Horror Month: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

                             Gotta have some Hitchcock in Horror Month. There are a number of his films I could have chosen, but I went with Psycho because it's really unsettling and one of his best. Psycho is another movie that I watched fairly young and it scared the hell out of me the first time. As with many who have seen this film, I was pretty scared to take a shower after watching it. Seriously, I bet when this came out Alfred Hitchcock was solely and directly responsible for a huge decline in personal hygiene. I'm glad I wasn't around in 1960 to witness the hordes of filthy people that were a result of the irrational shower phobias that Hitchcock created. Aside from that iconic and influential shower scene, Psycho is from start to finish a compelling mystery that ends in a skin-crawling conclusion that leaves it open for several sequels (none of which I have seen).

                           Everyone knows the story, so I won't really summarize it. If you're reading this (lol, no one reads this blog anyway) and you haven't seen Psycho, watch it right now. This time around watching it, I noticed several interesting connections and motifs I hadn't observed before, mainly because in previous viewings I wasn't looking for that sort of thing. I liked Hitchcock's use of lighting, especially in regards to our psychotic killer Norman. He is often lit from the side, which evenly splits the light down his face, casting one half in darkness while the other is brightly lit. This can be seen as Hitchcock hinting at Norman's duality, and the fact that both Norman and his dead mother now inhabit the same brain. The mystery around Norman's mother is very intriguing as well. Halfway through the film the investigating characters discover than Norman's mother has been dead for a decade, which leads us to wonder who the shadow of the woman was that was seen in the window. Hitchcock's movies tend to be rooted in realism and plausibility for the most part, and it's rather unlike him to delve into the supernatural, especially with something like the living dead. Given this fact we can fairly safely draw the conclusion at this point that Norman's mother is in fact dead, and the shadows and voices seen in the film are someone else. This makes Norman even more unsettling, because we have no idea what he's up to, and exactly who killed the original victim Marion. At the end it is finally revealed that Norman is essentially gone and the psyche of his mother has completely taken him over. He is still physically Norman, but he believes that he is his mother. It's really scary to think about someone who has been dead for an entire decade remaining alive in some fashion in the mind of another. Another interesting connection I noticed was that of Norman's obsession with taxidermy. He has a room full of stuffed birds that he preserved himself, and in his house lies his ultimate achievement in preservation: his mother. He's kept her body in the best condition possible considering how long she has been dead, and her memory and personality are very much alive in Norman.