Creating Fear: The Evolution of the Horror Genre in the 20th Century - Part 3 - The Impact of Psycho

In November 1957, Wisconsin police were led to a local farm house when investigating the abduction of a missing woman.

In the house, police discovered remains of the owner’s murdered victims, skulls, skin upholstered furniture, a necklace adorned with female nipples and, in the refrigerator, a container full of vaginas and numerous human organs. In the garden shed, the body of the missing woman was discovered, skinned and hung up like meat in a butcher’s freezer.

The owner of the house, Edward Gein, was arrested and spent the rest of his life in a mental institute but became a cult figure in American murder-history.

But it wasn’t just the local communities of Wisconsin that the legend of Ed Gein affected, it also had a major impact on the horror genre.

`America was probably very naïve at that time and very unsuspecting,' says Roy Rowan, who covered the investigation for Life magazine. 'And suddenly I think this changed people's attitudes. They suddenly realised that maybe you shouldn't trust the person next door. People knew about horrors and they had seen all kinds of Frankenstein and Dracula movies, but that was a different world. This was our world. This was small town America, where things like that just didn't happen’. (Jones, 1997, p.66)

Based on the novel by Robert Bloch, ‘Psycho’ (1960) reflected this new found fear of the American culture. Like such films as ‘The Mummy’ (1933) that reflected the audience’s fascination and fear of Egyptian history, and ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)’ that mirrored America’s anxieties of communism, ‘Psycho’ tapped into the fear and realisation that society was not a safe place and that every person was secretly capable of monstrous, unmotivated crimes.

Although America was no stranger to apparently motiveless killings, Gein was different. Here was a man well known in the community who, although cranky, was liked and trusted by Plainfield inhabitants. Although the newspapers suppressed aspects of the case, local gossip spread the more ghoulish details; it was the realisation that someone you asked to baby-sit your children, someone whom you had known since they were a child, could be a monster that shook people. (Whitehead, 2003, p.17)

Before the release of ‘Psycho’, monsters of the horror genre tended to be from ‘somewhere else’. Dracula and the Wolf-man were European monsters; the monsters in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1956) and ‘The Blob’ (1958) were aliens from another planet and Frankenstein and the Invisible man were monsters of science. ‘Psycho’ put a human face on the monster, the unmotivated killer living among a community, where even his closest friends are unaware of his true identity.

Structure

Apart from the shift in monster, the biggest impact ‘Psycho’ had on the genre was a change in narrative structure from that of the Classical Horror films.

Andrew Tudor, in ‘Genre and Contemporary Hollywood’ (Neale, 2002), labels the two types of structures as ‘Secure and Paranoid Horror’. (Tudor as cited in Neale, 2002, pp.107, 108).

Tudor pinpoints key narrative differences between ‘Secure Horror’, which I have previously referred to as Classical Horror, and ‘Paranoid Horror’.

Blurring the boundaries between normality and abnormality is one key element that the Mathematician’s formula (Whitaker, 2004) considered highly important and which Tudor insists is true for Paranoid Horror. In secure horror the monster, the setting and the audience’s perceptual balance between reality and fiction are weighted towards fantasy. This could be contributed to the horror film’s purpose of escapism; “...since horror films are metaphors for our own fears and perform a mythic function they are more popular in times of trouble”. (Dunbar, 2000, p.69)

Paranoid Horror, on the other hand, roots its monsters and settings in a reflection of our real world. The monster is also not as clearly distinguishable from normality as the monsters in the secure horror form due to their ability to physically fit in.

The element that needs to be stressed, precisely because it is so easy to overlook, is that we are dealing with the modern, everyday world, not with one situated in the past. Gone are the mad scientists, the remote islands and settings, the dangers of invasions and radiation. (Humphries, 2002, p.85)

Whereas ‘Frankenstein’ (1931), a large, physically-repulsive monster terrorizes a late 19th Century English town, ‘Psycho’ brings the horror of Norman Bates (a young man controlled by his dead mother) to the everyday, modern American town.

The use of everyday settings however, shouldn’t be seen as exclusive to Paranoid Horror. During the 1950s Val Lewton, an American film producer, made numerous films which rotated around non-human creatures disrupting order in our everyday world. Films such as ‘Cat People’ (1942), ‘I walked with a Zombie’ (1943) and ‘The Leopard Man’ (1943), show the genres testing of conventions.

Internal and external threat is another key difference to the two structural forms. The monster’s threat in Paranoid Horror is driven by the monster’s internal psychological conflicts, whereas in secure horror the cause of the creatures menace is determined by external factors. Monster’s from the Paranoid Horror category are also classed as internal as their origin is rooted in nature (they are essentially human), while creatures in secure horror are from ‘somewhere else’ and have little connection to humans.

Even where no explanation is offered for their behaviour, the rampaging psychotics... are constituted as monstrous threats by virtue of some characteristic presumed internal to their being. This was a major change of emphasis in as much as most horror threats prior to the emergence of the psycho-killer were externally derived: they came from space, for example, or super-nature, or were created by virtue of scientific interference in the proper order of things. (Tudor as cited in Neale, 2002, pp.108, 109).

For example, in ‘Psycho’ Norman is part of the human-race, he was born into our world. Whereas a creature such as the Blob is not human in any form and was a creation of another world.

Expertise and human intervention are two other key differences between the two forms of horror. In secure horror, experts are always called in to diagnose and eventually dispose of the monstrous problem successfully.

Paranoid Horror, however, presents expertise as ineffective and the chance of any human intervention being successful as highly unlikely.

For example, in ‘Psycho’, Detective Arbogast, the expert in solving mysteries, is murdered when he investigates the Bates’ house. If the expert is unable to stop the monster, who else can?

The role of the authorities and victims are also very different between the two structural forms of horror. Whereas in Secure Horror, the authorities (either police, military, Government Organisation etc) are legitimate and reliable, in Paranoid Horror the authorities are of little, if any, use in stopping the monster. This, in turn, has a knock on effect on the roles of the hero and the victims. For Classical Horror the authorities and/or expert’s main aim would be to stop the monster with as few victims as possible. In Paranoid Horror however, due to the unreliable authorities and ineffective expertise, the potential victims become the only people who can possibly defeat the monster in their bid for survival. In ‘Psycho’, the local sheriff is unwilling to believe, or even listen to, Lila Crane when reporting Norman’s connection to the disappearance of her sister, whereas the police in ‘The Invisible Man’ (1933) are quick to the scene of the crime and restore society back to normal by destroying the monster.

Narrative ending and order are the final two key differences acknowledged by Tudor (Neale, 2002) between the two horror forms. The monsters destruction in Secure Horror closes the narrative, restoring normality to the world. Because the monster is dead and people have learnt from their mistakes, the chance of order being disrupted again is unlikely.

Paranoid Horror however leaves its narrative ending open, allowing the monster to return for a sequel, to create more disorder and to scare us once again. The last scene in ‘Psycho’ leaves a chilling mark on its audience as Mother’s voice tells how her quiet, innocent looking son will return to kill again.

Shocks and Visual Style of Psycho

Although the narrative structure to ‘Psycho’ is very different from the Classical Horror narrative, Hitchcock’s influential style takes the visual techniques of the silent horror period. Dialogue does not take a key role in driving the story forward (a problem that became too common when the talkie pictures were introduced) and ‘Psycho’ displays this highly visual style with a sixteen minute section of the film containing only one line of dialogue (“Mother, Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!”)

‘Psycho’ pushed and challenged censorship codes of the day. Even Universal would not fund the film claiming it was “too repulsive for films” (Universal, 2000). This left Hitchcock to self-fund the project, allowing him to have more control over the film but with a smaller budget.

In 1960, black and white films were something of a rarity since the introduction of colour film stock and the competition with television. However, due to budgetary constraints, Hitchcock decided to shoot with black and white film as it was cheaper and this allowed Hitchcock to use expressionistic lighting like the original black and white silent horror pictures as well as pass numerous censorship codes (blood for example was considered less shocking when in black and white than in colour). Yet ‘Psycho’ was shocking for its time, presenting the audience with a number of culturally taboo breaking images;

Janet Leigh in a brassiere just after she has made love to boyfriend Sam at the start of the film; Janet Leigh stabbed to death naked in the shower; Norman Bates as a cross-dressing psychopath and the first ever flushing toilet shown on screen. (Sheahan-Wells, 2001, pp.7, 8)

The Audience Experience

Part of Psycho’s success is due to its intended audience experience. Firstly, the death of Janet Leigh at the end of the first act disperses any security and predictability of the film’s world and, in turn, reinforces the scary, dangerous and unpredictable nature of reality.

The sudden death of Marion Crane, the character whom the audience presume is the film’s protagonist as the film follows her story, leaves the film without a hero, a character who we know will save the day.

Hitchcock also changed the way in which audiences viewed the film in the cinema. Whereas with other films audience members could enter the cinema during a feature, Hitchcock insisted that all cinemas refused entry once the film had started.

This was unheard of in 1960, when cinemas usually played main features, B-movies and shorts in a loop and people wandered in and out of the cinema whenever they felt like it. People would often come in midway through a film and then sit through everything until they got back to the point where they had started. (Sheahan-Wells, 2001. pp. 7)

This new viewing technique allowed the film to build to the film’s dramatic (surprise) ending, creating a scary, tense guessing game that emotionally encompassed the audience from start to finish.

Is it Horror?

But is ‘Psycho’ a horror film? Although I, and other film historians, have labelled the film as part, even a key turning point, of the genre, Noel Carroll (1990), a key theorist claims that it isn’t. His theory (as discussed in chapter one) insists that the key feature of a horror film is the physically repulsive monster who doesn’t fit in to normality. This being the case, Norman Bates does not fit into that category. However, Le Blanc (2003) argues that the figure of menace, the executor of fear, need not be the apparent killer, and that a murderer in a film doesn’t necessarily have to be a monster. The monster’s key role is to provide a reason for the disruption of everyday order. Applying Le Blanc’s idea to ‘Psycho’ we can see that the monster is Mrs Bates, both in physical form (the skeleton body in the basement) and mentally (the monster in Norman’s mind) but the physical killer is Norman.

(Norman Bates) is and is not mother, both is and is not dead, is neither masculine nor feminine, mother nor son, fetish, corpse, nor living body. Rather it is all these states amalgamated into one phantastic body. (Bronfen, 1998, p.31)

Carroll (1990) admits that ‘Psycho’ does use many of the horror genres stylistic conventions (the eight key elements as proposed by the Mathematician formula [2004] are all evidential in the film) but Carroll still insists that the film is not a horror.

However, using Carroll’s theory against his argument we begin to understand that Psycho is a mental Jekyll and Hyde story. Using Carroll’s type of monster conventions (as discussed in chapter one) we can identify Norman as being a Temporal Fission/Meteonymy monster. As I have already mentioned, the true monster of the film can be seen to be Mother (Mrs Bates) who, psychologically, is repulsive and impure, and this is reflected physically (but non-diegetically) in her voice. She also contains a threat (another key element to a monster proposed by Carroll) both to Norman, mentally, and, through Norman, physically to others. The credibility of the character and its actions lie not with Mother, but with Norman, who reflects an everyday, doting son.

Of course, you also have to take into consideration the impact ‘Psycho’ had on the horror genre as a whole. The Man with a big knife and a false identity stalking people may have first been seen in ‘Psycho’, but has since been repeated in ‘Halloween’ (1978), ‘Friday the 13th’ (1980), ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ (1984) and ‘Scream one, two and three’ (1996, 1997, 2000).

The Impact of Psycho in a Changing Society

‘Psycho’ wasn’t the only determining factor in the change of the horror genre. From the 1950s onwards, with the emergence of a younger generation and the development of drive-in movie theatres, the cinema, and horror films in particular, became a key event for dating teenagers. Horror films slowly began to focus on a specific target audience and, in turn, the central characters of these films began to reflect its target viewer’s age and attitudes.

Also in 1968, a classification system was introduced to America, restricting films to certain age groups. This meant that the ethics and censorship codes that had previously restricted the contents of films could be relaxed. Thus the Slasher horror cycle, heavily inspired by ‘Psycho’, the new found teen audience and the relaxation of film censorship, became the key format for the Paranoid Horror form.