FTVMS 101 - Notes - Week 9

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PSYCHO: Lecture Summary and bibliography

 

PSYCHO AS HORROR

 

Look at Hitchcock’s Psycho as an example of genre criticism and then as an example of auteur criticism. In contrast to auteur theory, the genre approach highlights film as a popular art form with qualities of mass entertainment and also includes the audience in the equation because genre films must be understood in terms of audience expectations. In effect a genre is a kind of subculture, a set of conventions of narrative, setting, characterisation, imagery, iconography which is shared by those fluent in its ‘language’. This means that a genre is a social construction subject to constant negotiation and reformulation, which is why, of course, a genre is hard to pin down, why a genre’s boundaries are forever shifting.

 

The Horror Genre

In contrast to some other genres, such as lyric poetry, horror is first and foremost a modern genre, one that begins to appear in the 18th century.

 

The Gothic Novel

The earliest examples of the horror genre were the Gothic novels which flourished between 1760-1820, a group of novels primarily produced but also consumed by women.

The most famous examples are:

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

There has been a great deal of critical debate about the sexual politics of Gothic novels.

 

1.         From its outset the horror genre and readings of it have been concerned with questions of sexuality and gender issues.

 

The American Gothic

Whereas English literature excluded horror writers from its canon, the canon of American literature is dominated by them — authors such as Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. Horror writing has not been limited to popular fiction but has been highly influential on a number of different traditions of writing.

 

2.         The horror genre has straddled notions of high and low culture and in the traffic between high and low the innovations in horror may trickle upwards rather than the other way around.

 

Late Victorian Resurgence of the Horror Genre

The Gothic novel seems to go into decline after 1820 and the influence of horror shifts to popular theatrical forms. In the late 19th century there is a resurgence of horror fiction with the production of four horror classics:

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Jekyll, Dracula and Frankenstein have been seen as the three central narrative forms of the horror genre. All these texts deal with the theme of doubling and transformation - the body and personality.

 

German Expressionist film

The first film version of Frankenstein dates from 1910. It was in Germany during the silent period of film that horror began to emerge as a filmic genre. There are a number of classic German horror films of the 1930s which are particularly important for their visual style — above all for the fact that they did not adopt codes of visual naturalism but those of the artistic movement of expressionism

 

3.         Horror in the cinema starts out by rejecting codes of realism and drawing upon techniques of expressionism.

 

Hollywood Horror films of the 1930s

These were produced almost exclusively by one studio - Universal. These are films that have had a lasting impact; they are also associated with actors such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi famous for their portrayals of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula.

Dracula 1931

Frankenstein 1931

Bride of Frankenstein 1935

 

4.         Horror films even from the beginning are conscious of their antecedents: there is a sense of tradition which also invites repetition (Frankenstein becomes The Bride of Frankenstein etc). There is a focus on the star.

 

Hollywood Horror films of the 40s

RKO Studios and Val Lewton producer. Often set in the modern world using modern characters, the horrors are personal and intimate and self-consciously stress psychological themes.

Jacques Tourneur, Cat People (1942)

I Walked With A Zombie 1943

Curse of the Cat People 1945

 

5.         Horror deals with themes of the body and has a particular power in addressing unconscious fantasies.

 

Fifties Invasion Films

A shift from horror’s dependence on literary antecedents to borrowing from other popular genres in particular science fiction.

The Thing 1951

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers 1956

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

These films emerged during the cold war and the invasion by an alien force which they frequently feature represents American fears of a Russian threat. They are often read as anticommunist but also anti-scientific technocracy.

 

50s Popular Gothic from the Hammer Studios

A resurgence of interest in the popular gothic from a series of low budget films made in the Hammer Studios in Britain in the late 1950s. Again centred around actors rather than directors: Vincent Price, Christopher Lee.

 

6.         The focus on production values and the role of studios is highlighted in a genre approach in a way that other critical approaches don’t. A genre approach may allow us to re-evaluate periods of filmmaking.

 

Contemporary Horror and Genre Fragmentation

 

Since the late 60s the major production of the horror genre has been in the B-movie category but it has also been the material of major studio productions (Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula) and there has been an enormous proliferation of the genre. Some of the variants:

 — psychological horror (Psycho)..

— occult films (The Exorcist);

— zombie movies;

— the slasher and splatter subgenres (Texas Chainsaw Massacre);

— body/horror (Werewolf, The Fly); sci-fi horror (Alien);

— even a subgenre invented in New Zealand, Peter Jackson’s splatstick.

 

Perhaps it would not be exaggerated to say that in the 1980s horror was one of the most important and widely viewed film genres. There has been a sort of self-reflexive, self-annihilating exploding of the genre in the late 80s and early 90s marked by:

- first of all the self-mirroring of much recent horror film, where we find characters watching horror films or these films examine the horrifying consequences of looking at horror;

and secondly the emergence of a camp, self-parodying quality that is a combination of elements of popular culture, slapstick comedy, sometimes a knowing use of high culture.

 

7.         The horror movie genre is caught up with questions of its own genre and medium, it is self reflexive; it is also caught up with issues of the audience, questions of spectator response; and finally it seems focussed around issue of psychoanalysis, the body, gender and sexuality.

 

Genre features

Shift from genre history to genre features. Why do we watch horror movies?

 

The return of the repressed theory associated with the critics Robin Wood and Jean-Louis Baudry. The horror movie they argue provides for the release of repressed energies - our darkest thoughts about sadism, masochism, the breaking of norms associated with heterosexuality, incest, cannibalism, the family. In this sense Wood believes that horror is a radical genre, rather than seeing the pleasure of horror as primarily founded in the desire to contain the monster, Wood argues that horror movies elicit our interest in and sympathy for the monster, allow us to play out in a safe fashion being monsters ourselves..

 

The role of the spectator. Following the arguments of Carol Clover, the viewing subject of horror movie does not take up a fixed place or gender role, but is free to adopt a number of subject positions regardless of gender. This shifting viewing position encourages the spectator to oscillate between the positions of both victim and monster and in this respect the horror movie sets out to explore masochistic aspects of the gaze.

 

Who watches horror movies?

 

There does not appear to be any clear answer to this question and audience surveys are made even more difficult with the use of home video where the audience is largely hidden from view. However, audiences for the horror genre in descending order of size appear to be the following: young adolescent males; male-female couples in the younger age bracket; a group referred to as rouge males (older men of somewhat dubious distinction possibly dressed in raincoats); adolescent women in groups.

One thing you will notice about all these audiences is that they are gendered.

 

Where does Psycho stand in relation to all of this genre history and identification of the codes and conventions of the horror genre?

 

Despite the fact that Hitchcock is known as “the master of terror” within popular culture, Psycho was his first real horror film. It is clear that Psycho is the ancestor and antecedent of the slasher subgenre of the horror film. It is full of familiar elements: the killer is a psychotic product of a family; the film plays out a family romance; the victim is a beautiful sexually-active woman; the location is a haunted house, a terrible place; the weapon is a knife not a gun; the attack is filmed and registered from the victim’s point of view and is shocking and sudden it jolts us out of our seats. Hitchcock’s formulation and bringing together of these elements produced a master text and prompted a flood of imitations and a flood of homages.

 

Narrative functions

It doesn’t seem to matter whether the monster in a horror movie is a giant sized gorilla, a shark, a blob, a parasitic alien, or a motel attendant as in the case of Psycho they all carry out the same function in terms of the narrative. Horror as a genre can be reduced to a number of standard character functions, conventional elements and standard plots. Look at some of those features.

 

The monster

The monster and sexual difference. The monster disturbs the boundaries of sexual identity. Norman Bates has been described as a mother-fixated would be transexual. The pleasure the genre offers is based on the process of narrative closure by which the horrifying or the monstrous is destroyed or contained. What is radical about Psycho and might been seen as a break or a crucial innovation in terms of the genre is that the horror, the monster, is not presented as a force coming from outside American society but from within the patriarchal family.

 

The victim

The victim was once an adult woman like Marion Crane in Psycho, now she is typically in her teens, a recent suggestion that new victims of horror movies might be children. Marion Crane is first and foremost a sexual transgressor and the first scenes of the film show her in a hotel room after a stolen lunch hour of sex asking her lover to marry her. In the early scenes of the film we watch her dress, in the shower scene we watch her undress. One equation the horror film seems to be making is that of victim=audience.

 

The terrible place

The labyrinth of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the mansion of Norman Bates in Psycho, the weatherboard suburban house of Halloween, the gingerbread house of Creepers. Many of these spaces have at their centre the figure of the mother: Norman Bates dead mother in a rocking chair, the decaying corpse of the grandmother in the Texas Chainsaw mansion, the monstrous mother in Peter Jackson’s Braindead.

 

Weapons

It is interesting how guns have no or little role to play in horror movies. The preferred weapons are pre-technological: knives, ice picks, hypodermic needles, pitchforks etc. This allows of course for the silent assault. But when one links these weapons to those of technology found in recent horror movies such as the chainsaw or power drills, a feature they all have in common is that of closeness and tactility.

 

The shock effect

Horror works upon a shock effect often heighten by the musical soundtrack. One reason that the famous shower sequence in Psycho has created such commentary is that so very little is actually shown. Only one shot in the forty-four shot sequence of Psycho sequence shows the body being stabbed. The horror lies less in the actual images than in their implications.

 

The survivors

The survivor, the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends, is chased, cornered, wounded and almost always female. Lila (Marion’s sister) in Psycho; Ripley in Alien; Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Laurie in Halloween. All these figures exhibit active defense mechanisms, they are intelligent, resourceful, competent, but also tomboyish — often indicated by their masculine sounding names. Clover calls this character “the final girl.”

 

 

HITCHCOCK AS AUTEUR

 

Hitchcock’s signature

With Hitchcock the most obvious place to begin is with the signature appearance of Hitchcock himself in all his films. Generally, if you read the critical material on Hitchcock this is taken as little more than a sort-of in joke or teaser for Hitchcock fans.

Rather than just a joke, there are more serious meaning effects that arise from a Hitchcock cameo appearance in a Hitchcock film. Hitchcock authenticates each film, the sight of him reassures us that this is authentic Hitchcock even more than his name in credits at the beginning.

By appearing in the film itself, by this type of signing, Hitchcock is also introducing something outside the text of the film to the inside, it too becomes part of the film and so its effects must be read as part of the filmtext. Even though Hitchcock always disappears from the frame seconds after he appears textual elements that affect the meaning of the film have been put in motion and cannot be stopped.

Hitchcock’s appearances also function along the lines the characterisation of signature as style: they are a sign or another example of his particular style or idiom.

Finally Hitchcock’s appearances are a sort of self-reflexive pointing to the act of representation.

When you look at the signature effects, the very position of the director Hitchcock is made undecidable in these films. He is no longer simply the origin, or in total control of the filmtext. If he becomes like a character in the films does he then become simply another textual element inside the film? If so how can he be outside the text and its originator and in control of it if he is also inside?

So Hitchcock’s playing with the figure of himself is serious and the point is that it is not simply a question of intentionality but rather one of reading the textual dynamics of the film.

 

Narrative structure

Raymond Bellour claims that Psycho contains two stories slipping one under the other and one into the other. The first is the story of Marion, the other Norman’s story. The murder in Psycho makes a break, a rupture in the film as a result of which it is broken into two separate stories by the removal of its protagonist. The first story is that of Marion Crane up until her death. The second is the story of the investigation of her death by the detective Arbogast and her sister Lila. In the second story the focus of the narration is Norman Bates.

 

We might also compare this divided or double structure with other Hitchcock films: North by Northwest also contains two stories, the story of a crime and the story of an investigation; and Marnie also follows a similar underlying pattern. In Marnie and Psycho we have a mother figure who the investigators believe is being shielded and in both films it is the mother’s sexual involvement with another man, not the father, which is at the root of the original trauma. So in an interesting way in these various films by Hitchcock which seem on the surface quite dissimilar in their in type, subject matter and plot we find a common narrative structure which could be extended further to cover other films by Hitchcock.

 

Psychoanalytic Themes/Structures of seeing

 

1.         Themes associated with eyes.

At the film’s focal point the film makes use of eyes. The cut from the closeup of water and blood spiralling down the drain to the close up of Marion’s eye with the camera spiralling out from it. We also have the mocking eyes of the dead corpse of Mrs Bates. A literalisation of the theme of seeing and voyeurism.

 

2.         Voyeurism

In the opening shots of the film we have a roving camera eye that moves over a city it selects one apartment block and tracks in and then selects one window and tracks in again to take us through the window. There is an insistence on seeing as the camera takes us in and makes us see deeper and deeper into things.

The most obvious and literal reference to voyeurism in the film is to be found just before the shower scene. As soon as Norman returns to his room we learn that he is a Peeping Tom, a voyeur. He has drilled a hole into one of the motel rooms so he can spy on its occupants. Norman’s eye is filmed in extreme close-up drawing attention to the act of voyeurism. A reverse shot shows us that he is watching Marion undressing. Hitchcock is drawing attention to the voyeurism of not just Norman but also of the cinema spectator. Norman’s eye stands in for the director’s eye and in turn our eye too.

 

The Shower Scene

This scene has been singled out as the most horrifying in the film, possibly in the history of cinema. The American critic Frederic Jameson calls it “the most horrific and immediate scene in motion picture history.” As a scene it has probably elicited more comment and generated more shot by shot analysis from a technical point of view than any other scene in cinema history.

Not surprisingly it has generated a number of conflicting interpretations:

 

1.         The shower scene has been interpreted as representative of the desire of the mother to eliminate Marion as a dangerous rival. This is the argument given by the psychiatrist at the end of the film.

 

2.         There is the argument that the stabbing is a symbolic form of rape enacted by Norman.

 

3.         Various critics have suggested that Marion is punished because of the pleasure she is enjoying and exhibiting.

 

4.         Then there are those who argue that the shower scene awakens our unconscious fears of the mother as parental castrator. Again Psycho is exemplary of this structure — it acts as a sort of master text. In terms of the narrative of the film there are two stories — Marion’s story and Norman’s story; we might see the mother’s story as a third story that is used to fill in and connect the other two.

 

5.         Some feminist critics have pointed out however the shower scene doesn’t necessarily work like this, and that it has made decades of female viewers fear drawing their own shower curtains across. Tania Modleski has noted that the sexism in this scene is almost never discussed by critics. Modleski written convincingly in general terms on Hitchcock’s misogynist treatment of women and his homophobia.

 

3.         Shifting identification.

We identify and unite ourselves with the two major characters in the film. Our identification with Marion occurs in the opening sequence. We side with her in the dispute between the lovers. Each character is then presented through Marion’s eyes. The shower murder brutally breaks that identification and we attach ourselves and our gaze to Norman Bates.

 

4.         Themes of Mirroring

The mirroring of Mother’s face over Norman’s, a hallucinatory level of identification. The scene where Marion and Norman are face to face in the reception room of the hotel, the dialogue is organised according to shot/reverse shot. The mirroring of the sisters but also the mirroring of ‘lookalike’ Norman and Sam (Marion’s lover) in their confrontation across the counter in the motel office.

 

What I have tried to do here is weave together two different approaches to the film: a genre approach that has looked at it in terms of the development and conventions of the broader features of genre and an auteur approach focussed in on the individual aspects of the director and how the film might reflect his world view, how he has structured and thematised his text. I would stress that I see both approaches as equally valid and as we have seen at times they coincide and can be used to illuminate each other.

 

FOCUS ON A GENRE: THE HORROR FILM

 

Background Reading

 

‘Body/Horror’, A Special Issue of Screen, vol. 27, Jan-Feb 1986.

 

Ivan Butler, Horror in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer, 1970).

 

Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). A major reading of horror from the point of view of cognitive psychology.

 

Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws (London: BFI Publications, 1992). One of the most interesting and stimulating recent readings of the popular horror genre by a feminist critic.

 

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Contains important readings of a number of films - Alien, Carrie, The Exorcist, Psycho - from a psychoanalytical perspective.

 

Les Daniels, Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (London: Paladin, 1977).

 

Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

 

Reynold Humphries. The American Horror Film: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002).

 

Roy Huss (ed.), Focus on the Horror Film (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972).

 

Mark Jancovich, Horror (London: Batsford, 1992). A very readable introduction to the history of the horror genre and its main features. 

 

Mark Jancovich (ed.), Horror: The Film Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Useful collection: contains essays by Wood, Clover, Creed and Williams.

 

Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2002).

 

Tom Milne and Paul Willemen (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Horror Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). Reference book.

 

Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).

 

Kim Newman (ed.), The BFI Companion to Horror (London: Cassell, 1996). Reference work.

 

S. S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980). An early but influential reading of German expressionist horror.

 

J. P. Telotte, Dreams of Darkness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

 

Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

 

Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: University  Publications, 1984), pp. 67-82. An important essay which argues for a more positive role for the female spectator of horror film. Also in Jancovich above.

 

Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). Contains some essays first published in the 1970s which have influenced the direction of subsequent criticism of the horror genre.

 

 

 

Some Horror Movies in Our Collection

 

The Horror Hall of Fame        2050                            Bad Taste (1988) Peter Jackson          1673

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Cailgari (1919) Weine      63   Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955) Arnold   1338

 

Cujo  (1983) Teague   545                             Cat People (1943) Tourneur    1979

 

Curse of the Cat People  (1944) Fritsch         1979    The Day of the Triffids (1963) Sekely       1778       

Dressed to Kill  (1980) De Palma      3045     The Exorcist (1974) Friedkin 1344               

Fatal Attraction (1987) Lynne            1084                The Fly (1958) Neumann        2058               

The Fly (1986) Cronenberg     1627                Frenzy (1972) Hitchcock        489                 

Friday the 13th (1980) Cunningham    1366  Halloween (1979) Carpenter 389                               

Halloween II (1982) Rosenthal         1261     Hush... Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965) Aldrich 1969 

 

 I Walked with a Zombie (1943) Zemeckis 209         Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) Siegel

586

                       

Jaws (1975) Spielberg              582                                         Jaws II (1978) Szwarc            635                                         

King Kong (1933) Cooper      1566                            The Mummy (1932) Freund    1549               

Night of the Living Dead (1970) Romero      1077                Nosferatu (1922) Murnau 1125                     

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) Herzog      1446                    Peeping Tom (1960) Powell    1183               

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Julian     1119       The Phantom of the Opera (1943)

  Lubin  1783  

 

Poltergeist (1982) Hooper        1787                           Psycho (1960) Hitchcock    1331                               

Pyscho II (1983) Franklin        956                             Repulsion (1965) Polanski      518                 

The Spiral Staircase (1946) Siodmak      2032                        Targets (1967) Bogdanovich    1412 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1976) Hooper     1189          Them! (1954) Douglas        330                                

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) Corman      1362             Village of the Damned (1960) Rilla  57                    

The War of the Worlds (1953) Haskin      1235  Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Aldrich 1496

           

White Zombie (1932) Halperin     1087                                  The Wolf Man (1942) Waggoner   1563

 

 

 

A History of the Horror Genre

 

The Gothic Novel

 

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

 

The American Gothic

 

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Murders on the Rue Morgue’

Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Scarlet Letter’, ‘The House of the Seven Gables’

 

Late Victorian Resurgence of the Horror Genre

 

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

 

German Expressionism

 

Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1921)

Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1926)

 

1930s Universal Studios Hollywood Classics

 

Tod Browning, Dracula (1931)

James Whale, Frankenstein (1931)

James Whale, Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Merian Cooper, King Kong (1933)

 

RKO Studios in the 1940s

 

Jacques Tourneur, Cat People (1942) 

Zemeckis, I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The Bodysnatchers (1945)

 

Fifties Invasion Narratives

 

The Thing (1951)

Seigel, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956)

Jack Arnold, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Jack Arnold, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

 

Hammer Studios and the Return of the Gothic

 

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1965)

 

Contemporary Horror and Genre Fragmentation

 

The Deranged

Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho (1960)

Michael Powell, Peeping Tom (1960)

Roman Polanski, Repulsion (1965)

 

Apocalyptic Narratives

Rosemary’s Baby (1967)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Omen (1976)

 

Zombies

George Romero, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

George Romero, Dawn of the Dead (1979)

 

The Slasher Sub-genre

Tobe Hooper, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and sequels

John Carpenter, Halloween (1978) and sequels

Friday the 13th the series

 

Body/Horror

John Landis, An American Werewolf in London(1981)

John Carpenter,The Thing (1986)

David Cronenberg, The Fly (1986)

David Cronenberg, Videodrome

 

Scifi Horror

Ridley Scott, Alien(1979)

Aliens

Alien 3

Ridley Scott, Bladerunner (1982)

 

‘Splatstick’

Peter Jackson, Bad Taste (1988)

Peter Jackson, Braindead (1992)

 

 

 

FOCUS ON AN AUTEUR: ALFRED HITCHCOCK

 

 

Background Reading

 

Richard Allen and S. Ishii-Gonzales, Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI Publishing, 1999). Contains an essay on the eye in Psycho.

 

Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, edited by Constance Penley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Chapter 7 ‘Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho)’ a difficult psychoanalytical reading of the film.

 

Robert Bloch, Psycho (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). The original novel.

 

Lesley Brill, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Contains a chapter on looking in Psycho.

 

Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders (London: Faber, 2001).

 

Robert Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Contains a chapter on ‘Psycho and the Breakdown of the Social’.

 

Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986). Contains a ‘Psycho Dossier’.

 

Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at Psycho (London: British Film Institute, 2002). An entire book on Psycho: a relentless analysis of the film scene by scene with some great insights.

 

Sydney Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (London: Faber and Faber, 1995). Contains the classic ‘Why I am Afraid of the Dark’ (1960).

 

Sydney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse. Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). Contains an essay on Gus Van Sant’s 1998 colour remake of Psycho.

 

James Griffith, ‘Psycho: Not Guilty as Charged,’ Film Comment (July-August) 1996: 76-80.

 

Thomas Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

 

Paula Marantz Cohen, Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).

 

Howard Maxford, The A-Z of Hitchcock (London: Batsford, 2002).

 

Tania Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988). An important feminist revision of Hitchcock’s work.

 

Christopher Morris, The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

 

George Perry, Hitchcock (London: Macmillan, 1975).

 

Gene Phillips, Alfred Hitchcock (Boston: Twayne, 1984).

 

Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (New York: St Martin’s, 1990). The inside story on behind the scenes of the film.

 

William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Contains a good chapter on Psycho.

 

Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (London: British Film Institute, 2000).

 

David Sterritt, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). A good introduction to Hitchcock with a chapter on Psycho.

 

Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Little Brown, 1983). The standard biography of Hitchcock.

 

Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967). French New Wave director interviews Hitchcock and discusses his work. 

 

Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (South Brunswick, N.J.: A.S. Barnes, 1977). By one of the leading theorists of the horror genre.

 

Robin Wood, Hitchcock Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

 

 

Video

 

Psycho (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)                                                5227

Psycho II (Dir. Richard Franklin, 1983)                                             956

 

The Making of Psycho (Dir. Laurent Bouzreau, 1990)                      6290

I Confess (Interview Alfred Hitchcock, 1953)                                  441

Alfred Hitchcock: Two Interviews (1972)                             6139

Inside Hitchcock (Dir Richard Schickel, 1973)                                  236 or 1168

Hitch (Dir. Tim Kirby, 1999)                                                  6570