Psycho: Almost 50 Years Later

With this years Oscars on the horizon we should take this opportunity to look back on past greats.

Christmas seems to come earlier each year, games and albums are pirated at a higher pace and the college year flies by at increasingly high speeds. With this in mind, I have no problem jumping the gun on everyone and offering a fifty year retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho forty-nine years after it was released. Many people have made wide reaching statements about the film but I believe that it is summed up by its own subtitle: "A new and altogether different screen excitement."

A modern audience may find Psycho to be quite dated in places. The special effects are hardly special anymore and the relatively censored murder scenes bring a smile to the viewer who is used to the 'ultra-violence' of contemporary horror. But if you are turned off by these aspects then you have missed the point. The ability of Hitchcock to use simple imagery to create iconic and memorable scenes is sublime. With its simple black and white cinematography, exquisite music and believable character development Psycho achieves what films with ten times it budget consistently fail at: genuine tension.

More than this, Hitchcock has created a psycho-analytical thriller before the genre even existed. We are drawn into the minds of every character in the film and become both a victim on the murderer and an accomplice. The many levels of the psyche that this film deals with is quite staggering and the sociological issues of equality and isolation are still very relevant today. Hitchcock really did set the groundwork for the psychological thriller and as such shares some of the credit for the truly great films we have seen from that genre. He does not, however, share some of the guilt for the truly awful ones we have endured from that genre. 

If your thriller is underwhelming then you need to re-watch the forty-nine year old Psycho, for it is a masterclass on the art of cinema.

-The English Student