Psycho

Tonight we had just about the best Halloween night I can possibly imagine :-) Our local mall, The Biltmore, had another of their open air 'movie in the park' nights, and in honor of halloween, it was the Alfred Hitchcock classic "Psycho".

We got there early so that we could hit California Pizza Kitchen for dinner. To our surprise, they had a station set up outside so you could order your food without even entering the restaurant. So we placed our order, went and set up our blanket and pillows in the park, and then CPK called me 20 minutes later when the food was ready - fantastic!

Anyway, back to the movie. It's been a long time since I last watched Psycho, and I'd forgotten that it actually starts out here in Phoenix! It was interesting to see what Phoenix looked like back in 1959/1960, it's changed a little since then :-) The movie itself still holds up remarkably well today almost 50 years later. The most famous scene of course is Janet Leigh's shower murder scene, which still has the ability to shock, especially the final shot in the sequence where the camera starts on an extreme close up of her eye and slowly pans back, almost like her soul is leaving the body. Less effective was the final reveal of Norman Bates mother, which left a lot of people in the audience giggling.

There were 2 comments I heard though which started me thinking. Firstly after the shower murder scene, Sally said "Wow, I didn't realize that happened so early in the film" and I think that's actually a common misunderstanding. People new to the film expect that scene to be the dramatic end, but it isn't, it's fairly early on and leads into the bulk of the film which deals with the investigation into the murder. Finally at the end someone sat near us said "THAT was rated R?" It is of course silly to judge a movie from 1960 by todays standards, but there's no denying that without Psycho we may never have had all the great horror movies made since, especially during the late 70's, entire 80's and re-surging again over the last 10 years. All of which got me wondering if anyone has written about the popularity of horror movies during republican administrations? Hmmm?

It got me thinking about TV too. Psycho is surprisingly similar to a lot of today's most popular TV shows, in almost exact format as well as content. I don't think it's a stretch to say CSI is just Psycho from the investigators point of view; Law & Order is Psycho from the cops point of view, as are shows like Bones or The Mentalist; in a slight twist, House is just Psycho where Norman Bates is a disease instead of a person; and the ultimate? Dexter is Psycho, finally from Norman Bates' point of view...