Ram Gopal Varma Blog about 50 Years of PSYCHOing

Ram Gopal Varma Blogs
50 Years of PSYCHOing

ram gopal Varma

19 June 2010

No one has ever been afraid to take a shower before 1960 until Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho turned a daily bathing ritual into a perfect setting for a murder. Even though the horror film turns 50 this year and inspite of us watching numerous films of the same genre it continues to remain in every film buffs consciousness.

My earliest memory of Psycho is that there was a buzz in my home and in my school and wherever I went of everyone talking about this film called PSYCHO. They used to talk about the film in excitement challenging each other to dare to see it alone.

More than 2 decades later I saw a poster of Psycho-2 the sequel. I still remember the art work of the psycho house in a silhouette on the films poster along with a tag line -“Its 22 years later and Norman Bates is coming home”. I remember thinking at that time about the brilliance of that film which garnered such cult status that even after 22 years everyone still remembered the psycho house and its infamous owner Norman Bates and here we are now in the year 2010 still talking about it after another 25 years.

It is easy to underestimate the technical wizardry and its story telling Genius when we see “Psycho” in today’s times. So many hundreds or may be thousands of clones have been made of both Psycho and its various scenes that now the original Psycho itself sometimes might look like a caricaturish clone.

The making of Psycho went through its fair share of problems that included reshoots till the last minute, horrific trouble with Censors, and YES ofcourse complete rejection from quite a few critics. But now after 50 years it remains the most iconic serial killer flick of all times.

It begins with a racy intimate moment between Janet Leigh and Sam Loomis, till Janet lands in the lonely, way side Bates Motel. Meets the sole human being there, the hotel’s proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). His mother, whose silhouette is all that we get to see for quite a while. Then comes the blood and gore, the iconic shower scene. What begins as a simple movie with an overtone of desperation in love, turns into a chilling story of a psychotic killer.

After only 45 minutes, Hitchcock killed off the protagonist, who was played by the most saleable star of the film, Janet Leigh. To get rid of a character which the audience had become well-acquainted with and who they would expect to hang around until the end of the film, had no precedent in mainstream cinema till then, but the way Hitchcock sewed the story around the strange motel owner Norman Bates and his even stranger relationship with his mother proved once for all that it could be done and that there are no rules for Cinema. It set the agenda for the Slasher films none of which till now don’t really start until a pretty girl with a problem has been killed in the most imaginative of circumstances.

Ever since Psycho came out anyone who sat in a darkened cinema or living room watching anything from the Halloweens, the Fridays the 13th’s, The Screams, The Nightmare on Elm Streets and all such franchises definitely should owe it a debt of gratitude.

The way in which Hitchcock handled violence in Psycho was a revolution of its own kind. Never before had the full energy and murderous vigour of a knife attack, or any killing for that matter has been committed in such a way on celluloid and though it would have been an outrage to say it at the time, Hitchcock was using his every trick in his Cinematic book along with Bernard Herrmann’s frightening music to make his audience celebrate the macabre majesty of a life being taken.

Intrigued by Hitchcock’s insistence that cinemagoers not be admitted after the film had started, queues across the world stretched for blocks and box office records were smashed not only in The United States but also all over the world. It picked up 4 Oscar nominations, and is now regarded by critics, theorists and film fans alike as one of the finest and most scariest films ever made.

In his typical style Hitchcock undersold his own genius and belittled the numerous books which were subsequently written intellectualising his film by saying:

‘You have to remember that Psycho is a film made with quite a sense of amusement on my part. To me it’s a fun picture. The processes through which we take the audience, you see, it’s rather like taking them through the haunted house at the fairground’.

The iconic shower scene where Anthony Perkins murders Marion’s character by multiple stabs, has never really been replicated in terms of the tremendous effect it created at that time in the audience. Shot from multiple camera angles, the stab sequence has been put together from one hell of a multiple lot of cuts. For it’s time, so much violence had never been seen in mainstream Hollywood films. But it blew everybody because its brutality got across so effectivley the messed up mind of Norman Bates to the audience of Psycho with maximum impact.

But contrary to popular opinion, the second murder remains much more chilling for me. Much more than the shower scene. The whole sequence looks very pacy and the split second in which the murder happens coupled with the frighteningly scary music adds much more to the “trauma” of viewers than the more famous shower scene. The combination of the haunted looking villa, the element of rain and Norman Bates remain simply unmatched till today.

Film experts debate whether Hitchcock unleashed a mayhem of violence from his masterpiece, or he was just reflecting an increasingly violent country. At about the same time the movie was released, the Clutter family was massacred in Kansas, an event that produced Truman Capote’s novel “In Cold Blood.” Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein had just been discovered and arrested and was widely believed to be the “inspiration” for the book which led to the movie.

The scarily wonderful thing about psycho is that it mothered a Genre and for 50 years that Genre kept on giving birth to literally thousands of children in various languages across the world and yet till today we still can’t stop talking about that horrific mother of all Thrillers…. PSYCHO

We will all be dead and gone but PSYCHO will live on….

Note: Thanks to Ram Gopal Varma for giving us special permission to republish his blogs in idlebrain.com (visit rgvzoomin.com to visit Ram Gopal Varma's blog)

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