Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Hitchcock once characterized Psycho as “One of the most cinematic movies I’ve made and there you get a clear example of the use of film to cause an audience to respond emotionally.” Yet the hundreds of successors to Psycho only serve to display how scrupulous and restrained a filmmaker Hitchcock had been. If any energy remains in the Psycho formula—The Crackpot With the Knife, The Blonde, The Weird House, The Serpentine Plot—too few of Hitchcock’s followers and imitators have had what it takes to tap it.

  During the sixties and seventies, Hitchcock grew more infirm with arthritis and heart problems and his competitors became legion. He seemed to become more frenzied in his search for outstanding material. In early 1964, when Hitchcock wrote and telephoned novelist Vladimir Nabokov with proposals for two movie screenplays, he described his “desperation for a story” as “immediate and urgent.” Nabokov counterproposed an idea about a spy, which Hitchcock rejected as too like a 1955 movie called The Man Who Never Was. A scheduled meeting between the two never took place. “The main problem for Hitch after Psycho,” asserted Michael Ludmer, who functioned as an inhouse story finder and unofficial literary agent, “was that the material just wasn’t there. Fewer novelists and playwrights of the calibre of [Hitchcock collaborators] Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson, or Robert Sherwood existed. Hitch’s access to them, indeed, the access of all Hollywood to them, had changed. Top writers would not be interested in coming to Los Angeles for six to ten weeks to work on material that was not their own. So the Paddy Chayevskys were pleased as punch to hear from Hitchcock, but they’d look at that material and say, ‘I’d love to work for you, but not on this.’”

  Hitchcock watched as a parade of directors stepped forward to “do a Hitchcock.” Some of them publicly acknowledged their debt to the Master, others did not. Perhaps it was only fitting that the British-based Hammer Films (the success of which had been a prod to Hitchcock for making Psycho) embarked on a series of Psycho-like shockers, including Scream of Fear (1960), Maniac (1962), Paranoiac (1962), Nightmare (1963), and Die, Die, My Darling, Hysteria, and Crescendo (all 1964). The influence of Psycho is apparent on efforts from William Castle (Homicidal, 1961; Strait-Jacket, 1964), Robert Aldrich (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962; Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, 1964), Michael Powell (Peeping Tom, 1962), Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia-13, 1963), Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1965), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, 1968), Noel Black (Pretty Poison, 1968), Roy Boulting (Twisted Nerve, 1968), Herbert Kastle (The Honeymoon Killers, 1970), Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby (Deranged, 1974, based on the story of Ed Gein), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974, also inspired in part by Gein), and Brian De Palma (Sisters, 1973; Dressed to Kill, 1980). Before Psycho, would audiences have been as well prepared for the mood swings and bloodletting of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969)?

  Yet surely, any malicious merriment Hitchcock might have enjoyed at the shortcomings of his directorial colleagues must have palled as he realized that he could not top Psycho either. Running for cover, the director tried to reclaim audiences who clamored for another killer-on-the-loose thriller. During the mid-sixties, Hitchcock interviewed or hired a phalanx of writers, from Benn Levy (Murder!, 1930) to Broadway playwright Hugh Wheeler, from novelist Howard Fast to playwrights Lillian Hellman and Edward Albee, to devise a script based on the real-life case of Englishman Neville Heath, a baby-faced seducer-murderer with a compulsion to carve up the bodies of young women. Story conferences and script drafts alike came to a dead-end when Hitchcock asked the rhetorical question: “Is this too much like Psycho?” Frenzy (1972), his only other late-period psycho-shocker, was an attempt to apply old-style film craft to a latter-day tale of a Jack the Ripper-type at large in swinging London. Many critics consider it the best film of Hitchcock’s final decade, but some audiences and critics felt let down.

  Endless TV showings, imitations, and parodies have dulled the cutting edge of Psycho, particularly to a generation that may mistake spurting blood bags, flash editing, and cranked-up soundtracks for real thrills. By contrast to the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street series and their hellspawn, the fuss made over Hitchcock may seem as incomprehensible today as an old TV show or silent movie. Today’s children of Jason and Freddie may puzzle over why 1960 audiences screamed bloody murder over Norman. But should they be so lucky, perhaps a nineties-style Hitchcock counterpart might creep up on them unawares and scare the beejesus out of moviegoing America all over again.

  When director Francois Truffaut tried to pry out of Hitchcock comments on the experimental and artistic nature of Psycho Hitchcock admitted: “I can’t get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we’re using now.” Rather, observed the director, “Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to filmmakers, to you and me.” For the cinematic and literary successors to Hitchcock, the legacy is awesome. Novelist Stephen King (Carrie, The Shining), who ranks Psycho as one of “the scariest films ever made,” marks it as a touchstone for bringing the archetypal Jekyll-and-Hyde figure into the modern vernacular. “Psycho is effective because it brings the werewolf myth home,” King has written. “It is not outside evil, predestination; the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We know that Norman is only outwardly the Werewolf when he’s wearing Mom’s duds and speaking in Mom’s voice; but we have the uneasy suspicion that he’s the Werewolf all the time.”

  Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Body Double), one of the most technically accomplished of his generation, has appropriated plotlines and much surface technique from Hitchcock. In 1980, De Palma said, “Dealing with Hitchcock is like dealing with Bach—he wrote every tune that was ever done. Hitchcock thought up practically every cinematic idea that has been used and probably will be used in this form.”

  Few films since Psycho have seeped as much as it did into the dark imagination and consciousness of the public. Merits or demerits of the Psycho successors aside, that select circle must include Rosemary’s Baby (1968, directed by Roman Polanski), Night of the Living Dead (1968, George Romero), The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin), Halloween (1978, John Carpenter), and Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne). The timing of the release of the Polanski and Romero movies could not have been more perfect. America was reeling from the horrors of a televised jungle war, rioting in the streets, campus turmoil, the duplicity of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. A movie theater seat seemed as good a vantage point as any from which to view the apocalypse. Americans experienced the horror with a media-hip irony and detachment. Television had only made that attitude possible. The events of the era made it, for some, a survival tool.

  In The Exorcist, director William Friedkin went straight for the jugular. In its sequences that document the casual horrors and insensitivity of the medical profession in diagnosing the ills of a little girl, the movie is riveting. From there on in, it’s strictly an affair for the special effects team—much upchucking of pea soup, levitations, and twist-o-matic heads. Unlike many shockers that are popular with teenagers and the action crowd, The Exorcist (like the William Peter Blatty best-seller on which it was based) struck a nerve with audiences of all ages.

  Director Adrian Lyne was acutely aware of the shadow of Hitchcock looming over Fatal Attraction. Like Polanski in Repulsion, Lyne kept the audience on tenterhooks by reversing the psycho-knifing-the-blonde cliché with the blonde being the psycho who wields the knife. “Hitchcock was obviously so brilliant,” Lyne observed. “A genius. At the time Psycho came out, the shower scene was revolutionary. It was and is so impressive, the quick cuts, the bits and pieces. But today, compared to the rest of the film, that scene looks strangely naive. What is absolutely wonderful about the scene is the sound of the knife.”

  But audience response to early rough-cut previews of his own Fatal Attraction (1987) made Lyne realize that any thriller must stand comparison to Hitchcock. In the script and film as origina
lly shot, the ravaged Alix (Glenn Close) stabs herself to death like Madame Butterfly, tricking her one-night-stand lover (Michael Douglas) into marking the knife with his fingerprints. When blood-thirsty preview audiences demanded a more violent showdown, director Lyne regrouped his cast to stage a bathroom sequence reminiscent not only of Hitchcock but also of Les Diaboliques. “Although the comparison [to those films] was always there,” said Lyne, “I was anxious to avoid a repeat of the Hitchcock scene and was trying to avoid the knife-wielding sort of whacko. Both Glenn and I were reluctant to do it. In the end, I said to her, ‘Rather than hold the knife in a threatening way, perhaps you could let it dangle by your side—sort of twitch with it, almost like you’re scratching yourself.’ Anybody who could do that without feeling it was capable of anything. Like Hitchcock, we were setting up a generic sort of jeopardy that carried through the rest of the sequence. In retrospect, the new ending is better than the original one.”

  Lyne attributed to believable characters the phenomenal box-office records of Psycho and Fatal Attraction. He said, “The fact that Hitchcock’s main star was killed so early in Psycho was brilliant thinking. Almost everyone who saw my film put themselves in the shoes of the lover, the wife, the husband—sometimes all three. It was very real to them. A movie is much more difficult for the audience to dismiss if they can identify intimately with the problems of the characters in it.”

  In the nearly thirty years since the theatrical release of Psycho, the picture attained the status of an international pop culture icon. In 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock assessed Psycho for one of the umpteen reporters on his publicity tour, he observed: “It’s a pretty good film. But, more important, it’s the first shocker I’ve ever made. The pictures I’ve done before were thrillers. This one literally shocks you.” The fact is, the most famous and one of the most emulated of all Hitchcock films—for all its immediate power over audiences and its long-range impact upon international cinema—uprooted and altered no one more irrevocably than the director himself.

  Psycho

  Cast and Credits

  1960. A PARAMOUNT RELEASE. CAST: Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), Vera Miles (Lila Crane), John Gavin (Sam Loomis). Co-starring Martin Balsam (Milton Arbogast) and John McIntire (Sheriff Chambers). With Simon Oakland (Dr. Richmond), Vaughn Taylor (Mr. Lowery), Frank Albertson (Cassidy), Lurene Tuttle (Mrs. Chambers), Pat Hitchcock (Caroline), John Anderson (“California Charlie”), Mort Mills (Highway Patrolman), and Janet Leigh (as Marion Crane). Standins: Margo Epper, June Gleason, Myra Jones, Paul Matthews, Frank Vinci, John Drake, Ann Dore. Director of Photography: John L. Russell, A.S.C. Art Direction: Joseph Hurley and Robert Clatworthy. Set Decorator: George Milo. Unit Manager: Lew Leary. Title Design: Saul Bass. Editor: George Tomasini, A.C.E. Costume Supervisor: Helen Colvig. Wardrobe: Rita Riggs. Makeup Supervision: Jack Barron and Robert Dawn. Hairstylist: Florence Bush. Special Effects: Clarence Champagne. Sound Recording: Waldon O. Watson and William Russell. Assistant Director: Hilton A. Green. Pictorial Consultant: Saul Bass. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Running Time: 109 minutes.

  And After Psycho

  FRANK ALBERTSON (Cassidy), whose career includes appearances in such films as Alice Adams (1935) and Bachelor Mother (1939), later appeared in Girl on the Run (1961), Don’t Knock the Twist (1962), and Johnny Cool and Bye Bye Birdie (1963). He died at age fifty-five in 1964.

  JAMES ALLARDICE (writer of trailer, publicity), a former Yale playwrighting student, caught the attention of MCA and Paramount in 1949 when he was hired to adapt his comedy At War with the Army for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. A top TV comedy writer and Emmy-winner when MCA brought him together with Hitchcock, Allardice scripted for the director the merrily macabre situations and monologues that began and ended Hitchcock television shows for ten years. Allardice also wrote the droll speeches Hitchcock gave before the National Press Club and other organizations. Actor-producer Norman Lloyd had observed of the death of Allardice in 1965, “I always felt that when Hitch said he didn’t want to go on with the series any longer it was because he knew there would never be another Jimmy Allardice.”

  MARTIN BALSAM (actor) has continued to steal scenes in such movies as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Seven Days in May (1964), A Thousand Clowns (Academy Award for best supporting actor, 1965), Catch-22 and Little Big Man (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976).

  SAUL BASS (titles, pictorial consultant) contributed title sequences to such films as Spartacus and Ocean’s Eleven (1960), West Side Story (1961), A Walk on the Wild Side (1962), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), and Seconds and Grand Prix (1966). He has produced and directed TV commercials, shorts, and documentaries, including The Searching Eye (1963), From Here to There (1964), Why Man Creates (1968), and a feature film, Phase IV (1974). He created “key art” for dozens of film poster campaigns, including Exodus (1960), Advise and Consent (1962), Nine Hours to Rama and The Cardinal (1963), The Fixer (1968), The Human Factor (1979), The Shining (1980), and Talk Radio (1988).

  ROBERT BLOCH (novelist) has written over a thousand short stories, over a dozen novels, teleplays for such shows as “Darkroom,” and screenplays for such films as Strait-Jacket and The Nightwalker (1964), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), and Tales From the Crypt (1972), based on the gory E.C. Comics. His characters were the basis for Psycho II and Psycho III.

  JAMES P. CAVANAGH (screenwriter) had written teleplays for the Hitchcock series before tackling the first attempt to turn Robert Bloch’s novel into a screenplay: “The Hidden Thing,” “The Creeper,” “Fog Closing In,” “None Are So Blind,” “The End of Indian Summer,” “One More Mile To Go,” “Sylvia,” “Arthur,” and “Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?” are among them. Hitchcock rejected Cavanagh’s Psycho script, but Cavanagh continued to work for the director’s TV series (“Coming, Mama,” “A Jury of Her Peers,” “Where Beauty Lies”) before his death in 1971 at age forty-nine.

  ROBERT CLATWORTHY (art direction) has designed such films as That Touch of Mink (1962), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), Ship of Fools (1965), Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967), Cactus Flower (1969), The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), Butterflies Are Free (1972), Report to the Commissioner (1974), From Noon ’Till Three (1976), Carwash (1976), and Another Man, Another Chance (1977). In 1989, art director Anton Furst and director Tim Burton, who collaborated on Batman, called Clatworthy and Joseph Hurley’s Psycho motel and Victorian house the best movie “special effect” ever created.

  HERBERT COLEMAN (assistant director) had been associated with Hitchcock since becoming his assistant director on Rear Window and associate on every Hitchcock project prior to Psycho, which Coleman departed. He later worked on many TV productions, including the Hitchcock show, and often seemed on the verge of directing and producing feature films. He rejoined Hitchcock in 1968 through the troubled production of Topaz.

  JOHN GAVIN (Sam Loomis) became president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1971 to 1973. Later, he was appointed ambassador to Mexico by President Ronald Reagan, another former Guild president and conservative Republican. Before turning to politics, the actor’s credits included Back Street (1961), Midnight Lace (1960), Romanoff and Juliet (1961), Tammy Tell Me True (1961), the TV series “Destry Rides Again” (1964), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), and TV mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). Mr. Gavin has never spoken about Psycho in any published interview.

  HILTON GREEN (assistant director) produced the financially successful Psycho II (1983) and Sixteen Candles (1984), as well as Psycho III (1986), all for Universal.

  VIRGINIA GREGG, who provided the voice of Mother in Psycho, Psycho II (1983), and Psycho III (1986), has been seen on screen in Operation Petticoat and All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960), House of Women and Spencer’s Mountain (1962). She died in 1986.

  BERNARD HERRMANN (composer) acted as sound consultant to Hitchcock on The Birds (1963) and composer for Marnie (1964). Hitchcock
forever alienated Herrmann by replacing the musician’s score for Torn Curtain (1966) with one by John Addison. Among the composer’s later credits: The Bride Wore Black (1967), Twisted Nerve (1969), The Battle of Neretva (1971), Sisters (1973), and Taxi Driver and Obsession both released the year following his death in 1975.

  PATRICIA HITCHCOCK (Caroline) appeared in the TV version of Dorothy Parker’s “Ladies of the Corridor” with Cloris Leachman and Barbara Baxley, shown on PBS. Married with children and grandchildren, she endowed the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with her father’s career papers and production files.

  JOSEPH HURLEY (art direction) was the production illustrator to designer Richard MacDonald on both Altered States (1980) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). He died in 1982.