I Love This Sequence In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

Okay, I know we’re all focused on mid-term results this morning, but I just want to talk for a few paragraphs about how much I adore this particular sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho:

There are two murders in the film and one tends to overshadow the other. And for good reason! The shower slaying of Marion Crane, with the shadow appearing through the curtain, the expertly hidden Norman in his mother garb, the shrieking Bernard Herrmann score, the masterful editing - It’s great stuff! As such, the subsequent murder of Arbogast, the private investigator played by one of the greatest supporting actors in history Martin Balsam, gets the inherent Silver medal.

BUT there’s a lot that’s great in this bit, especially because of how Hitchcock plays with suspense and the audience’s notion of suspense. One of Hitchcock’s most famous quotes regarding his methodology involved a metaphor of a bomb going off. If it blows out of nowhere, audiences are surely surprised but then…that’s it. However, if the audience knows there’s a bomb but they don’t quite know when/if it’s going to go off, they linger in beautiful tension.

In this case, it applies to our knowledge of the killer in Psycho. We know Norman Bates (Sorry to spoil a 62 years old movie. Yes, Norman Bates dresses up and takes on the role of his mother. I promise, the movie is still good even when you’ve learned this) is in the house. We know that when Arbogast goes in the house, he’s likely to be attacked. Heck, as he goes up the stairs, Hitchcock even cuts to a door opening slowly. So we know that Norman is about to strike, even if we don’t exactly know when. In this case, we certainly understand that the bomb is there and that the bomb will go off. The only question is timing.

Then Hitchcock pulls one on us - the slow shot of Arbogast coming up the stairs immediately leaps to a ceiling view.

It’s abrupt and jarring and so when Norman bursts from the door, we’re still trying to get adjusted to everything. The broadness of the frame and the smaller figures that it captures means that it isn’t really a jump scare in how we typically know them. Rather, it ruins our sense of place, but in a good way. Just as Arbogast, a splash of blood across his face, falling backwards down the stairs feels like a hazy, surreal descent, so is the entire set-up and then overhaul meant to disorient us. Hitchcock was never going to get anything more iconic or memorable than that first shower scene. He’d played his hand with that slow build-up and savage release. So, instead of just doing the same thing again, he instead flips our expectations, not about what will happen, but how we’re gonna be able to process it.

It’s pretty cool!