Halloween season simply
isn’t Halloween season without a regular dose of golden age Universal horror
(1923-1963). Every day this October, I’ll be giving you a steady IV drip of it
by counting down Psychobabble’s 31
Favorite Universal Horrors!
#3. Psycho (1963-
dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
As I said in my discussion of The Birds a few days ago, Hitchcock’s horrors of the early sixties didn’t
as much wrap up an age of horror as they launched a new one. With the possible
exception of Franju’s gory Le yeux sans
visage, Psycho was the ultimate
shot across the bow for horror’s new age. After subsisting on years of
vampires, ghosts, giant spiders, and other humbugs, 1960s audiences must have
been utterly rattled by this unsparing portrait of a human monster. The film’s
sexuality, the viciousness of the attacks, the grotesqueness of Mother’s
corpse, and the sympathetic way Norman Bates is presented surely reconfigured
the minds of movie audiences and made them capable of digesting even hardier stuff
such as Night of the Living Dead, A Clockwork Orange, and The Exorcist. Hitchcock maximizes his
film’s shocks with tricky, bait-and-switch storytelling, and Anthony Perkins
aids and abets that assault with his completely ingratiating portrayal of
Norman Bates. As far as I’m concerned, horror cinema’s two greatest decades are
the 1930s and 1960s, and Universal was responsible for setting both of them in
motion.
