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"The Mount Rushmore of Murder Scenes" -- And Their Lesser Followers

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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A refinement of a "personal journey," but with some new additives:

Recall that for me, for a period of a few years, all I had to go on with regard to the two murder scenes in Psycho was how they were TOLD to me: I had to form the murders in my mind, and they were pretty scary there. Especially the detective's , because the several fellows who "told" me that scene could get it "exactly right, shot for shot" -- his climb up the stairs, the high shot of Mother attacking him(one kid told me "Its suddenly like, like -- a bird's eye view" and there's this sound like bats coming out of the room at him" -- the kid was describing Herrmann's screeching violins." The slash to Arbogast's face was "over-sold" by these kids("He face gets ripped open and blood pours all over it") as was Mother's leap on him on the floor("She leaps on top of him, grabs him and stabs him over and over and OVER!").

It was a very scary scene "in my head," that detective's murder, and the shower scene was harder to imagine "shot by shot"(I couldn't at all, really) but the IDEA of a woman being stabbed in the shower..indeed over and over and over." I was pretty scared in my mind.

I believe it was 1968 when I first opened the book "Hitchcock/Truffaut" in a department store book department and flipped to the Psycho pages and was very literally SHOCKED to see both murder scenes depicted there. I thought those murder scenes were "forbidden," they only existed in my mind because I wasn't allowed to see them...and on the page...they suddenly were REAL.

Again, the detective's killing won for shock. His face was bloody ENOUGH to scare me, and that look in his eyes was the stuff of nightmare. The image of Mother pinning the detective down(with her buttocks obscenely raised in the air) was shocking too. This was key: these images(Arbogast's shocked and bloody face; Mother pinning him down on the floor) are on screen for mere fast-moving seconds in the movie itself; on the page, they last...well as long as you want to look at them.

Which wasn't very long for me. I closed the book, did not buy it(I had no money) and waited a few years to own the book. I do recall browsing the book at the library a time or two and actually flipping the pages PAST the Arbogast murder. I did not want to look at it again for awhile.

(Oh, the shower murder in Hitchcock/Truffaut was a fragmentary and disorienting as in my mind at the time -- unlike as with Arbogast, I couldn't get a handle on it -- I think the "scariest part" was the shot of Mother, her face in shadow, first pulling the curtain open. Something about the flower pattern to her dress AND the flower pattern on the Cabin One wall behind her...scared me.)

Now, that was The Sixties with those murder scenes. In the 70's, something funny happened: first of all, I saw the movie and saw both scenes and I recall feeling that the scenes were actually pretty quick and actually not THAT bloody and...well, they simply became "movie murder scenes."

But well filmed and staged and scored murder scenes.

And that's when THIS started to happen: clips of the two murder scenes -- ESPECIALLY of the Arbogast scene(its more concise and scary) -- started turning up all over the place on TV. Hitchcock took the Arbogast murder on the Dick Cavett show. Hitchcock took an (edited) version of the shower scene on the Merv Griffin Show. A MORNING CBS educational show did an episode on Herrmann...and opened it with the Arbogast murder.

In 1973, a PBS weekly series called "The Men Who Made the Movies" ran about 8 weeks, with men like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra getting episodes that all led to the Big One at the End: Hitchcock. And the two murder scenes were shown there.

The two murder scenes were both shown on the "AFI Salute to Alfred Hitchcock" in 1979(with an all-star audience of Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins Janet Leigh and Hitchcock himself watching them.) The two murder scenes were part of a show hosted by Anthony Perkins about movie horror called "The Horror Show."(1979 or 1980, I think.)

In the 80's, a show called "Horror Hall of Fame" showed the two scenes. Also in the movies in the 80's, a theatrical movie hosted by Donald Pleasance("Terror in the Aisles") showed both scenes. (They stood out among all the COLOR murder clips in their classic black-and-white.)

Near the end of the century in the 90's, the two scenes were in shows such as "AFI's 100 Greastest Movies" or "AFI's 100 Greatest Thrillers"(Psycho was Number One.)
In 1999, the year of Hitchcock's 100th birthday(he was long dead) a few documentaries came out(Dial H for Hitchcock, There's Just One Hitch) and the two murder clips were shown there.

"Horror clips shows" on MTV and VH-1 and the Sci-Fi channel showed those two murders(and sometimes the Fruit Cellar Reveal as well) and in a documentary on Hitchcock, Scorsese commented on the three big shock sequences as they ran on the screen.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And thus reaching my point: two "forbidden horrific murder scenes" that I was not allowed to see and that haunted only my mind for a few years in the 60's, were suddenly ALL OVER THE PLACE in the 70's, 80s and 90s; and I think they've turned up in the 21st Century, too. (Though over the decades, they've had to share the screen with shots from Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Exorcist, Alien, and Jaws.)

And thus, I think some critic, sometime in the 80's wrote this about the shower murder and the staircase murder in Psycho: "To revisit these two famous shock murders is akin to a visit to Mount Rushmore...we are tourists at movie history."

And thus, I can segue to my OTHER point...and I think its a big one:

To the extent that Psycho II, Psycho III, Psycho IV, Bates Motel(the busted pilot) and Bates Motel(the successful cable series) have never really been able to match the original its because: not one of those movies has one single murder scene to take the place of the Historic Two Murders that Started it All in the original Psycho.

And that's even accounting for the process screen work("fake" 'but not "bad") in the Arbogast murder. Similar process work is REALLY bad in Psycho III for an accidental staircase fall.

No, really -- think about the murders of Toomey and the teenage boy and Lila(knife through the mouth) and Mrs. Spool(shovel to the head ) in Psycho II; the contrived "phone booth murder" in Psycho III, the repulsive "toilet murder" in Psycho III, the derivative "staircase death" in Psycho III; the poorly filmed bedroom stabbing in Psycho !V and the totally-out-of-place strangling in Psycho IV(Norman isn't BOB RUSK for God's sake.) I don't think Bates Motel the Busted Pilot even HAD a murder. Bates Motel the series had a lot of murders -- I saw about five of them and they were bloodier than the original but without impact or meaning -- a lot of blood has been shed in the sixty years since Psycho came out.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Gus Van Sant was given his chance to re-stage the two original Psycho murders -- working directly from Hitchcock's film and shots -- and still something went a bit wrong with them, even with improved technology for the knife stab sounds and the process on Arbogast's fall. Anne Heche lacked Janet Leigh's sensuality in the shower scene and acting skills as a lifeless corpse; William H. Macy was too wimpy an Arbogast to be much of a surprise getting slashed (more times in the face) as Martin Balsam did. And Van Sant threw in totally unexplained images of a half-naked woman and a calf in the middle of a road into the Arbogast murder. Hitchcock would have shot him had he been alive.

Nope, those two original Psycho murders ARE the Mount Rushmore of murders, and people have been failing to match them for decades now.

Including, I might add, Hitchcock himself. As perfect as the staging of the Arbogast murder is in Psycho, the murder of the sailor in Marnie is a rather bumbled and laughable affair. (The killing poker blow was more like a love tap.) The blood on Jarre's dead face in Topaz feels like a weak attempt to "bring back that Psycho bloodiness" as does the bloody-faced man running at the phone booth in The Birds.)

I do think that the final attack on Melanie in The Birds both matches(in edited shots) and exceeds(in technical prowess) the shower scene but...Melanie does NOT die and the terror isn't quite there.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Two murders post-Psycho are great in a certain way...but not an entertaining way. Both are graphic, lingering, and crucially without music: Gromek in Torn Curtain(a middle-aged "bad guy" slowly killed by a man and a woman acting together) and Brenda in Frenzy(a pert and matronly business woman reduced to a sex object by the psycho who first rapes and then very slowly strangles her.) These are "powerful" scenes -- but never shown in "clips" collections from Hitchcock's work(well, the Gromek killing was in "The Men Who Make the Movies") -- they are simply too disturbing; they are not fun. (Had shots from these murders appeared in Hitchcock/Truffaut, I might have been even more disturbed than I was by the Psycho killing photos.)

Indeed, the "retroactive" impact of the Torn Curtain and Frenzy killings was to render the two Psycho killings rather quaint and definitely fun. Whatever disturbed me so much(at perhaps too young an age) with the Hitchcock/Truffaut photos of the Arbogast killing has, in the intervening years, given way to that murder playing as much more of a "boo!" shock than anything on the real-death level of Torn Curtain and Frenzy.

But this: there are some folks out there who think Hitch was a sick, sick fellow in certain ways...and those ever-more gruesome murders from Psycho on are part of that concern. I expect Hitchcock was somewhat attacking his own audience - "Oh, you think murder is FUN? Here take a look at the reality of taking another human being's life." And in taking that up as part of his final years as a director, death became his theme(far more than romance in those later films.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But also this: everything's relative, and well before Psycho, Hitchcock staged some brutal killings FOR THEIR TIME: the beating and drowning of Willie in Lifeboat; the opening strangling in Rope, the strangling of Miriam in Strangers on a Train; the rape-like attempted strangling of Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder(and her scissors stabbing of her would-be killer); the lingering single stab to the back and clawing death of Louis Bernard in The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 and the unseen but well-imagined dismemberment of Mrs. Thorwald in Rear Window.

One book on Hitchcock made the point that almost all of his films had a murder in them; Hitch wasn't one to make caper films or bank robbery films. Lives are taken in his films and sometimes that's what the movies are ABOUT(Norman Bates and Bob Rusk kill because they either LIKE to kill or MUST kill...no other motives.) Hitch seems to have seen the taking of human life as a dark connector in all of our imaginations; he spoke to a latent bloodlust that has certain gone beyond HIS vision(see: Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street; Hostel.)

But back to basics: all those murders in Hitchcock and two of them are "the Mount Rushmore of murders" the shower murder and the staircase murder. THOSE two murders drove his biggest hit and arguably greatest movie.

And of those TWO murders, well, only ONE of them is known to everyone. The shower murder towers over film history -- again, arguably --as the most famous scene of all time. Famous mainly for "taking the movies to a place they'd never been before" -- a realm of terror on a scale never imagined before -- and opening the door to the second century of movies.