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Psycho and "The Frisson"

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Psycho was supposed to debut in September of 1966 on The CBS Friday Night movie -- but famously, did not. CBS pulled the (very expensively bought) movie at the last minute over the stabbing death that week of the daughter of a US Senatorial candidate(who won.) Word is, it wouldn't have been much of a broadcast of Psycho anyway -- 9 minutes were to be removed and Herrmann's screeching strings turned down low. Also, the San Francisco CBS affiliate announced that it would not air Psycho even before CBS made the announcement. (Imagine: a time where the very IDEA of Psycho being broadcast on TV was verboten to a San Francisco TV station owner.)

But the Hitchcock that WAS broadcast intact in September of 1966 was...Rear Window. As the "opener" for the 1966-1967 season of NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. In accord with a promotion by which all NBC shows that season had paintings made of them for printing in newspapers, TV Guides -- and as posters of the walls of America -- Rear Window as the movie opening Saturday Night at the Movies got a special painting, too.

So if Psycho was not a big deal that season, Rear Window was.

I recall watching it. I recall being very interested in it, intrigued by the possibility that that neighbor over there maybe really DID kill his wife and chop her into little pieces(Psycho wasn't the only Hitchcock movie with a "gore factor" -- its in our minds in Rear Window, but its there.)

And somewhere late into that Saturday night as "Rear Window" neared its climax, came this moment:

James Stewart is alone in his apartment, in the dark, panicking as he realizes that the murderous Lars Thorwald may be getting ready to run(Lars has already nearly killed Stewart's girlfriend, Grace Kelly, who was rescued just in time by the cops). The phone rings. Stewart's expecting that the caller is his cop friend, Tom Doyle(Wendell Corey.) Stewart blurts into the receiver "Tom, you'd better get over here, I think Thorwald is going to escape!"

And the phone clicks on the other end and goes dead. And Stewart realizes: that wasn't cop Tom Doyle on the phone. It was killer Lars Thorwald. Who now knows where Stewart lives. And is coming for him.

The frisson.

I felt it in that moment, at a very young age, a very long time ago: the frisson. Oh, I didn't know what that meant. But I knew how it FELT: literally or figuratively, the hairs rise on the back of the neck, the pulse quickens, the suspense kicks in with a sense of uncontrollable excitement. The killer knows who James Stewart IS. The killer knows where James Stewart LIVES. And the killer is coming for James Stewart NOW.

The frisson.

About a year and a half later -- a few months into 1968 -- I was at a theater seeing the thriller "Wait Until Dark." Near the end. Blind heroine Audrey Hepburn is being reassured by Richard Crenna -- a crook hired to con her out of something valuable -- that she doesn't have to worry about his more psychotic partner, Alan Arkin. Arkin has been killed, Crenna notes, by the third crook in the scheme(Jack Weston), and won't be bothering her. But WE know that Arkin actually killed Weston, and is still very much alive. Out there. Somewhere.

Crenna tells Hepburn he will leave her now, nothing more to worry about. He hovers in her doorway and turns to say:

"And Suzy, I just want you to know that--"

And he stiffens, freezes, gulps..his eyes go dead. He falls forward, a knife in his back , dead. With Arkin entering the door behind him and locking it.

The frisson.

I remember AGAIN feeling that excitement, that gut drop, that mix of horror and desire that this thriller was becoming truly THRILLING. And I remember this -- I flashbacked on that 1968 night to that OTHER night in 1966 when James Stewart heard that empty click on the other end of the phone. I PUT THEM TOGETHER. I understood in that moment that there if there was something truly great about thrillers, something bigger and better and more involving than other types of movies, it would be THIS. This feeling.

The frisson.

Frisson defined: "A sudden strong feeling of excitement or fear a thrill." ie "A frisson of excitement."

Is it a French word? I don't know. But I know that some years after Rear Window and Wait Until Dark, I read the word used as above and it became a key to understanding how thrillers work -- when they peak -- perhaps even why they matter. As Hitchcock said (paraphrased) "People have become too jellified do to the safety of the modern world; their instinctive mechanisms of fear are not used as they would be in nature. The best way to replicate those mechanisms, it seems to me, is through a movie."

Touche.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

There are LOTS of frissons in Hitchcock, yes?

In North by Northwest, the frisson comes with spoken words:

"That's funny."
"What?"
"That crop duster's dusting crops where there ain't no crops."

The frisson. Though I suppose there's ANOTHER frission a little later on in the crop duster scene, when Grant is just standing there looking in the distance and we get cuts to the crop duster coming closer, closer, closer....

I even think there is a "gigantic" frisson when , as they run from Vandamm's Rushmore house at the climax, Grant and Saint suddenly pull up short and stop. CUT TO: The heads of the President's FROM BEHIND, gaving out open an empty valley, Herrmann's music kicking in heavy, and Grant's plaintative : "This is no good. We're on top of the monument."

The frisson.

The Birds. Early on. Melanie and the Brenners are sitting in the quaint and cozy living room; the birds haven't been a problem yet.

Close-up. Melanie looks down.
Close-up POV: The fireplace, not in use. And one little sparrow flutters out of it and perches.

Melanie: Mitch...

And BOOM...hundreds of sparrows flood the room.

Melanie's unsure "Mitch..." is the frisson.

Frenzy: In her London marriage bureau, in a chair in her office, Brenda Blaney sits in a daze, having just been sexually assaulted by "Mr. Robinson"(Bob Rusk) a client whom Brenda can only take at this point for a rapist. But Rusk says "Women. You're all alike. I'll show you." Super EXTREME CLOSE UP: Rusk's hand going to the tiepin in his tie, plucking it out, moving it to the lapel of his jacket, and pushing it into the lapel to hold it there. Now the tie itself is free to be untied -- quickly -- by Rusk. And in that moment, Brenda realizes that Rusk is The Necktie Strangler terrorizing London: "My God! The tie!"

The frisson: Rusk's hand moving the tiepin from tie to lapel -- complete with the sounds of the cloth of both rustling as the tie is moved.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Which brings me, appropriately enough, to Psycho.

Where is the frisson there? Or perhaps, the frissons?

Its a little hard to tell here, because sometimes the "moment" of the frisson merges into the "suspense sequence" itself.

Example: When we first see Mrs. Bates in the fruit cellar from Lila's point of view -- back turned to us, in a chair, her ratty gray hair in its scary bun in evidence -- I suppose that is a "frisson." But as Lila advances on Mrs. Bates, the POV shots bring Mrs. Bates closer...and closer...and closer. And when she spins slowly around(another frisson?), and we see that skull face, and THEN we first hear and then see Norman rush into the fruit cellar with knife upraised and bloodthirsty smile on his teeth...well, that's just one big frisson after another, isn't it? Merged into a lollapalooza of a scream-inducing climax.

Perhaps more appropriately as a frisson:

Arbogast climbs the stairs. Camera facing him, slightly above him, medium shot. And then Hitchcock CUTS TO:

Close-up. Slightly high angle looking down. A door at the top of the stairs, slowly opening and slowly leaking light onto the ornate Gothic pattern of the carpet of the bedroom floor. In a matter of precision timing..only at the moment when the light has reached its maximum point of illumination on the carpet does Hitchcock cut to the murder.

I would say that the shot of that door opening and the light on the carpet is THE frisson in Psycho, but there is something that might be the best frisson that is even more famous. And it involves a door opening yet again.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Is THIS the big frisson in Psycho?

Marion showers away, washing away her sins and suggesting -- oh so very delicately -- a certain erotic release as the shower pulsates down upon her.

After following her shower in a series of cuts and angles -- from this view, from that view, and from this other view-- Hitchcock settles into one "wide medium shot" that takes in Marion showering to the right and the closed door to the bathroom on the left.

And that door OPENS. And a figure -- somewhat blurry, but somewhat clear - slowly creeps into the bathroom and slowly advances on Marion and then the camera moves to that figure through the curtain and that figure pulls BACK the curtain and there is she is: Mrs. Bates, knife upraised to kill.

Honestly, where IS the frisson in that famous sequence?

I'd say the frisson is the door opening and the first view of the "human but not" figure of Mrs. Bates in the doorway. On the other hand, Mother pulling back the curtain with knife upraised and Herrmann's screeching violins?

That's a super-frisson.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

PS. Note in passing as I reconstruct a distant past. When I wasn't allowed to see Psycho and it was discussed on the school playground, I knew that the shower victim was Janet Leigh(I'd read that) but I didn't know who played the detective who also got killed. Working from TV Guide, I wondered if that man was John Gavin, Martin Balsam, or John McIntire. I knew who they all were, and I recall thinking that Martin Balsam probably played Marion's boss (Balsam often played bosses.)

Well, the one night in February of 1968 that I got to see the first half hour of Psycho -- long before the detective arrives -- the TV channel had packaged up a few clips from Psycho to open the broadcast as a narrator said spooky things to get us in the mood.

I remember three of the clips most clearly now:

1. Norman running down the hill from his house.
2. Norman walking down the hall to the kitchen and sitting at the table (THAT clip really transfixed me, put me into "the world of Norman Bates" and suggested immediately to me the forlorn and lonely character of Norman himself.)
3. The "frisson" of the door opening onto the carpet at the top of the stairs.

I remember thinking: "I'll bet that shot of the door is when the detective gets killed. OK, show him coming up the stairs -- who PLAYS him?"

Nope. No shot of Balsam. I'd have to wait a few more months to "Hitchcock/Truffaut" to finally find out who played the detective.

But I sure did dig that "frisson" of the opening door at the top of the stairs...

[–] christomacin (4655) 4 years ago

While I read this, I can almost hear François Truffaut saying the word "frisson" with a French accent.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

The 'frisson' phenomenon is an interesting one because it combines a number of different elements. On the one hand there is a family of closely related involuntary physical responses like 'shivers', 'shudders', 'blood runs cold' ("frisson" shares a Latin root via French with "fridge") that are somewhat similar to our physical responses to literal cold. On the other hand in many of the cases discussed there's also a strong element of what we might call the audience 'putting 2 and 2 together". [Note that one of Wilder's rules for screenwriting that he took from Lubitsch was 'Let the audience put 2 and 2 together".] We generally enjoy scripts that make us feel smart and we enjoy watching characters figure things out smartly too. It deepens our identification with and love for those characters: they're smart like us, we are them, etc.. In a well-written thriller where there's maximal jeopardy, we're *in* there. In Psycho, both Marion and Arbogast are smart cookies (particularly in the long dialogue scenes right before their deaths!), and we're right there with them when they get taken out, just a moment after each *doesn't* see something fateful that we (putting 2 and 2 together) do see & immediately comprehend the significance of.

Anyhow, in a lot of key cases the shiver of 'frisson' is solidly mixed with delight at a connection being made: John Doe turns himself in in Se7en...we first only hear him, 'DETECTIVE!'; Spacey dies in LA Confidential but manages to set the Rollo Tomasi trap then we watch Exley put 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 together; The Red Wedding on Game of Thrones first announces itself when a familiar tune begins to play and with various other omens but begins proper when Lady Stark pulls back Lord Bolton's sleeve to reveal the chain mail underneath....

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

While I read this, I can almost hear François Truffaut saying the word "frisson" with a French accent.

---

Absolutely. Though I offered up a definition that I believe is from an English dictionary, I'm pretty sure it was a French word and the best way to picture it being said is to picture it being said by Truffaut: "Le free-sohne."

If weakening memory serves, Truffaut may have even used the word "frisson" somewhere in his interview with Hitchcock.

I know that I read that word many times and slowly came to understand what it meant and how important the frisson is to storytelling and thriller-making.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The 'frisson' phenomenon is an interesting one because it combines a number of different elements. On the one hand there is a family of closely related involuntary physical responses like 'shivers', 'shudders', 'blood runs cold' ("frisson" shares a Latin root via French with "fridge") that are somewhat similar to our physical responses to literal cold.

---

Aha...it DOES have French roots..but with some Latin. And I suppose the "shiver/blood runs cold" connection is strongest. As in "chills run down the spine."

I do believe way back when I was young, a movie could create those physical sensations. I REMEMBER them. And yet, well aside from my own limited experience feeling such feelings...it is pretty clear that millions upon millions of filmgoers DO feel such sensations when watching a thriller. I say this because such sensations are so often written about, and because we have all those terms: "hairs raising up on the back of the neck," "chills running down the spine,"

As I wrote this, the memory banks kicked in and I checked my Psycho paperback and found these two "very short pull quotes" from 1959 reviewers of Robert Bloch's book:

"Icily terrifying" - The New York Times.

"A terribly chilling tale" -- Bestsellers

So even that classic novel that made an even more classic movie had...a chilling connection.

Side-bar: Hitchcock read that "icily terrifying" review in the Times, by Anthony Boucher, and it led him to read the book, buy the movie...and to send Boucher a bottle of champagne when Psycho hit big. I wonder how Boucher felt -- his skimpy little one paragraph review(I"ve read it) changed history.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

On the other hand in many of the cases discussed there's also a strong element of what we might call the audience 'putting 2 and 2 together". [Note that one of Wilder's rules for screenwriting that he took from Lubitsch was 'Let the audience put 2 and 2 together".] We generally enjoy scripts that make us feel smart and we enjoy watching characters figure things out smartly too. It deepens our identification with and love for those characters: they're smart like us, we are them, etc..

--

All true. A lifetime of movie-going reminds me that my personal favorites were well-written. Good dialogue, to start, but GREAT plotting...makes at least a great film, maybe a classic. Like Psycho.

---

In a well-written thriller where there's maximal jeopardy, we're *in* there. In Psycho, both Marion and Arbogast are smart cookies (particularly in the long dialogue scenes right before their deaths!), and we're right there with them when they get taken out, just a moment after each *doesn't* see something fateful that we (putting 2 and 2 together) do see & immediately comprehend the significance of.

---

Hitchcock had what I consider the most precise and correct definition of suspense I've ever read: "Give the audience information that the characters on screen don't have." The most direct example of that is Arbogast on the stairs in Psycho: WE know a murderous old woman is up there somewhere, HE does not. More complex: WE know that Bob Rusk is the real killer in Frenzy; his best friend(and main wrong man suspect) does NOT. More complex still: we know that the missing heir in Family Plot is also a dangerous criminal kidnapper, those who are seeking him do NOT. Etc.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

It can be romantic suspense, too: recall the end of An Affair to Remember, where an angry Cary Grant is confronting Deborah Kerr for not meeting him at the Empire State Building. WE know why: a car hit her and right now, under the blankets, she is crippled. But GRANT doesn't know. It drives us crazy - come on, woman, TELL HIM. And when she does...tears for everyone(if a bit badly acted by Grant, alas.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Anyhow, in a lot of key cases the shiver of 'frisson' is solidly mixed with delight at a connection being made: John Doe turns himself in in Se7en...we first only hear him, 'DETECTIVE!'; Spacey dies in LA Confidential but manages to set the Rollo Tomasi trap then we watch Exley put 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 together; The Red Wedding on Game of Thrones first announces itself when a familiar tune begins to play and with various other omens but begins proper when Lady Stark pulls back Lord Bolton's sleeve to reveal the chain mail underneath....

---
The "chain mail" bit is close to the kind of frisson I'm thinking of. Its a gorier equivalent of "that crop duster's dusting crops where there ain't no crops."

I very much like your "Billy Wilder 2 and 2" example. LA Confidential is my favorite movie of the 90's for a lot of reasons(its multi-layered look at movies, TV, gossip, crime, politics and race, overall) but a BIG reason is the whole "Rollo Tomasi" gambit both as how it emerges from one of the great surprise shocks of all time(Spacey's murder) and how -- just one scene later-- it pays off as Guy Pearce in an instant knows who killed Spacey(he's standing right in front of him.) Pearce's poker faced reaction got a big laugh and applause in the theater when I saw it -- Spacey's getting his revenge from the grave.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

What a very good few years there for Kevin Spacey in the 90's(not so good, now). Yep, he turns up "outta nowhere" at the third act of Se7en and rather turns the whole investigation inside out, and its a scary sensation when he does. (Plus there's that leftover "Hannibal Lecter" thing of the cops treating Spacey with kid gloves -- as if he could break loose and kill them at any moment.)

Its side-bar, but I DO love the satisfaction given when Brad Pitt's tough cop tries to confront Spaecy directly about his madness: "Do you just wake up in the morning and say, hey...i'm f'in crazy!" But Spacey, being crazy, doesn't acknowledge a thing. (Neither would Norman Bates. Neither would Bob Rusk. Neither DOES Bruno Anthony, in his Hitchcock.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

swanstep, your examples from LA Confidential, Se7en and Game of Thrones tie into something I've been pondering since my OP on "the frisson," namely: is the frisson gone?

Is the frisson an "old fashioned" suspense story telling technique -- perfected by Hitchocck but rather passe today?

I'm not sure. The chain mail under the sleeve at the "Red Wedding" is a clear cut YES example. That IS a frisson. But there is perhaps something more complex and sophisticated going on in LA Confidential and Se7en. The world moved on from Hitchcock. I'm not sure that a modern kill-happy slasher movie like Scream(now over 20 years old!) would spend time showing a door opening like the one at the top of the stairs in Psycho.

I ran a few "post-Hitchcock" classics through my mind and found a FEW frissons:

In Jaws...the shot of the stick floating in the water as the young man calls out for the dog which is now not chasing it. Stick here...dog gone...the SHARK is here! And the Kintner Boy is about to meet him.

There are numerous other "suspense shots" in Jaws -- like the fishing wire on Quint's rod finally getting a bite(hey, we've all been there if we have fished); or the pretty young woman yelling "shark" and nobody can hear her...

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I was watching Alien the other night and when Harry Dean Stanton goes looking about for a missing cat in an ornate steel room of menace, eventually he is in a wide screen Panavision shot and the space near him fills up with the Alien's descending body much as Mother filled the frame behind Marion in the shower....so, yeah, I GUESS that's a frisson.

(Note in passing: compared to Arbogast on the stairs and Marion in her shower...Harry Dean looking for that cat is way overlong and overdone a suspense sequence.)

But Alien depended much more on the sudden shocks of the chest buster in John Hurt's body and the sudden-death appearance of the Alien behind Captain Tom Skerritt. (Trivia: Jon "Frenzy" Finch was cast in the Hurt role and would have been famously chest-busted, but illness took him out of the movie. Sad.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

And maybe this one:

In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter escapes his Atlanta cell by killing one cop and leaving the other bloodily injured. The injured cop is transported to the hospital in an ambulance.

And in that ambulance, the injured cop with a bloody face slowly rises and ...takes off his FACE!
We don't see the resulting action , but clearly its Hannibal, and clearly he kills the ambulance guys and makes his escape.

In a "2 + 2 = 4" moment, we realize: Lecter killed one of the cops, removed his face, put it on as a mask(shades of Ed Gein), hid the body atop the elevator, was put in the ambulance and..voila.

But I still remember someone in the audience yelling in that ambulance scene: "My God, he's wearing his FACE!!" And big screams.

Yeah, I think that was a good bloody, late era frisson.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

What a very good few years there for Kevin Spacey in the 90's

Yep., and we haven't even mentioned The Usual Suspects' great 'putting 2+2 together'/nice editing-heavy frisson when we and the detective realizes Kint has been spinning his tales out of clippings on the wall behind him... so that *he's* Keyzer Soze.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

Aha...it DOES have French roots..but with some Latin. And I suppose the "shiver/blood runs cold" connection is strongest. As in "chills run down the spine."

I believe that there's another closely related automatic physical response that powerful scenes often encourage, something like gasping or a sudden intake of breath. One version of this is a kind of light-headedness which we/I often try to capture by saying stuff like a given scene 'literally blew my mind' or 'made it feel like the top of my head was lifting off'. Sometimes this can happen at the time as chills and delight at 'putting 2+2 together' but on some other occasions an image can just be a stand alone 'mind-blower', e.g., the first star-destroyer shot in Star Wars (at least if you saw it back in 1977 in a 70mm blow-up with brand-new 6-track dolby stereo sound so the sound passed overhead and surrounded you).

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Sometimes this can happen at the time as chills and delight at 'putting 2+2 together' but on some other occasions an image can just be a stand alone 'mind-blower', e.g., the first star-destroyer shot in Star Wars (at least if you saw it back in 1977 in a 70mm blow-up with brand-new 6-track dolby stereo sound so the sound passed overhead and surrounded you).

--

Oh, I remember THAT one(Star Wars.)

Hitchcock stressed to Truffaut that what he sought was an emotional response to his films. He emphasized it, cut Truffaut off when he suggested another term: EMOTIONAL.

As William Friedkin said, people go to the movies for three reasons only: to scream, to laugh, to cry. (Well, he keeps changing "scream" to "get thrilled," etc -- which is true, too.)

But there are really more than three reasons, if you get technical about it. To get blown away is a big one. Or to be awed(some of those landscapes in Lawrence of Arabia.) And sometimes -- to think (I guess I would offer everything from Murder on the Orient Express to Network in that category.) And sometimes -- more rarely these days -- to get sexually turned on. (Basic Instinct hid that in a thriller, but there are the 50 shades of Gray films, and...hmm...not much else. Well, I mean in mainstream movies.)

I suppose Friedkin and Hitchcock -- both blockbuster makers, sometimes -- knew that EMOTIONAL movies get you big BOX OFFICE. (Psycho, Blazing Saddles, Terms of Endearment -- scream, laugh , cry.)

But being blown away is great , too.

And that's why a lot of us have gone to the movies.

For a long, long, time.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

I recently saw a quite widely heralded new film, Saint Maud dir. by Rose Glass (her debut I believe)... I was a little disappointed; I've seen a lot of 'studies of people going slowly mad' before and I struggle to see what makes this one especially interesting. I mean, I can see SM working as a 'calling card' for its writer and director; all technicals are good to very good and the performances are excellent. But it resembles a lot of other movies in various respects (Breaking The Waves, Repulsion, The Tenant, Black Swan, Babadook, and so on) all of which manage to feel like they've got more strings to their bows than SM does. Put another way, SM is just too derivative and to simple for me to rate it very highly.

Anyhow - and here's the relevance to the thread! - SM has one shot that triggered a big involuntary response in me that isn't quite the 'frisson' we've discussed but is closely related to that. Without wanting to spoil anything, the shot involve the lead character deliberately stepping bare-footed onto tacks - really impaling her feet that way. In response I got a shooting tingling sensation though my legs and feet - not the pain I'd experience if I stepped onto the tacks myself but something like a sympathetically mirroring the shock & nervous system reaction that would normally attend vast pain or an injury of the kind I just witnessed. I've had this sort of mirroring bodily reaction before in films, e.g., A Quiet Place had a scene where Emily Blunt stands on an exposed nail but can't let out a scream without alerting the story's acoustic-monsters. And in general, any scene of trauma to extremities has a good chance to trigger in me a bodily mirroring of the witnessed character's natural bodily response to excruciating pain.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

I believe that mirroring/internal simulation experiences of this sort are very common and that the whole horror genre would not exist without such mirroring responses being widely shared. There's variation tho', and at both ends of the spectrum: some people just don't mirror other bodies responses much at all whereas some other people have such incredibly high-fidelity emulators of others' bodily states that they literally and horrifically experience the pain of other bodies. I suspect that if most people were like that that once again horror wouldn't exist at least as a big money-making genre (i.e., if most people found going to a horror film no less gruelling than joining a fight club).

Thinking again about my own experiences with perceiving scenes of impaled/pierced extremities... the stuff I seem to easily emulate internally is all the inner fall-out that being pierced by something would entail apart from the actual pain. At one point in my life I had a medical condition that required me to have a lot of injections and at one point I had a nurse who just wasn't good at injections, finding veins etc.. She often had to restick me several times. Well, when you get restuck like that your body notices that something bad is going on and you may faint/lose consciousness. I remember those shutdown feelings well and I think that *they* overlap strongly with my impaled extremity perception responses. That is, what I register is in part the shock and shut-down inner experiences I would have if I were similarly impaled. People whose inner simulators of others are more high fildelity than mine (but still not true 'feel others' pain' lunacy) sometimes fully faint/lose consciousness just from perceiving impalement. (E.g., I had a girlfriend who passed out at Uma Thurman's adrenalin shot in Pulp Fiction. Not coincidentally she had no interest in horror. "It" films like Psycho and Pulp Fiction drag in people who'd normally never expose themselves to anything so depraved.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Anyhow - and here's the relevance to the thread! - SM has one shot that triggered a big involuntary response in me that isn't quite the 'frisson' we've discussed but is closely related to that. Without wanting to spoil anything, the shot involve the lead character deliberately stepping bare-footed onto tacks - really impaling her feet that way. In response I got a shooting tingling sensation though my legs and feet - not the pain I'd experience if I stepped onto the tacks myself but something like a sympathetically mirroring the shock & nervous system reaction that would normally attend vast pain or an injury of the kind I just witnessed. I've had this sort of mirroring bodily reaction before in films, e.g., A Quiet Place had a scene where Emily Blunt stands on an exposed nail but can't let out a scream without alerting the story's acoustic-monsters. And in general, any scene of trauma to extremities has a good chance to trigger in me a bodily mirroring of the witnessed character's natural bodily response to excruciating pain.

---

I brought all of that in because in just the DESCRIPTION of it...you raise a great issue: when pain is shown on the screen in graphic detail(sometimes sight AND sound)....does the viewer "feel" it?

I'm of several thoughts of this.

Here's one: if the pain and injury on screen is "too far removed from one's experience" -- say, getting shot by a bullet in the arm...maybe NO.

If the pain and injury is something that people have felt in real life(i.e. stepping on a nail or tacks)...YES.

Psycho II -- not the original -- took this up in its (ridiculous) climax, in which Norman Bates -- with Anthony Perkins finally enacting the kind of drooling, babbling looney tune he never was in the original --is advancing on Meg Tilly as she holds a knife out at him. Norman GRABS the blade with both hands and it slices his hands open and we see blood on his hands(actually we ONLY see blood -- if we saw "sliced hands" -- we'd throw up maybe.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

CONT

THAT bit with a knife(slicing open Norman's hands as he grabs the blade) -- I think I could somewhat feel.

But the stabs into Marion and Arbogast in the original -- not so much. One wonders -- especially with Marion under her onslaught of stabs -- when the body might mercifully go into shock and pain was no longer an issue to the victims -- just loss of blood and consconiousness.

One writer on the famous Psycho shower scene wrote this: Shock and terror and even sadness move up in our emotions....pain is relegated to a far lesser status. This is possibly so . Hitchcock famously never showed the knife cut flesh -- or even blood on Marion's naked back(which Van Sant DID show -- wounds and all.) Pain was relegated away from shock.

The Stefano script specified that blood "spurts from Arbogast's neck" during his murder scene. In 1960 -- that was too sickening -- the "human plumbing," if you will -- so in the movie the slash down Arbogast's face(with no deep gash wound as in the Van Sant)...had to suffice.

--

I made this comparison recently, and I think it is relevant here:

At the end of The Wild Bunch(1969) the four American outlaws kill a lot of Mexican fascists with handguns, a machine gun, and dynamite. In return , the four men take bullet after bullet and seem to fight on in no pain or agony until the final bullets actually kill them. Again -- pain is relegated to a lower level of cinematic expression.

But in a big bloody gunbattle in QT's "Django Unchained" (2012), QT TRIES to simulate the pain of the gunfight by having the bad guys SCREAM OUT in agony and pain every time a bullet hits them -- or in one case when wood splinters fly into one guy's eye after a bullet hits the wood(THAT -- we can relate to.) And the men keep on screaming, and never stop, until they are dead.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I dunno. I've written here recently that movies really can't scare me much anymore -- I"ve seen it all -- but graphic depictions of realistic violence(i.e. a nail through a foot)...yeah, I'll be averting my eyes in "mirror" sympathy.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

graphic depictions of realistic violence(i.e. a nail through a foot)

I think that you are likely right that it's our almost universal experience of damage to our extremities and maybe to our faces that makes it especially easy to mirror sympathetically such experiences when we see them depicted. I find that I *never* forget scenes in movies that trigger produce such vivid inner experiences, e.g., in the mid-'80s I saw for the first and only time so far a then new Nicholas Roeg film called Insignificance. It's a very-stage-playish film that imagines a night in the '50s when Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Sen. Joe McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio all meet in a NY hotel. At one point Marilyn gets beaten and abused and we see her try to pull herself together in a bathroom. During that scene she kind of collapses raking her hands across the mirror in an attempt to stop herself falling, her nails bending back from her fingers as she does so. Eeek! Shudder! Never forgot this and even remembering the scene now triggers mini-shudders, etc..

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Eeek! Shudder! Never forgot this and even remembering the scene now triggers mini-shudders, etc..

---

"On topic," I am flashing back to one of dozens of interviews I read with Hitchcock about Psycho, in which he pointed out to the interviewer that while the film was certainly more violent than most to its time, "its not like I showed fingernails being pulled out."

Which IS a torture technique and was(as I recall) used on George Clooney's character in Syrianna, a movie for which he won the Supporting Oscar.

What scares us? What horrifies us? What grosses us out?

I for one have tried to eliminate "what grosses me out" from my movie diet.

I'm reminded that the shower scene in the original Psycho evidently grossed out the un-named Time magazine reviewer of 1960. He called the shower scene "nauseating," and wrote later in the review "what comes after that is expertly Gothic, but the nausea remains," and closed with "what could have been a fine creak and shriek thriller becomes an exercise in stomach-churning horror."

And Bosley Crowther in HIS 1960 review: "You'd better have a strong stomach and be ready for a couple of grisly surprises if you come to see Psycho, which I expect that a great many people will."

Interesting that both the Time review and the NYT review seem to simultaneously indict Psycho for being stomach-churning and yet acknowledge the power of the film at the time. The Time review was meant as a pan, but it surely drew in horror-seeking audiences who had never seen such things before. And Crowther surmised(correctly) that a "great many people" would flock to Psycho, too.