True Confession: Psycho Did Not Scare Me(Nor Did The Exorcist or Jaws)

The pleasure of Wait Until Dark wasn't just the big shockeroo stuff at the climax, but the great contrast between Utterly Evil Alan Arkin(playing his mob psycho with a cruel comic touch and a funny voice) and Pure Good Blind Audrey Hepburn. As Arkin kills off his henchmen and the movie devolves down to him and Audrey...its a showdown. Good versus Evil. And the audience is fully invested.

This dialogue before the scares kick in.

Arkin has Hepburn trapped and he tells her he has killed his henchmen:

Arkin: Did you know they wanted to kill me? I knew it. I knew it before THEY knew it. They had comic book minds, and now its topsy turvey. Them topsey, me turvey. Even you saw through them.
Hepburn: I saw through you, too.
Arkin: Not all the way, Suzy. Even now...not all the way.

I cite this dialogue passage because it demonstrates how I personally enjoyed "the total package" of a shocker thriller back in the day. The characters, the dialogue, the building suspense, the narrative surprises. Psycho plays perhaps a little LESS chatty than Wait Until Dark, but the dialogues between Norman and Marion, and Norman and Arbogast...do the same thing: they create character and interest(even some humor) in the run-up to killings and escapes.

Perhaps the reason it isn't scary but feels exciting is because the way Peckinpah presents that final shoot out almost feels heroic and is the only really "noble" thing they really do in the whole film. The people they are shooting are much worse than they and get what's coming to them.---

--
As Dirty Harry said in one movie, "Its no problem shooting people as long as the right people get shot."

I suppose this is a variant on The Godfather, where we could take the Corleones as heroes of sorts because they only killed other bad guys(WORSE bad guys)...and we never saw them shake down innocent people, beat them, or kill them(which they probably did when we weren't looking.)

There has been some retroactive tut-tutting about The Wild Bunch being four white men shooting up scores of Mexican men(and some women), but the story speaks to the Mexicans being killed as villainous fascist tyrants who torture the Bunch's young Mexican member("Angel") who is on the side of the Revolution. And William Holden starts the ball(after killing the corrupt Mexican general who cuts Angel's throat) by targeting the German military adviser to the corrupt Mexicans. So it has "context."

I offer this one comparison: part of the "nobility" of the final Wild Bunch massacre is how the four guys seem to take bullet after bullet after bullet and "keep on going." It takes a lot of lead to put them down.

Decades later, Quentin Tarantino in "Django Unchained," tried in HIS Wild Bunch gunbattle(Django versus the plantation thugs) to convey the PAIN of every bullet; he had the bad guy victims scream and cuss every time they got shot. It almost worked, but -- pain can't really be dramatized. You have to feel it.

A different but related topic:

If Arbogast's killing is the big "jump scare" in Psycho, the shower murder seemed to get a lot of ink -- all by itself --as "the most graphic murder in screen history to its time."

Though I tell ya: some 1960 critics kept hedging their bets, writing things like "ONE of the most graphic murders in screen history" or "pretty much the most graphic murder I've seen on screen in years."

Which begged the question for me: honestly was there ANY murder on screen before Psycho that was even close in violence and lingering screen time to the shower murder?

I've never been able to find it. Maybe its in a foreign film of the 50s. The Hays Code pretty much locked down violence in the 40s.

I will say that one killing that seemed to get offered up a lot in film studies was: Richard Widmark as crazy gangster Tommy Udo pushing an old woman in a wheelchair down a staircase to her death in "Kiss of Death"(1949.) That's a shocker because she's a nice old lady and Widmark is a mean young man.

I've seen the scene. Its done in a long shot and maybe a second angle, as I recall...in the long shot, its pretty clear that the old lady in the wheelchair is a dummy in a wheelchair, but it IS brutal in the playing.

And its a good contrast to the great "process fall" of Arbogast(we fall with him) that in Kiss of Death, the staircase fall is seen from a distance and not terribly creative at all. Plus this reversal: in Kiss of Death, an old lady gets pushed down the stairs; in Psycho, an old lady pushes(with a knife) her male victim down the stairs.

As for jump scares, the earliest one in a major movie off the top of my head would be in Cat People from 1942, a small movie that was a surprise hit that year. A woman walking home alone at night thinks she hears a big cat stalking her. The sequence is slow but tense. It's punctuated by a loud bus coming suddenly into the frame. It makes me jump every time because the scene is so well done.

--

Yes...that scene does double duty for "moody suspense" and a jump cut.

I suppose the "big deal" about the Arbogast jump cut is that yes, we jump and scream when Mother comes out the door, but it GOES FARTHER -- usually the jump shock ends with the "victim" alive, but scared. Here the victim is KILLED. The door opening(and screeching violins) are just the start, we scream again when blood is drawn and it is clear that the detective will die.

---

Other 1940s jump scares, though they're not from horror movies exactly: Arsenic and Old Lace, where the villain suddenly emerges from behind a curtain, startling the other characters and the audience, and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, where a crazed Humphrey Bogart suddenly emerges from a window while chasing Barbara Stanwyck (that example prompted startled laughter from me though-- that movie is BAD).

---

Well, the Bogart one sounds a little funny indeed, but I suppose again, this proves that most of the pre-Psycho jump scares were ONLY scares...the victim survived.

The Hays Code in 1960 had some problems. It could be specific about what WORDS could not be said. It could be specific about what BODY PARTS could not be shown. But as for murder and violence, the phrasing was general, like "the taking of human life shall not be shown cruelly, or lingered upon." Hitchcock's first one, then two, extremely graphic and shocking murders messed with that code EVEN AS they showed less than we thought. Nothing of Arbogast's face when he is on the floor getting finished off, for instance.

CONT

As for that atmosphere of paranoia or dread -- you can't beat John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) for the whole mood. Did it SCARE me? No, but it kept me pretty tense, and always very entertained. The thing's physical changes and attacks were, as one critic said, "like abstract art," but to see a man's head disconnect from his body, grow spider legs, and walk out of a room -- was creepy/funny.
--
That's one of the few movies that truly frightened me. First saw it on DVD a few years ago. The dog scene is gross and awful, but the scenes that stick are the moments of mistrust between these men and the utter isolation they experience. I love watching that one in October-- a true classic of horror.
--
I suppose the "big deal" about the Arbogast jump cut is that yes, we jump and scream when Mother comes out the door, but it GOES FARTHER -- usually the jump shock ends with the "victim" alive, but scared. Here the victim is KILLED. The door opening(and screeching violins) are just the start, we scream again when blood is drawn and it is clear that the detective will die.
--
Yes, that's why that jump is still so good. It's lethal. No survivors. My mom and I watch Psycho together often (it's the only horror movie she'll touch) and she always tenses up the moment Arbogast mounts the stairs.

It reminds me of this great video essay about the jump in Wait Until Dark-- though the results of that scare aren't lethal, it isn't a "fakeout" scare (just a cat or just someone doing something innocent being misinterpreted by the main character)-- the villain intends to kill his victim. The shock isn't as cheap as usual. (Here's the video, if you're curious-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBVwnt7OxIw)

Damn, in the hands of better filmmakers, the jump scare can be good or earned. I mean, if I'm still tense when Arbogast mounts the stairs even though I've seen that movie over a dozen times, Hitchcock was doing something right.

It's all in how storytellers use their tools and how often.