Madman's Weekly

Photo credit: Downtown Greensboro, Inc.   Psycho begins with a suspenseful, anxiety-inducing music score: the volume and tempo amplifies as the credits roll in. The establishing shot pans over Phoenix, Arizona, and then the camera makes its way through a barely-opened hotel room window, immediately establishing the audience as voyeurs. We see Marion Crane, the female protagonist who is infamously killed off forty-seven minutes into the film, lying in bed shirtless, wearing white underwear, looking up at her divorced love interest, Sam. Already, we know this film is going to be unlike anything Hitchcock’s directed before. The abolishment of The Hays Code, which hindered creativity and “indecency” in film for the first half of the twentieth century, allowed Hitchcock to exploit previously forbidden tactics: a man and woman lying in bed, half-naked, passionately exchanging kisses for more than three seconds at a time, and later in the film, a zoomed-in shot of a toilet flushing. ...