Psycho is a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960 starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh.
To talk about Psycho is to talk about Cinema with a capital letter: it changed the way of making horror movies and it is not that there were no B Series concept before (it must be older than the cinema itself) but this film came to show that with little you can make a masterpiece.
Of course, you have to be good. And I think this gentleman named Hitchcock was.
Plot
A girl escapes with money that is not hers and, because of the rain, she ends up in a motel with a kind and strange owner named Norman Bates.
The rest is Film History.
Movie Review
What can I add to one of the most discussed films in history? That it’s wonderful? Well, come on, it is, and we all agree on this one (except for some who didn’t give it the Oscar). Besides, it’s everything a director has always wanted to do and either he doesn’t dare, or he says he doesn’t want to. Or he simply doesn’t have the talent and imagination.
In Psycho things are about money, inside and outside the production. Hitchcock decides to make a low-budget film and starts to imagine and innovate and, of course, he comes out with this. The poor guy was fed up with the studios because they forced him to give people happy endings, they wouldn’t give him freedom to do as he wished, so this Englishman got down to work and said to himself: well, let’s change the way of editing. Come on!
These kind of conflicts with studios used to be about one thing: editing. He rightly said that everything could be changed in that process and that a film could originally talk about the financial crisis and could end up being a film about love if the producer and the editor wanted to. So in this one he was going to treat himself and do whatever he wanted and… the shower scene came out.
Since he could do whatever he wanted, he said to himself: well, I’ll kill the protagonist and show myself as the true star of the movie (he was really eager to this). Thus, no one will focus on the Hollywood star of the moment (you know he hated them deeply, at least that’s what he said), but they will focus on the one who really matters: the director. (At this point, he was famous for being presumptuous. Well, if he was a show-off but he had the talent, who cares? Our applause).
Then Anthony Perkins (who didn’t even want to hear about this movie) gets the role that will haunt him for the rest of his life (he tried to continue the saga at his own risk, but it didn’t work out so well. He was never a great actor and I guess everyone knew it but playing one of the first psycho killers in the History of Cinema… was something. (He wasn’t the first, actually. Fritz Lang already presented one in M, but Perkins is the one who stands as head of this category).
By the way, David Fincher is a big fan of his (a truism).
This time I’m not going to go into any details, because the film stands out for its editing (and obviously its rhythm, which is why they go together). It builds the modern horror film genre and tells several generations how to do things.
All over you will find a thousand disquisitions slicing the film to satiety.
I tell you: you’d better watch it.
This one is six stars, but Google won’t let me.
Psycho (1960), by Hitchcock
Our Opinion
It has the merit of being a seminal film. It created an unprecedent trend, without match because it truly did what (almost) nobody has been able to do: a hands down masterpiece and there’s no further discussion against this.
I forgot: he also created a music score trend. There are so many things that I am leaving aside, seven stars already!
Movie Trailer
