, the axe in the corner? Hitchcock famously said to Truffaut his films were a slice of cake not a slice of life, but he also added it was life with the dull bits left out. If he includes what might seem like a dull bit when he shows an object of apparently little importance, we are inclined to wonder why. If we were to see the frame in the background of the shot in The Birds, it would be just another aspect of the image, but if a filmmaker cuts to that frame it takes on an importance in our mind that it wouldn’t have if it were to remain merely behind the character. In Psycho, the film may offer one of the biggest surprises in film up until 1960 as it kills off its leading lady halfway through, but Hitchcock gets us to anticipate, in contrast, many micro-events along the way, and isn't afraid to use the editing to offer the opposite of what he claimed was so important in the Hitchcock interview.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Psycho

What better place to start when thinking of Psycho than with the editing? When thinking of the shower sequence halfway through, showing the death of what a viewer would have understandably assumed would be their central character throughout the film, it shows us Alfred Hitchcock’s ability to use cutting as a nasty pun. Hitchcock shows us very little of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a brief series of shots but he manages to make us horrified by this demise that the viewer only half witnesses. The other half is in our mind, placed there by the director’s simultaneously explicit and implicit imagery. In his book on the film, A Long Hard Look at Psycho, Raymond Durgnat quotes Thorold Dickinson saying: “No film ever frightens an audience. The Audience frightens itself.” 

     This is a partial truth but an important one. A film reliant on the suggestive over the graphic is more likely to occur as much in the viewer’s head as on the screen. The more explicit the film; the more it is frightening the viewer; the more implicit, the audience is frightening itself. Francois Truffaut was right when he said to Hitchcock he thought “Psycho was oriented towards a new generation of filmgoers.” (Hitchcock) Part of that newness was a greater violent content Hitchcock would also go on to show in The Birds, Marnie and especially Frenzy. He remains interested in how form can suggest a terror but also allows the violence to become increasingly present. 

    In the shower sequence, Marion steps into the bath and Hitchcock shows the water pleasurably on her skin while simultaneously making us wonder why the film is lingering on her face. When Brian De Palma offers a homage at the beginning of Dressed to Kill, he does so to take advantage of the looser censorship available by 1980: we can linger on the body (double) all the better to get two for the price of one exploitation: the prurience of nudity; the thought of forthcoming slaughter. Hitchcock offers the latter without the former (De Palma reverses this as it turns out to be a dream sequence). But if Hitchcock couldn’t show Marion’s murder in its gory glory, he probably contributed more than most to its possibility. David Thomson says the film cost $1m and made twenty times that, adding “…as for Psycho itself, that word, the name, the film turned it loose on the culture like a mad dog. And it shifted the Freudian age of potential treatment into one of licensed glee.” (Have You Seen…?) We only need to look at Halloween made eighteen years later and see Michael Myer as a punctuated killer with little need of psychological examination, even if in John Carpenter’s film the scream queen will survive (played of course by Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis). The killings are what matters and Carpenter is a talented enough director to offer them up with invention.

    Yet let us return to Psycho's shower sequence and see Hitchcock’s capacity to generate fear through form. All those shots of Marion in the shower seem to be creating anticipation, and sure enough, Hitchcock offers us a high-angle shot with Marion occupying the bottom right-hand side of the frame. On the left of it, the viewer notices through the shower curtain the door opening and a figure with a pudding bowl haircut yielding a knife. The cuts we see aren’t into the body; they are the film cuts that imply it, as Hitchcock and editor George Tomasini frantically edit Marion Crane into mortality, the blood gathering around her ankles, the water turning dark. The figure retreats and Marion is against the wall and slides down it as Hitchcock shows us her outstretched hand before cutting to her fingers gripping the shower curtain - the last lease of life in her clenching fist. The film gives us her lifeless legs on the floor of the bath and follows the water into the sinkhole before match-cutting to Marion’s dead eye. 

   While Hitchcock talks about his debt to Russian montage when seeing similarities between Jefferies in Rear Window looking at various things across the way, and Kuleshov’s experiment where an actor’s reaction can be comprehended less through the acting than what the viewer perceives in the joining of the shot and the counter shot, Hitchcock here in the shower sequence is closer to Eisenstein. As Durgnat notes. “Marion’s death is ecstatic in Eisenstein’s sense, where ‘ecstasy’ means some extreme mental state of horror and pathos.” (A Long Hard Look At Psycho) Durgnat compares the moment to the panic on the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin, the frenzied butchery in Strike.

   Hollywood tamed Soviet montage and learned more from its conservative practitioners like Pudovkin over its more radical wing well represented by Eisenstein. But few more than Hitchcock gave its possibilities serious thought, even when he appears most to retreat from editing, as in the series of single takes in Rope, the extended takes in Under Capricorn and Frenzy. He saw film not chiefly as a recording of a pro-filmic reality with all its surplus material, but more a grammar. “…everything in cinema is a visual statement and the images are its language. Film, therefore, like any language, has its own syntax, which as the word implies, is lining up or ordering of images to create the maximum effect.” (Hitchcock on Hitchcock) However, in Hitchcock, this can come equally through cutting or by camera movement. In Frenzy, the film's most memorable murder scene is antithetical to the one in Psycho if one distinguishes montage from mise-en-scene, but similar in the context of Hitchcock’s syntax. Here we see the murder victim going up to the murderer's apartment with him. As they enter, the camera stays where it is, before retreating down the stairs and onto the streets. The shot is initially silent but, as the camera enters the busy road, the sounds become pronounced while the camera looks up at the apartment. Hitchcock doesn’t want the street sounds because they are realistic; he wants them because they emphasise the horror, the sense that someone has just been murdered while people go about their hectic lives. 

   What is interesting too, of course, is that Hitchcock is much less explicit in this sequence than he is in Psycho, even though Frenzy, made in 1972, was shot in an era when filmmakers no longer had to register the aggressive in the suggestive — in knowing as the viewer knew that censorship would only allow for so much violence to be shown on screen, no matter if Hitchcock is more explicit in other scenes. In Psycho, Hitchcock pushed that envelope with a montage that shocks the viewer by combining vivid cutting with, for its time, strong violence. Hitchcock shocks them all over again by literally retreating from the brutality he could show and creating a disquiet no less great than in his 1960 hit. Quentin Tarantino may have described Frenzy as “a piece of crap” (Indiewire) but he might have borrowed from its syntactical manipulation in Reservoir Dogs. Just as Hitchcock retreats from the extreme even though he need not. Tarantino pans away just as the sadist moves in to take off the cop’s ear. In each instance, the point is made more strongly because the filmmakers themselves insist on looking away. Usually, this expectation is placed on the film through the censor (in cinema before the mid-sixties) or by the audience (afterwards). But by holding the shot and yet eschewing the action, both directors maximise disquiet. The audience frightens itself. 

   For most filmmakers, editing versus extending the take isn’t an either/or even if much theoretical work has gone into playing one off the other. A great example of their combination comes when Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) goes into Norman Bates’ house looking for the mother. He has proved Marion stayed at the motel and she hasn’t been seen since. In two shots, the film shows us Arbogast making his way up the stairs to the house and reaching the door: Hitchcock doesn’t foreshorten these shots, well aware of the suspense they contain even if this is a mundane action. From there, Hitchcock offers an interior shot as Arbogast enters the front door, a point of view shot as the detective sees some stairs in front of him, a cut back to the detective, another cut as Arbogast is in the hall, and then another POV as he looks down the hallway. Hitchcock then cuts back to Arbogast before another POV on the stairs. There are a few more shots but all of them convey well the detective’s thought process: his awareness that he is there secretively and his decision over whether to look first down the hallway or go up the stairs. He chooses the latter, and this is where Hitchcock offers several shots that are masterfully done even if apparently contrary to his general directorial dictum. Speaking in a book-length Francois Truffaut interview of two characters talking in shot/ counter-shot, Hitchcock says you shouldn’t cut to a long shot as one of the characters rises to walk away. Truffaut says this is because “the technique precedes the action instead of accompanying it. It allows the public to guess that one of the characters is about to stand up or whatever. In other words, the camera should never anticipate what’s about to follow.” (Hitchcock) 

   This is an odd exchange because Hitchcock is a filmmaker who frequently anticipates the viewer’s response and he does it sometimes through camera movement and frequently through editing. In this sequence, he does it through editing as he cuts to a shallow focus shot of Arbogast going up the stairs. The detective turns round behind him and the film cuts to a shot of a door opening, but this isn’t a POV shot: it is, we will discover, the killer coming out of the room. Hitchcock cuts back to Arbogast and then to an overhead shot of him reaching the top of the stairs. The door is now wide open, the killer exits the room and strikes the detective with the knife, before another cut shows him falling down the stairs. If Hitchcock insists that in Truffaut’s words the camera should never anticipate what’s about to follow, that high-angle cut surely counters such a claim. We have the briefest of moments guessing why the high angle before the killer comes and takes out the detective. 

     Editing is often used to anticipate the action. A filmmaker who admits that he enjoys playing God with the viewer, as Hitchcock did, is likely to use editing (and camera movement and framing) to create such an effect. It might be the birds gathering behind Tippi Hedren in the film of that title, the door opening in the bathroom here, or in the Arbogast scene. In The Birds, Hedren sits down and smokes a cigarette on a bench, while the film cuts back and forth from her seated there, occasionally looking to the right where she can hear kids singing, to the birds, behind her to the left, gathering on a frame outside the school. First, it is one or two crows, then three or four and so on until the frame is covered with birds and Hedren turns around and sees them. The use of cutting like in The Birds is often an anticipatory device, and what might distinguish a more realist aesthetic from a more deliberate one is how editing helps us second-guess the action. After all, a filmmaker can cut to any number of things — why the knife on the table, the rope on the chair, the axe in the corner? Hitchcock famously said to Truffaut his films were a slice of cake not a slice of life, but he also added it was life with the dull bits left out. If he includes what might seem like a dull bit when he shows an object of apparently little importance, we are inclined to wonder why. If we were to see the frame in the background of the shot in The Birds, it would be just another aspect of the image, but if a filmmaker cuts to that frame it takes on an importance in our mind that it wouldn’t have if it were to remain merely behind the character. In Psycho, the film may offer one of the biggest surprises in film up until 1960 as it kills off its leading lady halfway through, but Hitchcock gets us to anticipate, in contrast, many micro-events along the way, and isn't afraid to use the editing to offer the opposite of what he claimed was so important in the Hitchcock interview.


© Tony McKibbin