Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” was released 60 years ago today, and though it is considered by many, including me, to be the greatest horror movie ever made, it’s one that achieves the singular feat of scaring you to your soul without monsters or demons. Of course, you could say that it does have one: Anthony Perkins’ stammering, bird-eyed Norman Bates, the nebbish motel clerk who thinks, at certain moments, that he’s his mother — and that she’s the killer inside him. Yet Norman is a monster of warped humanity; he’s a nervous schizoid freak.
The booby trap of “Psycho,” the joke of it, and the endlessly rewatchable pleasure and profundity of it is that Norman is one sick puppy, but the movie keeps fooling you into thinking it’s the tale of a grander, more metaphysically unsettling evil. The Bates house looks like a haunted mansion out of the 19th century. The character of Mrs. Bates (“Naw-man!”) is like a Victorian ghost who haunts it. And, in a sense, she is a ghost. She’s just the ghost who happens to live in the fruit cellar of Norman’s mind.
When “Psycho” came out, you might say that it ripped the 20th century in half. Before “Psycho,” we had a movie culture in which everyone huddled together in the dark to be thrilled, moved, tickled, and — yes — frightened, with the promise that we were all in it together, and that a happy ending awaited us on the other side. That cosmic reassurance wasn’t just a product of the Hollywood studio system. It expressed a worldview that was, in essence, religious: that movies unfolded in a larger-than-life realm guided by epic forces, and that there was a beauty, order, and symmetry to them. Even monster movies and tales of supernatural terror, from “Frankenstein” to “The War of the Worlds,” reinforced the feeling that the universe made sense, and that goodness would triumph.
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“Psycho” kicked the rug, and the floor, out from under all that. The shock of the shower scene wasn’t just that someone was being slaughtered before our eyes, or that she was the heroine of the film and therefore the last person you’d expect to die a third of the way through it. No, the shower scene, in a mere 45 seconds, tossed the entire aesthetic of Hollywood out the window, and with it the mythic sense that life was something that could and would protect you. The scene shows the brutal death of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, but what it really records is the death of God on film. If Norman’s mother was the killer inside him, Norman, the movie suggested, was the killer inside all of us. And that was the only monster that a monster movie now needed.
I first saw “Psycho” in the late ’70s when I was in college, and the thing I remember about that initial viewing is that in addition to being a Hollywood classic, the movie was now cool. The song “Psycho Killer,” by Talking Heads (released as a single in December 1977), had something to do with that. David Byrne wrote it to capitalize on his resemblance to Anthony Perkins, and Byrne’s whole spooked-preppie charisma lent a new cachet to “Psycho.” The film’s violence, in a way, had become punk. And what made it even more so is that “Psycho,” in addition to being the cinematic bible of Brian De Palma, gave birth to the entire genre of slasher films, which attained a barbarous artistry with the 1974 release of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” (The first murder committed by Leatherface is a total shock-theater sequel to the shower scene.) By the time that the “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” franchises took over, “Psycho” had come to seem nothing less than the template for modern movie horror.
But, of course, there was another template — the movie that most people, today, would probably name as the scariest film ever made (with “Psycho” coming in at number two), and that’s “The Exorcist.” And what “The Exorcist” reasserted was the power of the supernatural war between good and evil. “Psycho” was a Freudian death-of-God gothic funhouse; “The Exorcist” was a post-Freudian God-comes-back-to-kill-the-devil gross-out parable. The irony is that “Psycho” is a movie I return to again and again, because there’s an eternal mystery to it (it may be the ultimate movie that invites you to watch yourself watching it), whereas “The Exorcist” is a film about cosmic evil that’s as literal as a tabloid news story. Maybe that’s why I’ve never found it particularly frightening.
The original primal shock value of “Psycho” is probably hard for any of us who didn’t grow up with the film to imagine. And I’d guess that if you were seeing it for the first time today, “Psycho” might not even be all that scary. Too much of what was radical about it has long been incorporated into the new megaplex normal. If you watch “Psycho” now, you’re almost surely doing it at home, and while I think the film works marvelously on the small screen, especially late at night, in theaters — where I’ve seen it any number of times — it used to have the effect of a midnight black mass.
Sixty years ago, Hitchcock fashioned “Psycho,” in its very cells, as a film to be experienced with an audience. But now, for the first time, that idea is starting to seem quaint — or maybe even, God forbid, outdated. In terms of sheer influence, “The Exorcist,” for the moment, seems to outweigh “Psycho.” Our current age of cinematic horror is much more about devils and zombies and splatterific sensation than it is about laying a trap for the viewer that reveals the beast within. Yet “Psycho,” 60 years ago, did more than change movies. It mirrored, and maybe influenced, a change in the world, demonstrating that terror could now strike out of nowhere, and at the heart of everything we believe in. The movie showed us things to be fearful of, like a motel shower. But what it really showed us was fear itself.
