Psycho, produced by Universal Studios and released through Paramount (Rebello 51), contained a frank depiction of sex and violence "unlike any mainstream film that had preceded it" (Williams 1); the film included the first love scene in American popular cinema ever to feature a pair of lovers lying half-naked on a bed (Rebello 86). And not only did Psycho depict two brutal murders, but the first occurred in
the intimacy of the shower. As a result, Hitchcock had to fight to make the film as close to his vision as possible and find ways to work around censorship laws. When the censors demanded he re-edit the shower scene on account of a fleeting glimpse of Janet Leigh's breast, Hitchcock simply sent back the original cut on the (correct) assumption that they either would not re-screen it or would fail to see the barely noticeable nudity the second time around (Rebello 146). As well, Hitchcock reportedly shot the film in black and white only because he knew the censors would never approve the very bloody shower scene in color (Stevens 3). As he put it: "Our big problem...is trying to make the censors understand that the young people
are much more sophisticated than they used to be" (Kapsis 58).
Hitchcock explained the reason for filming a woman wearing only her under garments in the opening sequence of Psycho: "Audiences are changing....The straightforward kissing scene would be looked down at by the younger viewers.... Nowadays you have to show them as they themselves behave" (Hitchcock 1). The director was keenly aware of how audiences responded to his films (Rebello 163) and sought to maintain their interest. He was among a handful of Hollywood filmmakers who deliberately sought out innovative composers(Nowell-Smith 258); for Psycho, Hitchcock hired Bernard Hermann who wrote a modern score which challenged the norm.
The title itself, fifties and sixties slang for the violently psychotic, suggested the imminence of a new generation (Brill 200).

Fully aware that his film was unconventional and daring, Hitchcock used the media to sell his film to a younger, fresher audience(Kapsis 13). It was advertised as: "Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most shocking mystery with a galaxy of stars" (Greene 1). The stars themselves (Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, and Anthony Perkins) were of a younger generation than the top stars Hitchcock had previously employed for his films (Finler 131). Posters for Psycho featured a scantily clad Leigh wearing only a brassiere and
slip. Hitchcock instated a policy whereby viewers would not be permitted into the theater once the film had begun, a measure which had never before been taken (Kapsis 58). "The pre-publicity (and) the rumors of censor cuts...all combined to give Psycho precisely the send-off Hitchcock clearly wanted" (H. 126).
The timing was opportune. In 1960 in the United States the number of teenagers was on the rise: there were more people in the 15 to 19-year-old category than in any other adult age range (Population 1). In addition, the number of children under 15 years of age greatly surpassed the number of young adults in the population; not only was there a current market for modern films, but an even greater surge in the youth market was imminent. Although the mixed reviews and sexuality kept a fair number of Hitchcock's older fans away from Psycho, this did not deter the younger audience. Beyond the gory content, "the Slasher film...gives...a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes" (Clover 188). Although such attitudes may have shocked and upset more mature audiences, the younger generation was delighted to see a film which reflected their lifestyle; for them, it was "a major social event not to be missed" (Kapsis 62).
However, the passionate response the film evoked from its more senior viewers was not based solely on the inclusion of daring sexuality and brutality. There was a stark contrast between the cinematic tools employed in Psycho and the precedent Hitchcock had set for himself (Kapsis 63). Many viewers had come to expect a certain style from Hitchcock and were shocked and displeased when they saw otherwise. Even critics who did not respond negatively to the film felt that it was below the standard set by Hitchcock. One reviewer wrote: "Psycho is a grade-A program, but not grade-A Hitchcock" (Conover 427).

Many critics who strongly disliked Psycho upon its release were said to have rejected the film not only because of its departure from the Hitchcockian tradition. Hitchcock, in order to maintain the film's secrecy, had denied critics a pre-screening of Psycho (Kapsis 63); this act was said to have angered the critics and caused them to judge the film particularly harshly. However, as Janet Leigh suggested, the initial rejection of Psycho was more likely to have
been due to the film's uniqueness (Leigh 105). Films were judged according to the critical and aesthetic standards of critics, and to deter from that was to threaten the status quo and put the critics on their guard (Kapsis 7). As Leigh put it: "The completely unprecedented innovations caught (the critics) by surprise, so they really weren't able to evaluate the film properly, at least not right away" (Leigh 105).
Prior to Psycho Alfred Hitchcock was best known as "the master of suspense-without-horror" (Kapsis 52). Rather than
blatantly displaying nudity and violence, Hitchcock had hinted subtly at their presence. His 1954 film Rear Window, which also deals with a murder, featured snippets of the crime as heard from a distance; the central character, and by extension the audience, are separated from the actual crime. Questions as to the specifics are left unanswered, and it is up to the viewer's imagination to ponder the gory details.
Beyond the reputation his films carried of being subtle and suspenseful, Psycho was preceded by Hitchcock's highly successful television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which portrayed him as an entertainer and a popular media personality (Kapsis 34-5). Hitchcock's television series had led audiences to expect a resolution at the end of his projects by way of an expository epilogue (Kapsis 67) through which the audience achieved a "final catharsis in laughter" (Kapsis 36) and was brought gently back into the normalcy of everyday life after the suspenseful show. In Psycho, however, the brief and somewhat superfluous wrap-up provided by the psychiatrist does little to counterbalance the violent and bizarre nature of the rest of the film (Corber 186). One reviewer wrote that Psycho "frustrates and reverses any romantic impulses toward clarity and fulfillment" (Brill 200).
Hitchcock was known for stating that he believed in creating suspense, but that to follow through and drop the bomb would cheat and anger the audience (Taylor 139). With Psycho, it was thought at the time that "Hitchcock... abandoned the commercial geniality of his recent work and turned to out-and-out horror and psychopathology" (Callenbach 47). Rather than heeding his own advice, Hitchcock followed through with "dropping the bomb" and blatantly depicted the stabbings without any subtly. His
most disturbing film to date (Callenbach 48) was without the satisfactory resolution seen in Hitchcock's previous work. This led viewers comfortable with his familiar style to reject the film. One critic reported that: "There is no moral of any consequence...in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho....He is simply attempting to lure us...and then make us jump with sudden acts of violence" (Shocker
1).

Psycho has been described as an anti-romance (Kapsis 56). While Hitchcock's films traditionally included elements of both romance and irony, Psycho went against the established Hitchcockian conventions which had been set up during the fifties. "Psycho's emphasis on the breakdown of the practices and discourses that anchored...the construction of gendered identity in the fifties is surprising, for it exactly reverses the focus of (his previous film) North by Northwest" (Corber 191). The lead character of North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill, overcomes his dependency on his mother to take his "proper" role as a masculine entity and perform his patriotic duty. In Psycho, however, Norman Bates is unable to outgrow his maternal dependency; in fact, his identity is eventually overcome by his mother's. And rather than being patriotic, the role he plays in
society subverts the notion of what is decent and moral in the world. "When Norman took that knife to Marion, he was slashing away at everything that had gone before - at expectations of heroes and bad guys, at every cliche of what was supposed to happen, at the polite fantasy of good triumphing over evil. The movies would never be the same again" (Williams 4).
Virtually every aspect of film narrative that the audience had come to accept as normal was overthrown; just as Norman violated Marion with his knife as she stood naked and vulnerable in the shower, Hitchcock violated the security of the viewer and the trust they had put in the cinema. A perfect example of this is the fact that, although unheard of in a mainstream Hollywood film, the star (Janet Leigh) is murdered in the first half of Psycho. Audiences accustomed to the traditional narrative style wanted a character they could consistently identify with, yet Hitchcock denied them that comfort by killing off the character they had briefly identified with and proceeding to align the viewer not only with a murderer, but also with multiple characters (Lila Crane and Milton Arbogast as well as Norman Bates) (Finler 132). Not only that, but the killer was presented not as a monster or mobster but as a regular person gone mad; as such, he provided the most disturbing screen figure yet (Williams 3). Aside from his actual crimes, there is little to distinguish the mad character (Norman) from the others. This is unsettling because it implies "a whole culture which is equally
sadistic, violent, (and) perverted" (Gough-Yates 27). Hitchcock tapped into the subconscious of the viewer to identify disturbing flaws in society that lay beneath the appearance of normalcy and undermine previous conventions (Rebello 162).

In addition to its unusual content, Psycho was produced in an unconventional manner. Although in 1960 the majority of
Hollywood filmmakers employed techniques such as widescreen, stereo sound, and color in order to be differentiated from and compete with television (Nowell-Smith 464), Hitchcock filmed Psycho in black and white and employed his television crew to produce the film (Kapsis 238). Hitchcock, so obviously going against the grain, wanted to prove a point. He had set out to show that a low-budget horror film could succeed at the box-office, which was precisely what he did (Kapsis 57). Some of the
backlash against Psycho reflected the threat the film posed to society. Real-life murderers claimed that the film influenced them in committing their crimes (Rebello 173). Some viewers assumed that by aligning them with the point of view of a murderer Hitchcock was condoning such acts as murder, fornication, and matricide (Kapsis 61). Sociologists claimed that Psycho could be held accountable for all manner of events, from a rise in crime and violence to the decline in motel stays and the sales of opaque shower curtains and, perhaps most lastingly, a phobia of showering (Rebello 172).
To such allegations Hitchcock always responded that the film was not intended to be taken seriously; he maintained that critics had missed the point of the film, which was to employ "film art to precipitate something of a mass emotion" (Kapsis 64). Given
that this was Hitchcock's intent, the director was successful in meeting his goal. Audiences bonded together, having been exposed to this new tabooed experience of sexuality and violence as a collective; they all screamed at the same moments in the film (Audience 16).
Indeed, once critics were given enough time to absorb the changes, both in the film industry and the society around them, and to see how popular Psycho was with a younger generation, their assessment of the film changed drastically. One film critic who
worked for The New York Times initially wrote this about Psycho: "There is not an abundance of subtlety or the lately familiar
Hitchcock bent towards significant and colorful scenery in this obviously low-budget film" (Crowther 1). Nevertheless, he later included the film in his list of top ten for 1960 (Kapsis 63).
Hitchcock took the brunt of the backlash for the movement toward liberated filmmaking by virtue of the fact that Psycho was one of the first such films. It was the view of the industry that such blatant commercialism as was evident in Psycho was incompatible with artistry, seriousness, and a quality film (Kapsis 12). It was, however, this very quality that was heavily criticized by directors who contributed to the French New Wave, and these filmmakers came to the defense of Psycho from its initial release (Kapsis 13). The fact that they did so serves as an indication as to the kind of audience the film was suited for.

The French New Wave got off the ground just before the sixties, with its first few films releasing in 1958 and 1959 by such filmmakers as Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais (Nowell-Smith 463). These filmmakers stood for the evolution of both the social order and the form, power, and influence of film as a medium; the New Wave movement was dedicated to creating films which broke the mold of the formulaic, studio-bound mainstream cinema (Nowell-Smith 576-7). Contributors to the French New Wave recognized the value of Hitchcock's work, citing him as "a genius of cinematic form who created a distinctive moral vision of the human condition" (Kapsis 71). An ardent fan of Hitchcock's, Truffaut stated that: "Psycho was oriented toward a new generation of filmgoers" (Hitchcock 1). The praise of many other prominent contributors to France's Cahiers du Cinema was an indication that his work, in line with that of other
progressive filmmakers, "might seem to point toward the 'new' morality" (Naremore 75). Indeed, some American critics came to compare Hitchcock's work in the early sixties to films of the French New Wave (Rebello 184).
Although the critical evaluation of Psycho was at times ambiguous, there was never any doubt as to the tremendous impact it had on its viewers: "From the very first screenings, audience reaction, in the form of gasps, screams, yells, even running up and down the aisles, was unprecedented" (Audience 15). The film's enormous popularity with the younger generation of filmgoers brought in gross amounts of revenue (Kapsis 59). Due to its unqualified financial success, Psycho had a great influence on the industry's perception of films. It proved, as Hitchcock had intended, that the classical Hollywood narrative did not have a monopoly on cinematic success; the lower end of the filmmaking industry, the horror film, was indeed popular and capable of drawing vast sums of money (Nowell-Smith 311). "Audiences took pleasure in losing... control (of the) classical narrative cinema...(which took) second place to a succession of visual and auditory shocks and thrills" (Audience 15).
Part of the reason Psycho's impact was so great was that, unlike innovative films by other contemporary American directors such as John Cassavetes and Jonas Mekas (Nowell-Smith 541), Psycho challenged the cinematic conventions of Hollywood from within the studio system. The success of Psycho meant that other production companies would soon make similar pictures.
"Sex and violence...became in the 1960s the very raison d'?tre for a whole new cinematic tradition" (Nowell-Smith 493). The way had been paved for a new group of fresh and youthful films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and
Easy Rider (1969) (Nowell-Smith 609). As a result of the many precedents set by Psycho, the film is especially important retrospectively: "It stands at an interesting juncture in the development of the American popular film...midway between the repressive manners of the classic Hollywood studio era (Janet Leigh wears a bra) and the Ôliberated' ethos of the R-rated contemporary film (Janet Leigh is shown in bed with a man at midday)" (Naremore 75).
Although some viewers and critics responded negatively to Psycho, their appraisal changed once they had time to reassess the value of the film. Nearly forty years after the film's release, Psycho is still cited as a masterpiece which has inspired many dozens of other films such as Dressed to Kill (1980) and Fatal Attraction (1987) (Nowell-Smith 491), and is used as "a yardstick by
which other thrillers are measured" (Rebello 194). "The effect both in the short run, in establishing Psycho as the ultimate thriller, and the long run, in altering the cinema-going habits of the nation, is indisputable" (Clover 191).
by Amanda Sage

creative film...