I've read somewhere Hitchcock wanted to shoot "Psycho" in black and white to soften someway the bloody effect in the shower but can't say if this was true or not.
Could anybody explain what was the real reason?
Thank you very much indeed.
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I've read somewhere Hitchcock wanted to shoot "Psycho" in black and white to soften someway the bloody effect in the shower but can't say if this was true or not.
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That was the specific reason he gave, in many an interview.
I recall him saying that to a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1976 (while promoting his final film, Family Plot):
"If I had done Psycho in color, red blood in the shower scene would have disgusted viewers. As it was would have disgusted me."
There was also the issue that 1960 censors would have rejected the scene in color (they almost rejected the scene in black and white; Psycho had to be appealed for release.)
Black and white also allowed us to be "fooled" in the shower scene a bit: what was blood and what was shadow?
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That said, I'm willing to bet that Hitchcock "saw" Psycho in black and white, because so many of the movies that inspired it -- Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Welles' Touch of Evil, Clouzot's Diabolique, and William Castle's "House on Haunted Hill"...were ALL in black and white, and derived their atmosphere from that.
When Gus Van Sant remade Psycho in 1998, he did it in color and the blood was red in the shower...actually a kind of ORANGE red, which stylized it a bit. Nobody was much disgusted by that point in film history.
it's great in Black n' white.
shareIt was also cos colour was more expensive for films back then he was working on Psycho with mostly his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV crew and on quite a small budget so he did it in black and white to save some money among other reasons.
shareThe book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello makes the same point regarding a quick, low budget film using the AHP crew.
share@dejavu. It's worth keeping in mind that there was nothing at all *odd* about shooting in b/w in 1959/1960 (compare with shooting on film/non-digitally in 2002/2003). *Most* of the best films of 1960 worldwide were b/w: Psycho, The Apartment, Breathless, La Dolce Vita, L'Avventura, The Entertainer, Eyes Without a Face, Les Bonnes Femmes, Purple Noon, Rocco and his Brothers, Virgin Spring, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and so on.
B/W holds on though the early and mid-1960s with lots of the most significant films still shot that way (The Innocents, Yojimbo Manchurian, Lolita, Strangelove, Hard Day's Night, 81/2, Mockingbird, Hud, Baby Jane, Billy Liar, Repulsion, Onibaba, etc.). 1966 is the final year when significant numbers of the best films are b/w (Persona, Virginia Woolf, Seconds), the Oscars stops awarding separate color and b/w cinemtaography in 1967, Night of The Living Dead's probably the last break-out b/w hit in 1968, and by 1970 (Last Picture Show) the modern consensus that b/w signals artsy auteurship is firmly in place (compare with shooting on film in 2016).
There were flurries of b/w still around when I was in High School (e.g., Raging Bull, Elephant Man, Manhattan all in 1979/1980) and I'm glad I was around to catch 'em, but that was still just a happy confluence of auteurs.
By the time of Psycho, Hitchcock had shot most of his films in colour for 12 years.
Had Psycho been filmed in colour, it would have still been a great movie,
but the black and white brought it to another level of greatness.
Sometimes less is more.
By the time of Psycho, Hitchcock had shot most of his films in colour for 12 years.
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Yes, his first color film was Rope in 1948 -- 12 years before Psycho.
Then he did Under Capricorn (1949) in color.
Then he shifts to Warner Brothers and does three in a row in black and white, almost as a matter of fact: Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train and I Confess.
Then one at Warners in color: Dial M for Murder(also in 3-D in some towns.)
Every Hitchcock movie from Dial M for Murder(1953) through Family Plot(1976) was in color. Except two:
The Wrong Man(to get that "documentary" feeling and to emulate Italian neorealism.)
Psycho(for the reasons mentioned above.)
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Notes in passing:
It might have been interesting had Hitchcock made Strangers on a Train in color -- the berserk carousel climax and the Washington DC locations might have felt more "epic."
Colorized sequences from Psycho can now be viewed on YouTube.
And Hitchcock made one "psycho" film in color -- Frenzy(1972), in which Hitchcock made sure to give the male psycho killer a full head of bright red-blond hair, and to dress the characters in bright solid colors -- an orange dress suit for Babs the barmaid, a bright purple tie for "The Necktie Killer," a solid blue windbreaker for the anti-hero. One critic thought the colors looked like the colors of fruit -- given that that the killer ran a fruit market.
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shareShooting the movie in black and white gave it a documentary-style feel. That was why In Cold Blood, for example, was shot in black and white.
shareThe teenage horror wave that had came in around that time was mostly black and white. There was a perception that these movies showed you things that the big colour productions wouldn't dare to. Hitchcock was no doubt keen to attract the youth audience. B&W was still being used for horror/suspense in The Haunting, The Innocents and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane made after Psycho.
Colour horror was on its way in at this time, with Hammer's Dracula and Curse Of Frankenstein just out. Although those hugely successful films were certainly more graphic than just about anything that came before it. I think Hitchcock would have been thankful for Psycho not being associated with the period setting of those adaptations.
Psycho was rather "surrounded" in that 50's/60's cusp period...both by largely American black and white teenage-audience horror movies(with the French Diaboliqueas an outlier )and the Hammer Color Horror films, certainly bloody and violent (and bosom-driven sexual) in their own way.
I think Hitchcock was pleased to see that Psycho "fit right in" with all of those productions, but he probably liked that it was on the "black and white" side of the ledger. This gave Psycho the kind of spare, creepy, realistic look of many low budget movies -- but with a Gothic house to add a little "size" to the tale.
And I bet Hitch wasn't willing to gamble his own money on an "X" the way Hammer were willing to risk their backers' investments.
Ironically though. It was Universal who benefited the most from Hammer's huge financial success.
Black-and-white is beautiful. If I have to explain it to you, you'll never understand.
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