Psycho

It’s hard to appreciate the effect of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho on world cinema since we’ve been living in the post-Psycho world since 1960. It was a shock in 1960 for the sheer terror Hitchcock was able to create, the unprecedented gruesomeness of its violence, the explicit psycho-sexual themes it excavated, and its subversion of audience expectations and norms (for example, killing off the main character before the film is half over). It’s also a masterpiece of cinematic art with critics around the world praising its chilling atmosphere, innovative cinematography, and unequaled score by Bernhard Herrmann, often citing it as one of the greatest films ever made, generally crediting it as the first ever slasher film, and immortalizing several key scenes, most notably the famous shower scene and Herrmann’s screeching violins, the bloody drain’s dissolve into Janet Leigh’s frozen eye just one of countless master strokes. From a film noir perspective, its more mundane crime story (private eye pursues woman who steals a huge sum of money and tries to skip town) is understandably overshadowed by the deranged madman horror, but the film drips with dread and boasts a noir visual palette, including inky B&W shadows and disorienting camera angles that transform graphic violence into art (when Arbogast is on the staircase, Hitchcock re-uses the dolly zoom shot he pioneered two years earlier in Vertigo). Hitchcock doesn’t rely only on sensationalism for thrills, however, as his more traditional forms of suspense are present throughout, like when the state trooper begins following Marion or when her car doesn’t sink all the way into the swamp.