Learning to scream: Linda Williams on Psycho

Talk to psychoanalytic critics about Psycho and they will tell you how perfectly the film illustrates the perverse pleasures of cinema. Talk to horror aficionados about Psycho and they will tell you the film represents the moment when horror moved from what is outside and far away to what is inside us all and very close to home.

But talk to anyone old enough to have seen Psycho on its release in a movie theatre and they will tell you what it felt like to be scared out of their wits. I vividly remember a Saturday matinee in 1960 when two girlfriends and I spent much of the screening with our eyes shut listening to the music and to the audience’s screams as we tried to guess when we might venture to look again at a screen whose terrors were unaccountably thrilling.

Most people who saw Psycho for the first time in a theatre have similarly vivid memories. Many will recall the shock of the shower murder and how they were afraid to take showers for months or years afterwards. But if it is popularly remembered that Psycho altered the bathing habits of a nation, it is less well recalled how it fundamentally changed viewing habits.

When the purposeful, voyeuristic camera eye investigating Marion Crane’s love affair and theft of $40,000 ‘washed’ down the drain in a vertiginous spiral after the shower murder, audiences took pleasure in losing the kind of control they had been trained to enjoy in classical narrative cinema. With Psycho, cinema in some ways reverted to what the critic Tom Gunning has described as the “attractions” of pre-classical cinema – an experience that has more of the effect of a rollercoaster ride than the absorption of a classical narrative.

Anyone who has gone to the movies in the last 20 years cannot help but notice how entrenched this rollercoaster sensibility of repeated tension and release, assault and escape has become. While narrative is not abandoned, it often takes second place to a succession of visual and auditory shocks and thrills which are, as Thomas Schatz puts it in The New Hollywood, “visceral, kinetic, and fast paced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly ‘fantastic’… and increasingly targeted at younger audiences.” Schatz cites Jaws (1975) as the precursor of the New Hollywood calculated blockbuster, but the film that set the stage for the “visceral, kinetic” appeal of post-classical cinema was Psycho.

From the very first screenings, audience reaction, in the form of gasps, screams, yells, even running up and down the aisles, was unprecedented. Although Hitchcock later claimed to have calculated all this, saying he could hear the screams when planning the shower montage, screenwriter Joseph Stefano counters, “He was lying … We had no idea. We thought people would gasp or be silent, but screaming? Never.” Contemporary reviews were in no doubt that audiences were screaming as never before: “So well is the picture made… that it can lead audiences to do something they hardly ever do any more – cry out to the characters, in hopes of dissuading them from going to the doom that has been cleverly established as awaiting them” (Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly, Fall 1960).

But having unleashed such reactions, the problem Hitchcock and every theatre manager now faced was how to keep them from getting out of hand. According to Anthony Perkins, the entire scene in the hardware store following the shower murder, the mopping up and disposal of Marion’s body in the swamp, was usually inaudible thanks to leftover howls from the previous scene. According to Stephen Rebello in The Making of Psycho, Hitchcock even asked Paramount to allow him to remix the sound to allow for the audience’s reaction. Permission was denied.

Hitchcock’s unprecedented “special policy” of allowing no one into the theatre once the film had begun was one means both of encouraging, and handling, the mayhem. It also ensured that audiences would fully appreciate the shock of having the rug pulled out from under them so thoroughly in the surprise murder of the main character in the shower. Most importantly, however, it transformed the previously casual act of going to the movies into a much more disciplined activity of arriving on time and waiting in an orderly line.

Hitchcock’s insistence that no one be admitted late to the film supposedly came to him during the editing: “I suddenly startled my fellow-workers with a noisy vow that my frontwards-sidewards-and-inside-out labours on Psycho would not be in vain – that everyone else in the world would have to enjoy the fruits of my labour to the full by seeing the picture from beginning to end. This was the way the picture was conceived – and this was how it had to be seen” (Motion Picture Herald, 6 August 1960). In a narrow sense, this simply meant that having worked so hard to set up the surprise of the shower murder, Hitchcock wanted to make sure that it was fully appreciated. In the larger sense, however, his demand that the audience arrive on time would eventually lead to the set show times, closely spaced screenings, elimination of cartoons and short subjects and patient waits in lines that are now standard procedure.

Critics obliged Hitchcock by promoting the new policy: “At any other entertainment from ice show to baseball games, the bulk of the patrons arrive before the performance begins. Not so at the movies which have followed the policy of grabbing customers in any time they arrive, no matter how it may impair the story for those who come in midway” (View). Columnist Stan Delaplane describes in detail the experience of going to see Psycho and captures something of the psychological undertones of the new film-viewing discipline.

“There was a long line of people at the show – they will only seat you at the beginning and I don’t think they let you out while it’s going on… A loudspeaker was carrying a sound track made by Mr. Hitchcock.

“He said it was absolutely necessary – he gave it the British pronunciation like ‘nessary.’ He said you absolutely could not go in at the beginning.

“The loudspeaker then let out a couple of female shrieks that would turn your blood to ice. And the ticket taker began letting us all in.

“A few months ago, I was reading the London review of this picture. The British critics rapped it. ‘Contrived,’ they said. ‘Not up to the Hitchcock standards.’

“I do not know what standards they were talking about. But I must say that Hitchcock… did not seem to be that kind of person at all. Hitchcock turned us all on.

“Of all the shrieking and screaming! We were all limp. And, after drying my palms on the mink coat next to me, we went out to have hamburgers. And let the next line of people go in and die.

“Well, if you are reading the trade papers, you must know that Psycho is making a mint of money.

“This means we are in for a whole series of such pictures.” (Los Angeles Examiner, 9 December 1960)

Obviously the audience described by Delaplane was docile. Their fun was dependent upon this docility. Yet we can see an element of playful performance at work in this evocation of the exhilaration of a group submitting itself to a thrilling sensation of fear and release. In this highly ritualised masochistic submission to a familiar ‘master’, we see shrieking and screaming understood frankly as a ‘turn on’, followed by a highly sexualised climax (“go in and die”), a limp feeling, and then a renewal of (literal and metaphorical) appetite. This audience, despite its mix of class (mink and hamburgers) and gender, has acquired a new sense of itself as bonded around certain terrifying sexual secrets. The shock of learning these secrets produces both a discipline and, around that discipline, a camaraderie, a pleasure of the group that was both new to motion pictures and destabilising to the conventional gender roles of audiences.

Another important tool in disciplining the Psycho audience were the promotional trailers. All three hinted at, but unlike most “coming attractions” refrained from showing too much of, the film’s secrets. In the most famous of these, Hitchcock acts as a house-of-horrors tour guide at the Universal International Studios set of the Bates Motel and adjacent house (now the Universal Studios Theme Park featuring the Psycho house and motel). Each trailer stresses the importance of special discipline: either “please don’t tell the ending, it’s the only one we have”, or the need to arrive on time.

But there was another trailer, not seen by the general public yet even more crucial in inculcating discipline into the audience. Called ‘The Care and Handling of Psycho’, this was not a preview but a filmed ‘press book’ teaching theatre managers how to exhibit the film and police the audience.

The black-and-white film begins with the pounding violins of Bernard Herrmann’s score over a street scene outside the DeMille Theater in New York, where Psycho was first released. A long line waits on the sidewalk for a matinee. An urgent-sounding narrator explains that the man in the tuxedo is a theatre manager in charge of implementing the policy for exhibiting the film – a policy which has placed him out on the sidewalk directing traffic for the “blockbuster”. The film then explains the key elements of the procedure, beginning with the broadcasting, in Hitchcock’s own sly, disembodied voice, of the message that “this queuing up is good for you, it will make you appreciate the seats inside. It will also make you appreciate Psycho.” The mixture of polite inducement, backed up by the presence of Pinkerton guards and a life-size lobby cardboard cut-out of Hitchcock sternly pointing to his watch, seem comical today because we have so thoroughly assimilated the lessons of punctuality and secret-keeping.

Part of the fun of the film is Hitchcock’s playfully sadistic pose mixed with an over-solicitous concern for the audience’s pleasure. He asks the waiting crowd to keep the “tiny, little horrifying secrets” of the story because he has only their best interests in mind. (According to Rebello, the strategy succeeded – when shaken spectators leaving the theatre were grilled by those waiting in line, they answered only that the film had to be seen.) He then insists on the democracy of a policy that will not make exceptions for the Queen of England or the manager’s brother.

Punctuated by short glimpses of a screaming woman (who isn’t Janet Leigh – could it be her double?) and Herrmann’s unsettling score, this training film is a fascinating record of the process by which film-going became both a more gut-wrenching experience and a more disciplined act. Exploiting his popular television persona as the man who loves to scare you, Hitchcock also went one better than television by providing the kind of big-jolt ride the small screen could not convey. And he obtained the kind of rapt attention that would have been the envy of a symphony orchestra from an audience more associated with the distractions of amusement parks than with the disciplines of high culture.

In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine has written compellingly about the taming of American audiences during the latter part of the 19th century. Levine argues that while American theatre audiences in the first half of the century were a highly participatory and unruly lot, arriving late, leaving early, spitting tobacco, talking back to the actors, stamping feet and applauding promiscuously, they were gradually taught by the arbiters of culture to “submit to creators and become mere instruments of their will, mere auditors of the productions of the artist. “ Certainly Hitchcock asserts “the will of the artist” to “tame” his audience, but this will is in the service of producing visceral thrills and ear-splitting screams rather than the passivity and silence Levine describes. Hitchcock’s disciplining of the audience is a more subtle exercise of power, productive rather than repressive, in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term, merging knowledge and power in the production of pleasure.

In the discipline imposed by Hitchcock, the efficiency and control demonstrated outside the theatre need to be viewed in tandem with the patterns of fear and release unleashed inside. And this discipline, not unlike that demanded by the emerging theme parks, was not based on the division of audiences into high and low, nor, as would later occur through the ratings system, was it based on the stratification of different age groups. In Hitchcock’s assumption of the persona of the sadist who expects his submissive audience to trust him to provide a devious form of pleasure, we see a new bargain struck between artist and audience: if you want me to make you scream in a new way and about these previously taboo sexual secrets, then line up patiently to receive the thrill.

While the training film offers us a look at the audience for Psycho outside the theatre, photographs taken with infrared cameras during screenings at the Plaza Theatre in London and issued in an oversized press kit by Paramount, the film’s distributor, provide an insight into what went on inside. The intense-looking audience, jaws set, stares hard at the screen, with the exception of a few people with averted eyes. The somewhat defensive postures indicate anticipation – arms are crossed, while several people hold their ears, suggesting the importance of sound in cueing terror.

On the whole the men are looking intently, some with hands up towards their face or chin. One man is dramatically clutching his tie while holding it out from his body; another bites his fingers while the young man next to him both smokes a cigarette and grabs his cheek. It is women in these pictures who look down, including the woman whose hand covers her mouth sitting next to the cool male smoker.

How are we to interpret these images of an audience showing its fear? Is it possible that a discipline, albeit of a different kind, operated inside as well as outside the theatre? Of course, we have no way of knowing at what point in the movie these shots were taken. But we do know that the film’s scariest moments occur before and during the appearances of ‘Mrs Bates’ and that these appearances result in the highly feminised terror first of Marion, then of subsequent victims.

The terrified female victim is a cliché of horror cinema: both the display of sexual arousal and the display of fear are coded as quintessentially feminine. As Carol J. Clover puts it in Men, Women and Chain Saws, “abject fear” is “gendered feminine”. The image of a highly sexualised and terrified woman is thus the most conventionally gendered of the film.

Much less conventional is the ostensible cause of this terror: ‘Mrs Bates’. Apparently gendered feminine, yet equipped with a phallic knife, ‘Mrs Bates’ represented a new kind of movie monster. But Hitchcock’s decision to turn the traditional monster of horror cinema into a son who dresses up as his own mummified mother was not so much about giving violent power to a castrating ‘monstrous feminine’ as about deploying the sensational pleasures of a sexually indeterminate drag.

“He’s a transvestite!”, says the District Attorney in a famously inadequate attempt to explain the roots of Norman’s behaviour. Certainly Norman is no mere transvestite but rather a much more deeply disturbed individual whose whole personality, according to the psychiatrist’s lengthy discourse, has at times “become the mother”. Yet in the scene that supposedly shows us that Norman has “become” the mother, what we in fact see is Norman, now without wig and dress, sitting alone and reflecting, in the most feminine of the many voices given ‘Mrs Bates’, on the evil of ‘her’ son. In other words, while ostensibly illustrating that Norman now ‘is’ the mother, the scene provides a visual and aural variation on Norman’s earlier sexual indeterminacy. The shock of this scene is the combination of young male body and older female voice: it is not the recognition of one identity overcome by another that fascinates so much as the tension between masculine and feminine. The penultimate shot of Norman’s face, from which briefly emerges the grinning mouth of Mrs Bates’s corpse, drives this home.

The psychiatrist’s contention that Norman is entirely his mother is therefore unproven. Instead, these variations of drag become an ironic, and by this point almost camp, play with audience expectations that gender is fixed. Norman is not a transvestite, but transvestism is an attraction of these scenes.

But if gender performance is a newly important element within the film, how does it also figure for the audience in viewing Psycho? I would argue that a destabilisation of gender roles takes place both on screen and in the theatre, and that even the most classic-seeming masculine and feminine forms of behaviour take on parodic elements of performance that destabilise gender-fixed reactions.

Thus while the men in the audience look conventionally masculine, while they appear to stay cool in the face of danger and to look steadily at the screen, there is something just a little forced about their poses. In the face of the gender-confused source of terror on screen, their dogged masculinity seems staged. The more masculine they try to appear – as with the man clutching his tie – the more it is clear that a threat of femininity has been registered.

The cringing and ducking women, on the other hand, assume classic attitudes of frightened femininity. Yet here too the exaggeration suggests a pleasurable and self-conscious performance. I once interpreted this classic women’s reaction as a sign of resistance: that women resisted assault on their own gaze by refusing to look at the female victims of male monstrosity. However, this notion of resistance simply assumed a masculine monster and the displeasure of horror for female spectators. Now I am more inclined to think that if some of the women in the audience were refusing to look at the screen, then they were also, like my girlfriends and I, at the early stages of assimilating a discipline that was teaching us how to look – emboldening us to look as the men did, in the interest of experiencing greater thrills.

We also need to recognise what these photographs cannot show us: that these disciplines of gender performance evolved over time and, though they seem fixed here, were actually thrown into flux by Psycho. Male and female spectators who either stared stoically or clutched themselves, covered eyes, ears, and recoiled in fear at the shower murder may have been responding involuntarily, and quite conventionally, the first time, to an unexpected assault. But by the film’s second assault, this audience was already beginning to play the game of anticipation and to repeat its response in either gender conventional or gender transgressive – but in both cases increasingly performative – gestures.

By the time the game of slasher-assault had become a genre in the mid- and late 70s, by the time a film like The Rocky Horror Picture Show took on its own performative life, by the time the erotic thriller had become a newly invigorated genre in the 80s and 90s, this disciplined performing audience was to give way to the equivalent of the kids who raise their hands in rollercoaster rides and call out, “Look Ma, no hands!”

The dislocations between masculine and feminine, between normal and psychotic, between eros and fear, even between the familiar Hitchcockian suspense and a new, gender-based horror, were new in Psycho. And it is these qualities that make it the precursor to the kinds of thrill-producing visual “attractions” that would become fundamental to the New Hollywood. After making Psycho, Hitchcock boasted of his power to control audience response, saying that if you “designed a picture correctly in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience would scream at the same time as the Indian audience”. It might seem that the photographs of the Psycho audience bear him out – certainly they exhibit his power to elicit response – yet there is reason to suspect a level of calculation behind his emotional engineering. We have seen that Hitchcock was in fact taken aback by the screams Psycho produced. Perhaps his elaborate attempts to stage the experience of the film’s screenings were simply bids to regain control over an audience response which scared even him.