Sunday Classic - Psycho

The horror genre is over eighty years old. To stand so easily at the top of the pile, then, is quite the achievement, and to realise it, any movie would have to be much more than just a collection of scares & spooks. Psycho fits that bill: witty, beautifully shot and genuinely creepy, even today.

Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's novel begins by following Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) as she skips town with $40,000, intending to steal it and start a new life with her lover, Sam. But on the way to him she checks into the Bates Motel, where shy, timid Norman Bates lives with "Mother". Marion never checks out: a shadowy figure in a dress slays her in the shower. The rest of the movie follows her sister, Lila, and Sam as they find their way to the motel and try to uncover what really happened to Marion.

It should be said right here: Norman Bates is one of the great screen villains of all time. Agreeable, likeable even, from the moment he meets Marion, most viewers will feel quite sorry for this wounded bird before realising that he is something to be feared. The sacrifices he so happily makes for his apparently deranged mother have the effect of convincing Marion to take back the stolen money, after all.
Before long, we receive clues that Norman has issues of his own. Showing Marion her room, for example, Bates refers to the bathroom as "over there". These are the words of a little boy, and later conversations with "Mother" reveal an angry, immature soul caught in awe of a much stronger personality.

Although the death scenes may be slightly jarring (silly even, in the case of Detective Arbogast) to modern audiences, they remain vitally important to filmmaking history. Hitchcock had an uncommon finesse when it came to offing his characters, using experimental angles and shots to squeeze undiluted drama from his characters' last moments. That shower scene, perhaps the most famous in cinema, used 90-odd shots to portray Marion Crane's demise, including several of the shower head, drain and a nearby toilet flushing. The combined effect was chilling, and is still quite powerful today.

It is a sad fact that horror classics very seldom become cinema classics (or Channel24 Sunday Classics, for that matter). Looking back, many of the greats, so terrifying at the time, become laughable raspberries in the neon light of the present day. Somehow, Psycho retains its charm, even though so many new phobias and fears have entered the mainstream conscience. Perhaps it succeeds because on some level, we can't ignore the hunch that the kind of insanity that plagued Norman Bates could spring up just about anywhere.

Niel Bekker