Both major characters-Norman Bates and Marion Crane-are tortured by their past and their own misdeeds to the point where their own guilt swallows them whole. A stellar example of this is that in the first film in the Halloween series, Jamie Lee Curtis is terrorized by a psychopath much the same way her mother, Janet Leigh, was in Hitchcock’s classic.Īccording to the “Critics Consensus” at Rotten Tomatoes, “Because Psycho was filmed with tact, grace, and art, Hitchcock didn’t just create modern horror, he validated it.”Īs the cinematography abruptly switches from deep darkness to harsh light again and again, the viewer realizes that the film is about guilt and redemption.
#Opening to psycho 1998 movie
But due to its themes of sex and violence compounded by its runaway success, it changed the horror game forever and can rightfully claim the title of the most influential horror movie ever made.Įvery horror film that came in its wake owes at least a partial debt to Psycho. Psycho is widely considered the first “slasher” movie, although a little-known British film called Peeping Tom featured similar themes and was released a few months prior to Psycho. Psycho also bears the dubious honor of being the first major Hollywood film to show a toilet flushing. The deep psychosexual subtexts involving gender dysphoria and a confused man with murderous mommy issues would never have slipped past the censors. Tortured lovers Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin) discuss their uncertain future in the opening scene.Įven the opening scene featuring unwed lovers Marion Crane and Sam Loomis sitting together in bed, with Marion wearing a bra, would have been prohibited if the film had been made only a few years prior. In this case, the monster was an ordinary (if extremely tortured) human being, and his violence was explicitly shown rather than merely hinted at.įor some reason, it’s much harder to deal with monsters when they’re human.
#Opening to psycho 1998 code
But whereas former classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein were based on semi-human monsters and were constrained by the prudish mores of the era, Psycho was produced shortly after the Motion Picture Production Code that had been in place since 1930 had begun falling apart. There have been horror movies as long as there have been movies. The original movie poster from the 1960 theatrical release of Psycho
#Opening to psycho 1998 tv
Despite all this, Paramount Pictures wanted nothing to do with his planned adaptation of the 1959 Robert Bloch novel Psycho, finding it to be “too repulsive.”īeing a stubborn creative sort with a dogged faith in his own vision, Hitchcock persisted anyway, using his TV film crew and paying his actors unusually low wages to produce the 1960 film version of Psycho, which became his most commercially successful film and entirely changed the horror-movie genre. He was also one of the few people in American history, before or since, to be universally recognized merely for being a director. By 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was one of the world’s most famous and respected film directors.
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