Page 21 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

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Alfred Hitchcock
Fowl Play and the Domestication of Horror

KELLY OLIVER

ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S PSYCHO, arguably the most shocking and
groundbreaking Hollywood film of i960, ushered in a new era of Ameri-
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can film. With its opening scene suggesting illicit sex in a cheap hotel,
the first look at a toilet in American cinema, heartthrob Anthony Perkins
playing a peeping torn, and the stunning shower scene in which the hero-
ine (Janet Leigh as Marion Crane) is brutally murdered early on, Psycho
flirted with censorship from beginning to end; however, what the censors
found most objectionable was the use of the word transvestite applied to
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Norman in the penultimate scene. With the corpse of Normans moth-
er, which Norman stuffed like one of his birds, Psycho also plays at the
boundary between thriller and horror.
Before Psycho the horror genre was dominated by Britain's Hammer
Studios and Hollywood's Roger Corman and their formula for box-office
success, B creature features with human-cum-animal, sexy women, super-
natural monsters, and mad scientists. Hitchcock was inspired by these
low-budget moneymakers to show what a "master" could do with such
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restrictions. And, with Psycho and then The Birds (1963), Hitchcock not
only transformed the horror genre but also made it respectable by mov-
ing horror out of the realm of the fantastic and into the realm of the
everyday. By suggesting that horror lies within the mundane rather than
the supernatural, that it haunts rural landscapes and picturesque homes
rather than cemeteries and laboratories, Hitchcock's mixture of suspense
and horror hit home. What have become formulaic elements of contem-
porary horror films began with Psycho and The Birds in the early 1960s.

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