By Jim Bloch
Seventy-five years ago this year, Robert Bloch – no relation – published the slender novel “Psycho” on which Alfred Hitchcock based his shocking movie of the same name.
The plot of the book and movie are essentially the same. Mary – Marion in the movie — Crane steals $40,000 from her greedy employer and escapes into the night to rendezvous with her fiancé, Sam, who she barely knows and who is ignorant of the theft. A rainstorm causes her to miss her turn. She winds up on an old road largely untraveled after the new highway was constructed. Lost and exhausted, she checks into the Bates Motel.
One of the biggest differences between the movie and the book is the physiques of Norman Bates. In the book, Norman is fat. In the movie, he’s played by the skeletal Anthony Perkins, who brings a more sinister aura of creepiness to the character.
“‘Psycho’ all came from Robert Bloch’s book,” said Hitchcock in a blurb on the back of the 1989 Tor paperback edition of the book.
The movie contains one of the most shocking murder scenes in the history of cinema, when Janet Leigh — mother of Jamie Lee Curtis of the “Halloween” movie franchise — playing Marion, is hacked to death in the shower by a person who appears to be Norman Bates’ mother wielding a knife. It’s not the mother. She’s been dead for years. Norman taxidermies her and carts her stuffed body around the old California Gothic house on the hill above the Bates Motel.
The murdered is Norman dressed as his mother.
Bloch hints at the truth of the situation through his repeated use of “doubling.” After Mary’s own mother dies a slow death, it becomes clear that her care-taking has taken a toll on her. Only 27, Mary peers into a mirror “seeing this drawn, contorted face peering back at her.” It’s Marion, but not Marion, just like Norman’s mother turns out to be him, but not him.
A week after Mary disappears with the $40,000 she stole, her sister Lila turns up in the middle of the night at Mary’s fiancé’s hardware store. But Sam mistakes Lila for Mary – “he stepped forward and his arms closed around her. ‘Mary,’ he murmured. His mouth found hers, gratefully, greedily; and then she was stiffening and pulling away…”
It’s a warning to readers: All are not who they appear to be.
Bloch sometimes portrays Norman and his mother as doubles of each other. Norman has a dream in which his mother is drowning in the swamp on their property – “he could see her gasping for breath and it made him gasp too; he felt as though he were choking with her…”
Adding to the shock of the shower scene was the fact that Leigh received star billing in “Psycho.” How could the star of movie be killed 40 minutes into the picture?
In the book and in the movie, the scene is remarkably short. In the book, the murder takes three sentences.
“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further, and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife,” Bloch wrote. “It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.
“And her head.”
That scene sparked Hitchcock’s imagination.
“I think the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue,” Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut in his famous 1962 interview with French director.
In the movie, the shower scene lasts 45 seconds. But its impact on viewers kept them on the edges of their seats until the end of the picture – and sometimes longer. It was the “Jaws” effect 15 years earlier. People, especially women, became afraid of taking showers just as beach-goers would stay out of the water, fearing great white shark attacks, after Steven Spielberg’s shock fest was released in 1975.
“Psycho” was shot quickly, using the crew from Hitchcock’s popular TV show, on a tight budget of $800,000. But the shower scene took a week shoot. Hitchcock had a scaffold built for some of the 78 camera setups.
As a prelude to the shower scene, we see Norman spying on Marion through a secret peephole in the office wall. We see a close-up of Norman’s eye watching Marion getting undressed.
Then we see the circular shower head from below, its spray radiating out like sunbeams, perhaps a symbol of life, the opening frames of the scene. The quick cuts that follow, 52 of them, coupled with composer Bernard Hermann’s shrieking strings, give the audience the impression of seeing Leigh naked and stabbed more than a dozen times. Yet on the screen, the knife never touches Leigh’s skin. She never is seen naked. Hitchcock shows almost no blood beyond it thinning out in the water at the base of the tub and whirlpooling down the drain, a clear symbol of death, the hole down which life disappears – and on which the camera closes in, the drain’s circularity echoing the shower head, until it is shockingly replaced by a super close-up of Leigh’s unblinking right eye.
“That is the most violent scene of the picture,” Hitchcock told Truffaut. “As the film unfolds, there is less violence because the harrowing memory of the initial killing carries over to the suspenseful passages that come later.”
As the ironic blurb on the cover the 1989 paperback advised readers: “Check in. Relax. Take a shower.”
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
