Psycho
Movie: 1960, black and white, 109 minutes
-Director: Alfred Hitchcock
-Actors: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, and John Gavin
A young woman steals $40,000 from one of the clients of where she works. She flees Phoenix in order to go visit her lover in California. On the way she stops at a motel where a young man seems to be under his mother’s constant watchful eye.
How does the score of the film add to the intensity of particular scenes?
Psycho has a very harsh sound at certain thrilling scenes. The fast pace violin strokes and classic thriller score intensifies the scenes of violence. It creates an edge of your seat affect for the audience. Without the hardcore noise in the background of the scene where Janet Leigh is murdered or the scene where she discovers the mothers body in the basement the thrill would not resonate.
What about the word bathroom foreshadows the following events?
Something that stood out was when Anthony Perkins refuses to say the word bathroom when showing Janet Leigh around her small motel room. He point to the bathroom and says: “uhh there is the um….” This gives a sort of eerie feeling to something having to do with that particular bathroom. It’s as if something occurred there, something that happens most often in that particular place. Now we can assume that there have been other pretty young woman in the past since Perkins returns to his office right next door and looks through his peep hole. So when he does morph into his other self which is his mothers character and he kills he in the bathroom the foreshadow is understood. Perhaps many a time before he had killed other girls in that same room, in the bathroom. It is from this hesitance on that one word that it is apparent there are two side to him and the bathroom connects him to his memory and he stops and stutters because he knows what is going to happen.
