Psycho House
Couldn't sleep so started watching an AHH called Unlocked Window. It's got the Psycho house in it, but different interior. Mwahahaha.
share'An Unlocked Window' is definitely one of the scariest AHHs. It's thematically connected to Psycho as well as reusing the key house exterior.
share!!! SPOILERS !!! SPOILERS !!! SPOILERS !!!
That's why I posted once I saw the Psycho house in it. It reminded me of the Hopper painting. I have not seen AHH except for one episode besides this one. It was a creepy, atmospheric episode from the beginning.
Post view. I think I've seen most of AHP and trying to watch the ones I've missed. Just started to watch AHH on youtube. For Unlocked Window, the twist ending got me. Didn't see it coming. AH did it to me again. I realized the first mcguffin, but couldn't figure out the obvious. Some very, very, very good acting, storytelling and use of multiple mcguffins. In this one, he left the ending to the viewers except for the epilogue. This is AH's you know what.
SPOILERS for An Unlocked Window
In "informal circles of friends" that I know, An Unlocked Window is to the Alfred Hitchcock Hour(indeed to the entire series, including the half hours)...the Psycho of the series. The Big One. The Truly Scary One.
The funniest story I heard was of a female friend, as a pre-teen, watching An Unlocked Window (in syndication) on TV and "she was so scared she couldn't walk the distance to the TV to turn it off." (She had no remote control.)
An Unlocked Window has none of the blood or big scream shocks of Psycho(not allowed on TV), but it has an ever-building suspense and an ending that took Psycho "a step farther": who will ever forget the heroine nurse clutching at the dress of the big nurse strangling her -- only to see the buttons of the big nurse's dress to open and reveal a hairy, fat MALE chest. When Norman Bates' dress unbuttoned in the fruit cellar, his regular man clothes were on underneath -- this is a very fleshy reveal. Of a very big man. Whose sadistic, laughing voice has been tormenting the characters unseen, all through the story.
And this: the heroine of the story(Dana Wynter) DOES get killed. You could do that on an anthology series. (Even as Hitch came on at the end , as he was required to, to say that an undercover cop in female clothing later arrested the killer.)
Hitchcock himself had script and story control over his series. I expect he approved the use of the Psycho house, and acquiesced to this episode using elements he didn't use in Psycho -- a big lightning and thunderstorm, the unseen person with the scary voice, etc. "Let 'er rip!"
Note in passing: the final killing in An Unlocked Window is a strangling, and its interesting how stangling was Hitchcock's murder method of choice in so many films: the original Man Who Knew Too Much, Shadow of a Doubt(never shown, but the killer is a strangler), Rope(the film opens with the final moments of the strangling of a young man, on screen); Strangers on a Train(Bruno stops being funny and Miriam stops being hateable, as he slowly strangles her); Dial M(the ATTEMPTED strangling of Grace Kelly, which is staged as a rape), and the Big One: Frenzy, in which a strangling is shown as a long, lingering, painful and horrible way to die -- and an adjunct to rape(the killer only gets "satisfaction" FROM the strangling.).
Funny, when Hitchcock "went for the knife" in Psycho, he got the elements of a blockbuster: blood(all youths love blood as a marker of horror), "jump cut screamable shocks"(mother rushing Arbogast and slashing his face -- it would be less scary if she ran out and strangled him), and a sickening sense of "how could a human being DO that?" Strangling, I think , we can all relate to more. Bloodless, not too different from the struggling and wrestling we all "played at" when we were young.
But more intimate as means of murder.
Good point about strangulation. It's more a power method of killing and can be very violent. Stabbings, slashings and slittings are usually more bloody and uses a knife as leverage. It may or may not be as violent, but in Psycho it was.
shareI suppose "in real life," though being stabbed or slashed across the throat would be a bloodier experience, it could be a much quicker way to go than strangling. And yet as a "cinematic visual," strangulation isn't nearly so messy.
The fact remains that three of Hitchcock's psychopaths -- Uncle Charlie, Bruno Anthony, and Bob Rusk -- were stranglers, and only one -- Norman Bates -- was a stabber/slasher. (The guys in Rope may be nuts too and thus -- more stranglers.)
I think I read somewhere once that on TV shows in the censored sixties and seventies, scripts about stabbers were changed into scripts about stranglers, to avoid the blood and "realities" of stabbing and slashing. Perhaps Hitchocck , operating for much of his life in the Hays Code Hollywood, HAD to use stranglers(and remember, we never see Uncle Charlie actually strangle anyone.)
Once he made Psycho with its very famous stabbing/slashings(and they ARE both)....his next psycho movie(Frenzy) seemed to require a brutal strangling. (Note in passing: in between , Hitchcock had scripted ANOTHER movie called "Frenzy," and the killer in that one was a stabber, too.)
Anyway, it is interesting. And in one interview Hitchcock groused, "its becoming harder and harder to figure out ways to kill people." He did them all: strangling, stabbing/slashing, gunshot(Topaz), poker bludgeoning(Marnie), gas oven(Torn Curtain), bird pecking....well, maybe not ALL. Hitchcock left the chainsaws, meat cleavers, axes and icepicks to a new generation of gorehounds.
I like to note this(and its getting relevant month-wise, soon), the original Halloween has been called "the first slasher movie," but that's wrong on two counts. One is that Psycho was the first slasher movie. The other is that in the original Halloween, Michael Myers strangles as many victims as he stabs. Thus the film is an ode to Psycho AND Frenzy.
Grisly post...but Hitchcock's canon requires a look at the methods of murder....
There was an episode of AHP where a man confronts a burglar during the night, develops a rapport and ends up hiring the guy to kill his wife who's asleep upstairs. The burglar starts talking about different ways to kill someone (finally deciding on smothering her with a pillow) and at one point considers stabbing but rejects it saying "knives are too messy". I won't reveal the ending because i's a treat.
shareThe burglar starts talking about different ways to kill someone (finally deciding on smothering her with a pillow) and at one point considers stabbing but rejects it saying "knives are too messy". I won't reveal the ending because i's a treat.
--
OK, sounds like another good one(boy did Hitchcock manage to pop out hundreds of good ones with that TV show -- his team that is -- but I think he supervised and read scripts, etc.)
knives ARE too messy...which is why Psycho gets around that problem by having Marion Crane get stabbed in the nude(no blood on any clothes) in a shower (most of the blood goes down the drain) in a bathroom(the floor and sink lend themselves to clean-up.)
Arbogast's murder is messier -- the slash to the face and no tub or bathroom for clean-up. But Bloch's book reveals what the movie murder suggests -- the rug upon which Arbogast lands and is finished off upon, will absorb much of his blood and can be used to "wrap him up."
Speaking of Hitchcock knife murders.
There's one in the movie right ahead of Psycho - - North by Northwest.
Its when UN diplomat gets that thrown knife in the back and expires -- instantaneously -- in Cary Grant's arms.
This Hitchcock murder is set up for laughs -- at Grant's expense(he grabs the knife! a photographer takes his photo!) but it is certainly macabre, and carries that feeling of "Hitchcock fate." Townsend walks out to meet a stranger(Grant), converses with him, gets a bit testy in frustration(as if inviting the knife with his new grumpiness), folds his arms in a "show me" motion(as if signaling the knife to be thrown!) -- and that silvery knife flies in "screen right" and kills Townsend in milliseconds.
His last thoughts must have been -- "What? Ouch! Ohhh...."
The NXNW knife killing of Townsend strikes me as "fantastical." Could a thrown knife, even into a man's heart from behind, kill him in seconds flat, before he hit the floor? Are throwing knifes REALLY that deadly(in the Bond film Moonraker, they were.) In any event, a funny brilliant, well structured and timed scene.
All that time we(I) spend here on Arbogast's murder -- and Townsend's murder a movie before is a pretty good Hitchcock set piece all its own. (In a special 1976 Film Comment salute to Hitchocck in honor of Family Plot, the Townsend murder got a shot by shot breakdown -- note the statue in the background in one shot is the statue that Valerian will stand by to throw his knife in another shot.)
But the seconds within which Townsend expires from that thrown knife set up a marked contrast to Marion's murder, in which the killer stabs and stabs...and stabs...and STABS...all the while with Marion upright, screaming, in pain, in terror.
Arbogast's murder, too, is both one that he experiences (Townsend didn't know what hit him, let alone who killed him) at length and in an extended fashion..down the stairs, finished off on the floor.
---
Speaking of one MORE Hitchcock stabbing murder:
The Man Who Knew Too Much '56.
Louis Bernard, in dark face make-up, running through the streets of Morocco in a traditional gown and hood -- chased by another man in gown and hood , until that man catches up with Bernard, grabs him, stabs him once in the back deeply -- and leaves the knife in.
Which leads to a gripping shot of Bernard staggering his way over to Stewart and Day and family with the knife still in his back, him still alive, and clutching behind his back , as Stephen King wrote of a similar murder "like the guy trying to reach that one itch he can't scratch." This murder carries its own horror and pain I think -- Psycho might have the longer murders and bigger shocks, but Hitchcock had some earlier bits of violence in his films that one can "feel."
And this one isn't "funny" llike the NXNW thrown knife.
About which: I was once invited to come over to a party to watch North by Northwest at a friend's home. On the phone, he asked me if it was as gruesome as Psycho. I said, "No, in fact the one murder in it is actually kind of funny -- Hitchcock's last funny murder."
I drove over and found a written sign on the door:
"Screening tonight: Hitchcock's Last Funny Murder. in North by Northwest."
One reason Hitchcock was able to "pop out hundreds of good ones" is that unlike, for example, Tarantino, who's inspiration is froma lifetime of watching movies, Hitchcock was also a compulsive reader throughout his life, so he came to TV with a lifetime of stories in his head.
As an example of how far back he went, Hemingway's classic novel The Sun Also Rises includes a recounting by the narrator of a short story about a woman whose fiancee falls into a glacier and she spends many years waiting for the glacier to reappear just so she can get another glimps of him. Which is the story that Hitchcock adapted as The Crystal Trench. I'm sure Hitchcock had read either the Hemingway (published in 1926) or the original story, or possibly both, and filed it away as something that would make a nifty short film.
One reason Hitchcock was able to "pop out hundreds of good ones" is that unlike, for example, Tarantino, who's inspiration is froma lifetime of watching movies,
---
Indeed, I don't think QT is much of a reader....we might add to the sequel/remake morass of our time the idea that there aren't a lot of famous novels being written from which classic films are made. Hollywood still has a flow of novels and short stories from which to adopt films, but they aren't necessarily all that famous. And the famous ones aren't all that good(Fifty Shades, The Hunger Games, and the latter is from the ranks of "youth novels.")
Indeed, something that I think is "gone with the decades" is the heavily promoted best seller. I grew up with department store book departments that would feature -- on a table or two -- ONE new bestseller. There would be heavy promotion and soon novels like Exodus, Advise and Consent, Dr. Zhivago...Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws....would have been so heavily promoted first as books(in hardback AND in paperback), that the resultant movie was almost an afterthought.
Even Leon Uris' Topaz got that kind of treatment in the bookstores -- he had written Exodus, which was a huge bestseller, so Topaz was heavily promoted as a "big book". It was weirdly "equal" -- as exciting as it was to see Hitchcock electing to direct such a "big bestseller" as Topaz, the resultant movie was so minor and starless and flawed that one forgot that Topaz HAD been such a big deal.
Hitchcock was also a compulsive reader throughout his life, so he came to TV with a lifetime of stories in his head.
---
Yes, I read that Hitch was reading all the time -- books, short stories, magazines and newspapers.
Recall that Hitchcock found Psycho when he read a one-paragraph mini-review of the Bloch novel in Anthony Boucher's Sunday column on mystery books in the New York Times. I assume that Hitchcock regularly read that column to see "what was out there" -- and the paragraph on the Bloch book so intrigued him that he bought a copy of the book, read it, and then bought the book itself(assistant Peggy Robertson said Hitch bought the book at the LA aiport to catch a plane to London, and by the time he got to London, he called to say "I've got our next project. Psycho." Funny: He probably got the book read in the first hour of a ten hour flight.)
Years ago, I went to the microfiche at the library to look up Boucher's review of Psycho in a 1959 NY Times column. The paragraph on the Bloch book was ridiculously "without content" -- I think the key phrase that the book was "icily terrifying" is what caught Hitchcock's eye. The review did not mention the shower murder, or the motel, or much of anything other than a mother being dead being key to the mystery (a giveaway!). And yet, Hitchcock was intrigued enough to find the book and read it. Hitchcock sent Boucher a bottle of champagne when Psycho hit so big.
As an example of how far back he went, Hemingway's classic novel The Sun Also Rises includes a recounting by the narrator of a short story about a woman whose fiancee falls into a glacier and she spends many years waiting for the glacier to reappear just so she can get another glimps of him. Which is the story that Hitchcock adapted as The Crystal Trench. I'm sure Hitchcock had read either the Hemingway (published in 1926) or the original story, or possibly both, and filed it away as something that would make a nifty short film.
---
Yes, he was always "filing away" material -- evidently more for the voracious needs of the TV show than for his feature films, where he was a bit more driven by "the market"(ie, whe Diabolique became such a big hit, he determined to buy the next book from the same authors.)
"At the movies," Hitch looked at a LOT of material after Psycho hit big, trying to top it. And it finally came down to his memory of a short story he had read years before: DuMaurier's The Birds(recall that the author of Rebecca was used in the print ads to promote The Birds! In 1963, Rebecca was only 23 years old as a movie; that's 1995's Braveheart from 2018..)
Here at the moviechat board, I saw a trending thread on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" in which someone wanted a vote on comparing it to The Twilight Zone. I'm not inclined to choose sides, but one thing I DO know, is that I think the first years of AHP has a deep and broad selection of novels and short stories to choose from -- a lot of them classic tales from the whole stretch of the 20th Century before 1955(the show's start year.) For minimal sums, the Hitchcock team would buy the rights to this material and thus AHP never "ran dry" for years on the air.
Whereas I think a lot of the Twilight Zone stories were original teleplays, usually based on one clever fantasy idea -- a hit and run driver's CAR drives him crazy until he turns himself in. A little girl doll swears she will kill the father of the girl who has it. A man who wishes everyone in the world could be like him -- is suddenly confronted where everyone in the world IS him. Etc. Lots of "high concept" ideas on TTZ; the Hitchcock shows came from both British and American mystery sources(and occasionally a story from somewhere else, like France.)
One of Hitchcock's staffers said he was a "voracious seeker of material," and as I have mentioned before, he chose Frenzy(the novel Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leiceister Square) after reviewing 1500 summaries of material!
I see AHP and Twilight Zone original episodes as different classes of shows. That said, the TV Guide critics and most fans think TZ is one of the greatest tv series of all time. AHP doesn't even rank in the top 60. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that AHP isn't based on original material. It could have been from an original source like a novel or short story, but what drags it down is that the material was done already. It's like doing a reboot. While AHP is well done, it gets knocked down when we've seen it before somewhere else. The shows which are taken from a book, short story, play, etc. that hasn't been done before are rated much higher.
TV Guide Magazine's 60 Best Series of All Time
https://www.tvguide.com/news/tv-guide-magazine-60-best-series-1074962/
Top AHP episodes (based on one website)
https://episode.ninja/series/alfred-hitchcock-presents
I see AHP and Twilight Zone original episodes as different classes of shows. That said, the TV Guide critics and most fans think TZ is one of the greatest tv series of all time. AHP doesn't even rank in the top 60.
---
That's quite a drop off! I suppose The Twilight Zone was its own "thing," and the Hitchcock TV series was always sort of a stepchild to Hitchocck's great movie output. Maybe. But also the things you suggest below:
---
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that AHP isn't based on original material. It could have been from an original source like a novel or short story, but what drags it down is that the material was done already. It's like doing a reboot.
---
Yes, and I believe that people in general were more prolific readers back then -- they KNEW these stories that Hitchcock filmed(like "Man From the South.")
I'm sometimes reminded that in the days of novels "soon to be a major motion picture," readers of the book who showed up often got...exactly the same story they had read already. No surprises. Case in point: Robert Bloch's Psycho. The style and shocks may have been cinematic, but the story (shower murder, staircase murder, fruit cellar...house and motel) was pretty much what folks had read already. (Well, OK...the second murder wasn't on the staircase in the book. It was in the foyer.)
The Godfather pretty much replicated all the murders from the book verbatim, but cut out a lot of the Harold Robbins sex and added all those great performances and SOME better dialogue. Still, if you read the book...you knew the movie story pretty well, too.
While AHP is well done, it gets knocked down when we've seen it before somewhere else. The shows which are taken from a book, short story, play, etc. that hasn't been done before are rated much higher.
TV Guide Magazine's 60 Best Series of All Time
https://www.tvguide.com/news/tv-guide-magazine-60-best-series-1074962/
Top AHP episodes (based on one website)
https://episode.ninja/series/alfred-hitchcock-presents
---
I'll take a look.
Is not another problem for the Hitchcock series that it splits into two: "Alfred Hitchcock Presents'(half hours), "Alfred Hitchcock Hour." Do they all get counted together as one series? I would think so -- Hitchcock's series is said to have run for 10 years -- in both formats, together.
Dwight MacDonald in his pan of "Psycho" noted of the Hitchcock Hours: "They run twice as long and hence are half as interesting." I don't think so. Longer length allowed character to build as it couldn't in the half hours. More to the point, the half hours are more of the staid fifties; the hours of the hip sixties(when the Twilight Zone ran.)
An Unlocked Window is on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLxhz4A4Vp4
Watch it and get scared!!
(Thank you for finding this.)
@Mizhub. Thanks indeed for finding that. I don't doubt that it'll be copyright-objected off the site soon (we've been through this several times before with AHPs and AHHs on youtube), so interested people shouldn't dilly-dally to watch/grab copies etc.
shareI thought you guys knew. AHH and AHP episodes are on youtube. BTW I thought I was almost done with AHP, but found out it's 7 seasons. I thought it was around 3.
shareI thought it was AH's Psycho 2. This time the antagonist was a psychopath and not a split personality. If he worked at it, then he could've made the story into a full-length motion picture. However, he doesn't do sequels, but does do remakes of his past stories.
share