“Is that what I was afraid of?” – Psycho and the Changing Face of Horror
“Before Ed and Psycho,” Eric Powell and Harold Schechter write in their 2021 true crime graphic novel Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done, “every movie monster tended to be from somewhere else: Transylvania, Germany, England… or outer space. In his incarnation as Norman Bates, Ed Gein introduced something new and revolutionary to the big screen: the all-American monster. The terror next door.”
I was reminded of that panel because Tyler, my co-host at the Stray Cat Film Center, was talking to me about a horror film discussion he had just listened to in which the “agreement seems to be that Psycho marks a moment in filmic history where the genre went from the monster to the monstrous. The monster from without becomes the monster within.”
It’s an argument that comes up a lot, and one that is usually treated less like an argument than a trusim. “Psycho changed everything.” Except, of course, that it just isn’t the case.
Don’t get me wrong, Psycho was an important film, a genuine phenomenon at the time of its release, and a true masterpiece. But it’s absurd to claim that we didn’t have “monsters from within” movies before it came along, and equally preposterous to think that “monsters from without” movies tailed off after its release. Hell, Psycho owes its very existence to the runaway success of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique from 1955.
Nor is there no truth to the idea that Psycho was a key text (if not the first one) in bringing horror home to everyday America. What’s more accurate than any of these assertions, though, is that Psycho is a hinge point for a larger sea change that was taking place in horror film. I have argued elsewhere that this change had less to do with the nature of the monster, however, than with the nature of its victims.
Gone are the professionals, “men of courage,” and people who have some connection (familial or otherwise) with the monster or killer. In their place are hapless victims, who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is a dynamic that is explicitly explored in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 film Targets, probably the best text to study, if you want to understand the change that was taking place in the horror film during this period.
But that’s only the change in content. That shift (as is so often the case) was also accompanied by a parallel change in the context in which these movies were made. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of a “New Hollywood,” one in which auteur directors had greater creative control over their films, and independent productions flourished, turning out blockbusters on miniscule budgets.
Hitchcock’s classic is an early example of this changing dynamic in Hollywood. The studios had already rejected the idea of making Psycho, and initially refused even Hitchcock’s cost-cutting measures to do so. It was only after he volunteered to finance the film himself and shoot it using his Shamley Productions crew (assembled for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents), while also foregoing his usual director’s salary in exchange for a higher stake in the film, that Paramount agreed to distribute the finished product.
The changing face of horror has as much to do with this changing power structure in Hollywood as it does with anything that was going on within the films themselves, or anything going on in the cultural zeitgeist around them.
So, did Psycho change everything? Sure. But it didn’t do it alone. All the arts, and horror maybe especially, are always in conversation with what came before, and Psycho was part of a change that was already underway, one that was happening both on screen and behind the scenes. There were plenty of monsters next door – and even in the mirror – before Psycho, and plenty of big, weird aliens and gloppy its afterward.
But horror was changing by the time Norman Bates picked up that knife, for better or worse, and it will continue to change for as long as people are telling scary stories.
