09 · 12 · 25

PSYCHO 65th anniversary

Rafael Aviña

In 1959, following the release of films like Rear Window and Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's career reached its peak. At the age of 60, after the successful premiere of North by Northwest, the so-called "Master of Suspense" was seeking new motivation and a way to break free from the major film studios. The same year, writer Robert Bloch published his chilling novel Psycho, which thrilled the filmmaker. Acting on an unexpected impulse, Hitchcock decided to shoot a low-budget horror film, but no studio supported the project, especially after seeing in the script that a knife stabs a woman's naked body, so the director financed it himself.

Hitchcock was forced to mortgage part of his mansion to produce it. Desperate to find a blonde actress, his wife Alma Reville suggested the young Janet Leigh, whom Hitchcock immediately found appealing. The complicated shoot ultimately elevated the 1960 film Psycho to legendary status: an international phenomenon and one of the most famous, terrifying, and influential films in the history of cinema, which this week marks the 65^th anniversary of its release in the United States and Great Britain.

The true story behind Psycho began a few years earlier, in November 1957, in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Two officers searching for clues to solve a disappearance arrived at the farm of Edward Gein, which was a mixture of a pigsty, a slaughterhouse, and a catacomb. It took them a few minutes to recover from the shock: the corpse of the person they were looking for was hanging from a hook by the ankle, with the other foot wired to a pulley. The body had been cut open, revealing shiny, freshly washed intestines, contrasting with the room that was covered in garbage, excrement, horror comics, and fragments of human skin and bones covering chairs and adorning the house.

Gein was a timid individual who harbored a hatred for his dead mother. He was the murderer of two women, a necrophiliac, a cannibal, and a grave robber. He inspired Bloch to create the psychological profile of Hitchcock's Norman Bates; for example, the taxidermy aspect in Psycho was taken from Gein's fascination with human skin and his attempts to dissect corpses. Bloch's Norman Bates was closer to the real Gein, but with the help of screenwriter Joseph Stefano, Hitchcock delved deeper into the protagonist's troubled mind, and his nightmarish universe was transformed from a farm into an old, claustrophobic motel where the protagonist's sick fantasies emerge following his mother's death and lead him to murder.

Psycho opened up a vein in the genre that continues to be imitated to this day. It also gave Anthony Perkins a profound obsession that would follow him for the rest of his life. The film not only broke new ground with its innovative approach to violence and its way of circumventing strict censorship of such controversial topics, but also heralded the advent of a new realistic horror cinema stripped of fantastical elements, presenting to audiences some precursors of future gore cinema.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), tired of waiting to save enough money to get married, steals money from her boss's safe and flees Phoenix. On the way, she decides to spend the night at the roadside Bates Motel, owned by a nervous young man with a taste for taxidermy, Norman Bates, who claims to live alone with his mother. Marion, tired and overwhelmed by guilt, takes a shower that will change the course of her life and, ultimately, cinema itself.

Psycho quickly became a cult classic among moviegoers. Contributing to this were the terrifying shower scene, Perkins' characterization, and the chilling conclusion in which Hitchcock confronts the viewer with Bates's split personality. Psycho was the first film to kill off the female lead within the first 40 minutes, to show a toilet (never before seen on film), and to feature Leigh semi-naked in that famous shower sequence, copied and parodied ad nauseam, a sequence in which the filmmaker used frenetic editing.

Interestingly, the Gein case would later inspire characters in two other horror film classics: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991). Psycho premiered in Mexico on March 29, 1962, at the Cine Chapultepec, where it was screened for 11 weeks.

Translated by Abigail Puebla