Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece, danced around the censors to help break old Hollywood – 21-Jun-2020 – NZ International news – NZCity

"For a split second," one man recalled, "the audience was quiet".

"Then there was an eruption of shrill screams, held breaths released, and 'Oh my Gods'.

"I had never before, and never since, witnessed a movie as surprising and shocking."

The man, recalling his experiences in 2008, was talking about seeing Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho at a cinema in the weeks after its release exactly 60 years ago.

In particular, he was referring to just one moment, less than three minutes long a moment that would become one of the most famous and influential in all of cinema history.

The shower scene.

"I think it's very hard to imagine just how ... confronting this film would have been upon release," says Zak Hepburn, general manager of The Astor Theatre in Melbourne.

The film seemed at first like a redemption story. Janet Leigh's character Marion Crane, having stolen money from her boss in order to make a new life with her boyfriend, decides instead to go home and make amends.

Forty minutes in, the shower scene at the Bates Motel threw that assumption out.

The shock of it was partly the violence.

It's a quick barrage of cuts, 52 in all, canvassing 78 different camera angles. It preferences rhythm and abstraction over gore, making you fill in the gaps. And there's Bernard Hermann's shrieking score.

But it was also destabilising. Wasn't Janet Leigh the star of the film? The one on the posters?

"I think there's an emotional violence or a psychological violence in regards to how we expect these stories to play out," says Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who has written many books on horror and is a programmer for the genre film festival Fantastic Fest.

"The one hook we had, the one connection to this story, which is Marion's journey and her tale of redemption, is violently taken away from us."

Some people who saw the film, released at the height of the British director's fame and influence, were later terrified of getting in the shower, Hitchcock told one interviewer.

My father was one of them. He saw it in Geelong at 14 and it still scares him.

Same with Ms Heller-Nicholas's mum: "She was a bath woman from that point onwards."

Psycho was a violent film for 1960, particularly given it was pitched not at arthouse film buffs but mainstream audiences.

Hitchcock knew the long reach of censorship, for years having adhered to the Hollywood production code, which from 1934 strongly discouraged violence, nudity and anything else that suggested loose morals.

But Hitchcock enjoyed testing the code's limits "it was like a red flag to a bull," Ms Heller-Nicholas says and by the late 1950s, as society changed, its power was waning.

On the set of Psycho in 1959, Hitchcock was asked if he was worried he might face censorship over what was rumoured at the time to be an "intimate homicide" in his new film.

His reply:

"Men do kill nude women, you know."

Psycho, in this way, was hugely influential in ending Hollywood's obsession with script vetting and manufactured decency.

"Psycho is a really major moment in Hollywood film history for that reason," Ms Heller-Nicholas says.

That was all well and good in the US, but in Australia, where obscenity trials involving art were not unusual, things were different.

In 1948, chief Commonwealth censor J.O. Alexander said that horror films were "neither entertaining nor cultural and cater only for a small minority of the moronic type". The whole genre was banned for two decades.

Between 1961 and 1963, 139 films were edited prior to their release in Australia, according to Robert Cettl's book, Offensive to a Reasonable Adult: Film Censorship and Classification in Australia.

It's not clear what happened with Psycho, though.

Australia's censors "forced some minor changes" in the film before allowing it to screen here, according to an interview with Hitchcock in the New York Times in 1961.

However, critic John Baxter said Hitchcock convinced the Australian Government to leave his film alone.

In doing so, Psycho's shower scene helped sparked conversations in Australia about whether censoring movies was still necessary.

"In Australia, critics were soon placing the censors under sustained attack," Baxter writes in Philip J Skerry's Psycho In The Shower: A History of Cinema's Most Famous Scene.

Within a few years, Baxter said, film festivals were exempted from censorship, then members-only cinemas, and finally all cinemas.

"By widening the definitions, Psycho and the shower scene began it all."

Psycho didn't just change cinema-going or perceptions of what was obscene.

It made fear relatable, brought it into our most intimate spaces. That was unheard of in mainstream cinema. That's why it was so shocking.

In this way, it began a social-political shift in scary movies: suddenly, the danger came not from an "other" a monster or ghoul but from the supposedly safe domestic sphere.

"It's not Bela Lugosi," Ms Heller-Nicholas says, referring to the accented Hungarian-American who played Dracula in 1931. "It's not this foreign outsider that's coming in to wreak havoc and upset the very pleasant status quo.

"What Psycho says is, 'The status quo is toxic. The supposed happy household is toxic. Mother is not good, son is not good'."

This idea of family disfunction and terror in suburbia would come to underwrite huge film franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street and by extension any Hollywood thriller you can think of.

"I think that was something we certainly hadn't seen before in cinema," Mr Hepburn says, "and subsequently that's been hugely influential to filmmakers."

Psycho cost $US750,000 to make and in two years had earned about $14 million, the equivalent of $US119 million in today's money.

Its influence on modern filmmaking from the mechanics of building suspense to assumption subversion, censorship, subtlety and the psychology of badness is hard to overstate.

"We routinely screen it and it still really packs a punch," Mr Hepburn says of his cinema.

And presumably, it still leaves a few people avoiding the shower.

ABC

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Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece, danced around the censors to help break old Hollywood - 21-Jun-2020 - NZ International news - NZCity