One angry father wrote to the brilliant director, saying his daughter had not bathed since viewing a bathtub drowning in the 1954 French film "Les Diaboliques," and now she was refusing to shower after seeing Janet Leigh’s character slashed to death in "Psycho." Hitchcock responded, "Send her to the dry cleaners." - The Secrets of "Psycho's" Shower Scene, Salon.com "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." - Alfred Hitchcock

My obsession with Hitchcock was not one that blossomed in a split second. As someone exposed to the art of filmmaking and movies as a whole from a very early age, it took much time and patience to come around to appreciating folks like Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock. As a person who grew up in front of the television watching slasher films and zombie movies, it required some effort to sit down in front of a television screen to soak in the nuances and undertones of "Psycho" that would soon become one of my favorite horror films of all time. As a horror movie it's without a doubt a keen exploration in the unending madness and reign of terror of a man forever damaged by his mother during and after her death. But as a film it's so intricately made and so diversely entertaining that it's almost impossible not to enjoy it. As a piece of horror filmmaking, Hitchcock made a movie that's the epitome of the convention breaking genre masterpiece.

It's a slasher that only has a few murders in it, it's a murder mystery with an impossibly twisted climax, and it dares to kill off a money making starlet in the first half of the story. And it wasn't a quick win for me when I first saw it as a kid in a Bronx apartment on a restless Saturday afternoon. Back then stations played marathons of Hitchcock and Godzilla and Hitchcock was always a guarantee with only one TV and my mom controlling it. So, I had to sit through "Psycho" and it was always a constant state of bewilderment. Why was this even considered a horror film? Why is there so little killing? But as time went on, I learned to mature as a person and as a film lover who was eventually enamored by the small bits of genius the man inserted beneath his black and white mystery. Throughout my years exploring film and Hitchcock's method, it's clear the man was like every other artist of his generation, someone with an old world sensibility who dare not take advice from an actor or else he'd lash out on them.

Along the jungle gym, we see the birds flocking behind her growing in groups as the seconds pass. One is three, three is seven, seven is twelve, and the like. She has no idea what awaits her and the poor children of the seaside town, but we do. The trick is we're watching what they're not aware of and sadly we can do nothing to warn them. We want to get in to the movie and tell them and warn them of this impending danger from the skies, but we can't. Hitchcock knows that and takes great joy from it. You just have to love the utterly gripping and intense sequence where the lovely angelic Lisa Fremont is called upon to enter the abode of the wicked Lars Thorwald to inspect his things for evidence of his wife and her corpse, all of which is witnessed through L.B. Jefferies photo lens. Left with only one leg, he can do nothing but watch and hope for her to use common sense to guide her in and out the shroud of evil and once Thorwald comes home much to the astonishment of L.B. he can do nothing but watch and hope for the best as Fremont continues investigating aware of the looming psychopath lurking in the darkness.

Hitchcock of course let loose with his unabashed desires and fetishes within his films providing us with peeks in to the taboo that would later be explored with a more gruesome effect by folks like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. As we all know Hitchcock was utterly in love with Grace Kelly and deified her to a great degree on film, while "Psycho" seemed to be most sexual and sardonically twisted little thriller that show a man incapable of expressing his own bodily desires, and the women he punished for revealing it to him. In the landmark shower scene, the sexually repressed Bates is raping Marion as she's finally revealed to be in a vulnerable position where she can do nothing but bear witness to her own mutilation. She's sexuality and free will unabashed and Mother Bates makes her pay for that through Norman's own phallic symbol, the knife.

The knife in many ways represents Bates own impotence and possible homosexuality, while Marion pays for such a deed in getting to know him and arousing some sense of lust in him. It's alluded throughout most of the story that Bates and his mom had an abusive and possibly incestuous relationship where his dependence on her led to a possible affair, thus he can find no one else to turn to for his needs than his mother. Like most artists, Hitchcock sought out to show the world what he feared the most, and that was mainly representative in the harrowing and brutally nightmarish "The Wrong Man." Though I am a hardcore Henry Fonda fan, the 1956 thriller is not Hitchcock's best. It falters a bit in the climax and even in the fifties the premise required some suspension of disbelief, but what we're seeing on the narrative is Hitchcock's greatest fear: the police. In many noted interviews, Hitchcock explains his paralyzing fear of the authorities and how he avoided them quite often like boogeymen and "The Wrong Man" is essentially Hitchcock living out his nightmare where Manny Balestrero is confuse for a convicted felon and has no way of actually proving his innocence.

Part Two of "Anticipating the Bang" >>

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