MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > "The scene" still holds up today

"The scene" still holds up today


Everyone's seen it, even those who haven't watched the movie. It still manages to 'cut' to the bone, so to speak. A naked woman, alone and vulnerable in the shower. The part that gets me every time is when the bathroom door opens and you can see someone standing there but can't quite make them out through the plastic shower curtain. It looks like the silhouette of a woman. They stand there for what seems like a long time before ripping the curtain back.... Sends chills down my spine no matter how often I see it.

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And when 'Mrs. Bates' rips open the curtain, you can just barely make out her eyes. Hitchcock was aware of the subliminal effect of something just barely seen.

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Yes, that is really jolting. Also, the moments just leading up to it, where 'Mrs Bates' approaches the shower, and you can begin to decipher the vague form of someone approaching through the curtain is especially frightening.

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That scene is probably among or even the only reason this movie is still remembered 56yrs later.

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Oh yeah the shower scene is still one of the greatest scenes of all time. Definitely iconic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kWMaf6rVyU

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Sometimes I think the world thinks of the entire film of Psycho as ONLY "the shower scene."

Oddly enough, for me, the shower scene is perhaps the third or fourth thing I picture when I think about the movie.

I picture the house. The motel. The motel AND the house. Anthony Perkins.

And then the shower scene.

But frankly, I picture the staircase murder scene almost as much.

Still Hitchcock said that "pretty much the only reason" he even made Psycho from the Robert Bloch novel, was because of the shower scene "coming, as it were, out of the blue."

I might add that Hitchcock said the same thing about scenes in two other movies:

The Mount Rushmore chase in North by Northwest: "It was the only reason I wanted to make the movie." (And yet the crop duster scene is perhaps more beloved.)

The rape-strangling in the office in Frenzy: "It was the entire reason why I made the movie."

Hmmm...

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The shower scene remains famous, I suppose, because...everybody takes a shower sometime. And it usually feels safe and secure in there. Except you are naked. And entrapped. And standing on a slippery surface with poor footing. And naked.

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Actually, I feel that the Psycho shower scene outdistances all others because of the peculiar SET of identifications we make, in our minds, as the horrific slaughter takes place. Consider:

A beautiful woman
Naked
In a shower
In the bathroom of a motel room
In a shabby motel
With no other guests
15 miles away from the nearest town
Down the hill from an aging American Gothic mansion
At night
After a rainstorm
Is stabbed to death
With a huge butcher knife
By a maniacal monster of an old woman
...who turns out to be a man.

All the elements save the last(a man) are happening in our minds even as the horror unfolds. And once we add "who turns out to be a man" to the equation, the horror intensifies retroactively.

Level upon level.

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Naked.




"'Extremely High Voltage.' Well, I don't need safety gloves, because I'm Homer Simpso--" - Frank Grimes

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That's the scariest part of the shower scene by far for me. The door opening and the figure of a person coming in but Marion being completely unaware of it. It also works so well because technically she's trapped there with no means of escape.

Two seats in the back of the cinema, hazy. Ah yeah, you're forgettin' it and all the mad *beep* we did

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Because the shots kept changing locations before the shower ran, which shot is going to be Miss Bate's entrance is unknown once the shower is running.

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I like your thumbnail photo (avatar) of Hitchcock, there, WiseKing.

The photo is of Hitchcock when he filmed his cameo by the River Thames in "Frenzy" (1972.) This photo was the first one released in the press FROM Frenzy(for Richard Schickel's Life magazine rave, "Return of the Master.") We had to wait quite some time for photos from the actual movie to appear in other magazines and newspapers.

The "Psycho" connection: I've always felt that Hitchcock wearing a "British bowler hat" in the "Frenzy" cameo was meant as a nod to Hitchcock wearing the "Arizona Southwest Cowboy hat" in "Psycho." A simple prop(a hat) converted Hitchcock into a walking advertisement for the motifs of his American and British psycho thrillers.

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I love the aerial "plan" view of the detective walking up the stairs as Norman is coming at him from the room.. genius !

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Such precision to the last moments:

The camera travelling with Arbogast as he climbs the stairs(but not FOREVER)

The cut to the close-up on the door opening to Mother's room...a beam of light crawling across the musty carpet and hardwood floor...the cut ending when the door is wide and the light can cover no more space...

One more shot of Arbogast climbing the stairs, but from a slightly new "straight on" angle(as if to say "now that you've seen the door opening, here, look at Arbogast entering the killing zone") and then...

...that great overhead shot. Slow it down sometime and look at the various details: mother comes out when Arbogast's' hand touches the post at the top of the stairs; as she stomps towards him from screen right, he keeps walking, screen left -- unaware of his attacker for a second or two before she reaches him and he IS aware; the flash of the knife in the light as Mother raises it towards the detective(Hitchcock said "A knife blade without a flashing gleam is like asparagus without Hollandaise sauce"); How Mother's attack on Arbogast at screen left is "mirrored" in their shadows on the wall screen right; how Arbogast is caught with one hand on his hat while Mother grabs his other wrist to prevent him from defending against the first slash; and how Arbogast rears his head back and upwards towards US as the knife comes down -- thus setting up that big close-up that Hitchocck so savored of Arbogast's "big head" with the slashed face.

That's classic stuff. Even in a movie where that OTHER murder is considered more classic....(because, says I, of the shower setting and the naked lady....)

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Slowing down never occured to me, yes that's an interesting idea. I liked all Hitchcock films I've seen because the shots are so compelling..

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This particular shot is worth slowing down and looking at. Something is happening almost everywhere in the frame. The shadows on the wall, the flash of the knife, how Mother comes out when Arbogast's hand touches the post.

Hitchcock knew that the finished shot would go by too fast for audiences to even catch some of these touches -- consciously. But I believe(and I think he believed) that the human brain still picks up all those details and reacts to them without being fully aware of them.

And all of those touches had to be SET UP. The lighting had to be set up to catch the flash of the knife blade AND to project the shadows on the wall. Arbogast touching the post was probably the "cue" for the person playing Norman/Mother(it wasn't Perkins) to come out to play.

William H. Macy , who played Arbogast in the Van Sant remake of Psycho, rather sneered that, in the original "Mother's knife misses Balsam's face on the first slash." I think Macy is wrong. While Hitchocck likely didn't force Martin Balsam to take a rubber knife to his face for the scene, Hitchcock did add the sound effect of the knife slash to suggest the blade making contact, and Mother's downward stab (to me) comes pretty damn close to Balsam's face on the downswing. Its the sound effect that creates the illusion of "knife to face." And if you slow the film down, it looks pretty close, knife to face. Its not a gaffe. Macy was wrong. (HIS version of this shot in the Van Sant is staged wrong -- no shadows, no knife flash and a mis-matched cut from stairs to landing.)


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One more thing: I've always felt that there is profound horror in how Arbogast is still walking even as Mother rushes him. He doesn't notice her at first and when he does -- its too late. And in an instant, Arbogast goes from being a shrewd, witty, thinking man of action to...a victim. A shocked, terrified, howling animal. All of his humanity is taken away from him in the last moments of his life. And he doesn't have a chance.

In the shower scene, the moment when Marion first sees Mother and realizes she is under attack is more "stretched out" -- Mother posing with the knife, Marion spinning around and then one-two-three close-ups of her screaming.

That's pretty profound too -- Marion doesn't have a chance either.

But I'm a bit more partial to Arbogast just walking into his own death. It reminds me of how precarious life can be in this age of active shooters...

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