Psycho: A Bait-And-Switch Horror Classic

"Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.”

Many would call Psycho, the most famed movie of the ever-quotable Alfred Hitchcock, dated. In some ways, they're right. The movie was designed to look older than it really was back in 1960, and it's been 65 years since then. However, the fight-or-flight instinct in humans has remained unchanged, regardless of whether we're going to the theater to see a black-and-white movie or one in color. Psycho plays off of this instinct brilliantly, and in many ways, this is what makes it timeless. It's considered to be one of the first if not the very first slasher movie, a film that has inspired countless others and even spawned a much-maligned shot-for-shot remake by Gus Van Sant. It is a great movie indeed, and in a lot of ways, it's even come to define what makes a movie great. 65 years later, many are still taking the cinematic drive with Marian Crane down the interstate towards the rain-soaked Bates Motel.

Psycho is not complicated. Its "take the money and run" premise is open-ended, composing a symphony of uncertainty and morbid possibilities. Marian doesn't have a goal other than "don't get caught with this money I stole." Norman Bates and his mother's motel is an extremely odd place - not quite sinister, but noticeably strange. How many motels feature taxidermied animals as decorations? How many motels are run by owners with family issues brewing? Even the stilted, awkward way Norman delivers his lines is designed to put one on edge. Something is most definitely not right, but it's hard to put your finger on exactly what.

As for any actual murder in Psycho, I love how restrained it is by today's standards. It was no doubt shocking in 1960, but the mind of this movie is set more on strategic audio-visual work than it is bloody bombshells. Hitchcock scares less with what we see and more with what's just out of frame, a remarkable effect. After all, there's a reason that showers have become synonymous with Psycho. The mystery of the film works on a similar level, especially in regard to Norman's mother. Out of her presence flows such a troubling undercurrent that seems to corrupt the whole film, an undercurrent that takes multiple forms accomplishing multiple different things at multiple different times. She's one of the first questions the movie raises and one of the last it answers.

I love how this movie changes directions so abruptly and radically about halfway through. Made anywhere else or by anyone else, Psycho would have no doubt been Marian's movie. But with time, it will suddenly reveal itself to be a very different movie than you had been conditioned to believe, perhaps the original cinematic bait-and-switch. The situation of Psycho is extremely unstable, keeping it utterly unpredictable. The characters populating it's world are absolutely terrible liars, and it's not hard at all to imagine their lies crashing unceremoniously to the ground to let morbid secrets fly, especially as each new revelation brings with it more truths.

If I had to levy a complaint against Psycho, there are a couple of extremely exposition-heavy sequences that don't do the integrity nor the mystery of the film any favors, disrupting an otherwise methodical trickle of intrigue and mystery. Nevertheless, Psycho arouses consistent curiosity throughout up until its very strong third-act revelations, discoveries that tie together the loose threads it's been laying out unpredictably yet perfectly believably, bringing a weighty yet frightening sense of finality to the mystery before twisting the knife and the plot it's stuck in one final time. It's a hundred and nine minutes of Alfred Hitchcock gleefully misdirecting audiences and making them never want to shower again. It's one of my favorite classic movies, and its slow-burn mystery is intoxicatingly intriguing, outdone only by revelations that simultaneously overturn and make sense of everything we thought we knew about the film. It's not quite Hitchcock's best work (see Rear Window), but there's a reason it has remained iconic. Not only was it shocking in the day and age in which it was made, but it was also ahead of its time as well, benefiting from entirely deserved critical reevaluations in the decades following its release. If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk. And as it turns out, if you give Alfred Hitchcock a little bit of your time, he'll demand all of your attention.

Psycho - 9/10

Job 24:14-20