Something Interesting About Watching Psycho on Netflix (The LOGO)

This is October of 2024, and in honor of Psycho still being able to qualify as a "Halloween horror movie" in some markets (certain US art house theaters show the movie EVERY Halloween) it is currently on Netflix for the month(at least?) The print is "boxy" in screen ratio and a bit scratchy and a bit "aged" looking(I much prefer "cleaned up wide-screen print currently on Amazon Prime) but there it is, and I've amused myself looking at the movie for five minutes here and five minutes there between other viewings. (Like watching the Mets struggle. Doesn't look good for them.)

But this: I would occasionally "pause" Psycho either to go do something or to "freeze the frame on a favorite shot"(guess which ones?)

And ANY time -- EVERY time -- you pause a Netflix showing of "popular studio movies" -- the LOGO pops up on the screen. In this case the logo is: PSYCHO in those big tall white letters -- slashed horizontally across all of them and vertically down the top of the "C."

I have called the PSYCHO logo "the greatest movie logo of all time," and I still stand by that. Jaws has an identifiable logo, and The Exorcist has an identifiable logo, but NEITHER of those does what the PSYCHO logo does -- to conjure up the NATURE of the horror in the film: a KNIFE, slashing. Since childhood, I have matched up that slashed logo with the slashes applied to both Marion and Arbogast.

Recall that this PSYCHO logo first appeared on the cover of the hardcover first edition of Robert Bloch's Psycho (it fills the entire front cover -- no other illustrations are on the cover -- and the word runs "top to bottom sideways") Recall that Hitchcock paid the artist who designed the logo -- Tony Palladino - pretty much the same amount($9,000) that he paid Robert Bloch for the STORY! To do this, Hitchcock had to pass over "master logo man" Saul Bass, who nonetheless did the titles for Psycho and some "visual consulting."

Well, Hitchcock's choosing to immortalize that PSYCHO logo can go on the long, long list of "great instinctive moves" by the great showman-director.

Back to Netflix: Jumping around in the movie from night to night, I amused myself -- in a creative way -- by pausing key shots so that that slashed PSYCHO logo would appear on the screen right OVER the frozen shot.

I put the Psycho logo over:

Shots of the old house.
Parts of the shower scene(including Marion's head on the floor.)
Arbogast in the foyer.
Arbogast on the stairs.
The overhead attack on Arbogast.
Arbogast's slashed face close-up.
Arbogast being finished off at the bottom of the stairs by Mother(in freeze frame, the most horrific and nightmare inducing shot in the movie.)
Mother's head and skull face in the fruit cellar.
Norman posing with a bloodthirsty smile, knife upraised in the fruit cellar.
And -- for good measure -- Simon Oakland talking in the DAs office.
And: Norman's final grin.

This was an "experiment" of sorts, to me: by affixing the Psycho logo to each of those shots, I rather "time stamped" a classic -- THAT logo was eminently PAID OFF by THOSE shots. Those shots ENACTED the logo in human terms. Truly scary(for its time and still somewhat today) something "beyond the scope" of the mere movies made around it in 1960.

If you have Netflix, watch parts of PSYCHO and try it yourself. Pause and put the logo over the shot. Its quite an interesting visual.