Psycho (1960)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
When larcenous real estate clerk Marion Crane goes on the lam with a wad of cash and hopes of starting a new life, she ends up at the notorious Bates Motel, where manager Norman Bates cares for his housebound mother.
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What critics compared Psycho to
The chase sequence through the Universal Studios backlot takes our heroine to the hilltop house from Psycho (1960), famously associated with Norman Bates.
…and then winds up at the Bates Motel from Psycho, where she’s stalked by a sleazy private eye…
…including one in the Bates Motel set on the Universal studio lot…
…characters openly discuss the mansion looming above The Bates Motel from Psycho…
The implicitly gendered connection between horror protagonist and antagonist has been a glaring subtext ever since Psycho supplied the genre’s contemporary rubric.
Blending references from Vice Squad and classic Hollywood tales to Psycho and Giallo cinema…
“X” is threaded with blithe references to key films — a car in a swamp like the one in “Psycho,” an ax through a door like the one that kicks off Jack Nicholson’s rampage in “The Shining,” an alligator borrowed from “Alligator” (ingeniously shot from high above in one jittery sequence), an ending that nods to the premise of Paul Schrader’s “Hardcore” (which came out in 1979).
There’s a fine line between a compelling homage and a tedious exercise in stylistic replication, and West achieves the former, even as he nods to Psycho (1960) and The Shining (1980).
Its influences extend well beyond ’70s slashers and include M. Night Shyamalan (think: The Visit and Old ) and Alfred Hitchcock (specifically, Psycho ) alongside many others.
The film looks spectacular, full of Hitchcockian homages that remind one of Vertigo and Psycho, to name only a few.
It’s a number that substantially ups the game on earlier horror incarnations of the disorder such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho , the latter of which gets several obvious references throughout.
He’s obviously and respectfully nodding to silken, scary movie predecessors played by Anthony Perkins in Psycho and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, but he’s better here than he’s been since Atonement because he’s complex and oddly sympathetic—in addition to being a deeply creepy lunatic.
The film’s B-movie aesthetic is enhanced further by McAvoy’s confidently showy performance, which feels like an homage to Psycho’s Anthony Perkins and other actors who have played imbalanced bogeymen.
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan reminds everyone why folks used to associate him with Alfred Hitchcock, swiping a mental condition from Psycho, a sympathetic shrink from Spellbound, and a bold theorist from Rope.
Shyamalan has never bothered hiding his adoration of Hitchcock, and in Split, the references start with the movie’s Psycho-inspired title sequence.
While the film's score (by frequent Shyamalan collaborator James Newton Howard) ingeniously combines homages to Bernard Herrmann's themes for "Psycho" and John Williams' music for "E.T.," in these scenes Shyamalan employs no score, letting the exterior sounds and actors' strong performances work the audience's anxiety.
But again, maybe your mileage will vary: At my advanced screening, many in the theater reacted with the same measure of hysteria as those who caught The Exorcist during its first shows back in 1973 or Psycho when it premiered in 1960.
It’s all over-explained, more like the deflating coda to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” or the “Yeah, and?” “surprise” of “The Village” than the gotcha of “Sixth Sense.”
In that way, Glass is like an entire movie made up of that scene at the end of Psycho when the shrink explains what really happened to Norman Bates.
Completing the mood, composer Richard Band blatantly rips off Bernard Hermann's Psycho score, and gets away with it (it works beautifully).
While still somewhat limited by the source material, the new soundtrack sounds excellent, opening up Richard Band’s fantastic New Wave rendition of Bernard Herrmann’s classic Psycho score and making all those gushy, gross-out sound effects even, well, gushier and grosser coming from your surround channels.
Richard Bands memorable score, which cheerfully rips off Bernard Herrmanns "Psycho" theme, sounds just fantastic here.
Purposeful and loving as it may be, it’s merely a half-step up from “Psycho,” right down to the anxious eighth-note triplets.
The centrepiece (not the bathtub scene, which, after Les Diaboliques and Psycho , seems less taboo than exquisitely beautiful) is a pursuit through an environment lit, uncannily, by colour cels and flashing neons that ends with our first good look at the faceless killer and, more importantly, with the silencing of the owner of the abovementioned black leather purse.
Roberta Bloch, with a bow to the author of " Psycho " (1960), who will probably not be inclined to bow back.
Pretorius (after Ernest Thesiger in Bride of Frankenstein) and Dr. Bloch (after Robert Bloch, author of Psycho).
Writer Michael Cooney ("Jack Frost") uses the single location thriller format of "Ten Little Indians" to pay homage to "Psycho" with a twist on that film's psychiatric underpinnings while director James Mangold ("Heavy," "Kate & Leopold") keeps the action barreling forward, roving about the limited confines of a desolate motel with flair.
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
Not since "Psycho" has a motel provided the setting for such terror and helpnessness in the face of an unseen, rampant killer.
But instead of being shocked, we have to muster the energy to roll our eyes at the solution doled out in one of those serious psychological lectures, a device that was cornball when Hitchcock resorted to it in the otherwise brilliant "Psycho."
But, even as its end credits are in sight, the movie does a huge turnaround to become a horror version of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" -- and a homage to Hitchcock's "Psycho."
A touch of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is present, but the similarities are minimal.
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Goode’s take on the film’s mysterious antagonist is frighteningly reminiscent of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates in Psycho , while Kidman’s turn is blessed with subtlety that makes Evie’s instability all the more engaging.
The plot of Stoker borrows liberally from Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in which a young girl falls under the sway of another mysterious “Uncle Charlie,” and the visuals owe much to Psycho.
Actor Wentworth Miller's ('Prison Break') first produced script pays homage to Hitchcock's Uncle Charlie ("Shadow of a Doubt") with little dabs of "Psycho" (a motel, stuffed birds, reflections in a policeman's Ray Bans, a swinging cellar light, an unharmed fly) and a dollop of "The Bad Seed" for good measure, but the film impresses more as artful craftsmanship than emotionally satisfying thriller.
That they’re further represented musically – particularly via “Duet,” a Philip Glass composition whose on-screen performance by Wasikowska and Goode ranks among the hottest sex-free scenes in recent memory – is a testament to the completeness of Park’s vision, which rivals Alfred Hitchcock’s work in Psycho and Stanley Kubrick’s in The Shining in terms of turning storytelling clichés into something fresh and creative.
There is no doubt about Charlie’s sinister intent as when India glimpses him standing in the distance he looks like Norman Bates from Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) standing in silhouette next to the hotel.
Park has said he was sorry he didn’t get to direct the recent bio-pic Hitchcock; but Stoker is way Hitchcockier than that staid fiction about the making of Psycho.
Ignore the opening shot – a direct nod to Hitch’s Psycho - and the first 30 minutes of Side Effects could stand alone as a tender vignette about a woman doomed by her illness, her circumstances, and the ignorance of those entrusted with taking care of her.
“Contagion”), nods early on to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” as the camera settles randomly on Emily’s apartment window.
Playing with perception and opening with a shot lifted straight out of Psycho, Soderbergh makes his intention to play Hitch an obvious aspect of Side Effects‘ mystique.
Later on, around the 45-minute mark, a major character will get diced and spliced by a kitchen knife, as Janet Leigh was in Psycho.
But upon his release, something doesn’t feel quite right between them -- and, quite out of the blue at the 35-minute mark, one of the main characters does a Janet Leigh in Psycho and gets the blade.
(Cliff Martinez, who composed the score, does an arresting job of suggesting the somber themes written by Bernard Herrmann for other Hitchcock films like Psycho and Vertigo .)
Likewise, key players disappear from the film in a blink: a big-name blonde star is killed off quickly (a nod to “Psycho”?), and the passings of other characters are noted in simple, subtle moments.
Soderbergh pulls a Hitchcock (" Psycho ") by offing a lead early on; during the autopsy, that actress's iconic features are literally peeled away.
What "Psycho" did for showers, "Contagion" aims to do for shaking hands and shared water glasses.
The film itself is filled with references to other movies (after all, this is De Palma), including perhaps the funniest Psycho (1960) shower-murder parody ever.
De Palma’s cultural nods are always on his sleeve, from bombing the Beach Boys to a Psycho– / Hitchcock-aping plunger joke.
Phantom of the Paradise is equal parts compendium of the director's interests as a cinephile - Touch of Evil and (naturally) Psycho are among the classics to be explicitly referenced - and showcase for the young Turk's visual flair.
Let's just say that De Palma also pulls a few "Psycho", with a vampire shower scene (don't ask!) and one of the most gruesome murder scenes I've seen.
Just as De Palma's excellent Dressed to Kill was an homage-or-rip-off-take-your-pick of Hitchcock's Psycho, Body Double uses both The Master's Vertigo and Rear Window as its twin starting points and then wanders off in its own delirious direction.
This time out, he most explicitly references a trio of Hitch�s films (Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho) that he had previously paid extensive tribute to with better end results (most notably in Obsession, Sisters, Dressed to Kill).
Much like Psycho, nothing is what it seems and characters that appear to be permanent are not.
A fan of bait-and-switch storytelling that starts off as one thing and then suddenly twists around, catching the viewer off-guard and feeling unsafe, De Palma used the framework of 1960's " Psycho " for his own splendidly bizarre narrative.
This one uses Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho as a starting point before veering off in its own deliciously twisted direction, centering on a sexually frustrated housewife (Angie Dickinson), her patient therapist (Michael Caine), an imperiled prostitute (a wonderful Nancy Allen) and a razor-wielding psychopath.
This time, he's channeling mostly "Psycho" but also "Vertigo" and his own "Carrie".
It's one of the most overt of De Palma's "look at me, I'm a cinephile" homages to Alfred Hitchcock, and especially to Psycho , a film from which it openly borrows enormous chunks of its plot and narrative structure.
And later, a bloody attack with a straight razor can’t help but steal camera angles and choreography from “Psycho” (along with the overt thefts of the ideas to remove a main character when least expected, the sequence in the shower, a transvestic nutter, and a lengthy exposition at the conclusion to spell everything out for the unobservant audience).
And who can forget the shower scene in Psycho, which includes a peeping Norman?
Japan's answer to John Williams, Ryuichi Sakamoto does a passable job of emulating Hitchcock's musical mainstay Bernard Herrmann with an edgy "Psycho" like score and a confused rendition of a piece, over the opening caper, that has the sexual overtones of Ravel's "Bolero."
De Palma's borrowings were all the more irritating when it became clear that much of his supposed fealty to the master came less from his soul than from his big production budgets, which enabled him to hire Bernard Herrmann for Sisters and Obsession -- though all he wanted Herrmann to do was imitate his scores for Vertigo and Psycho.
Certainly the bravado opening sequence seems to throw more at us than most can handle, referencing Psycho, The Rear Window, and Rope, among others, under the guise of a B-grade horror film.
(Echoes of the opening sequence of De Palma's Carrie, which took place in a high-school girls' locker room, are explicit, if distant, as are nods to shower scenes in Hitchcock's Psycho and De Palma's previous film, Dressed to Kill.)
Some have compared what De Palma accomplishes in that sequence to what the director's hero, Alfred Hitchcock, did when Janet Leigh took a shower in Psycho .
If Obsession is DePalma's Vertigo and Dressed to Kill is his Psycho, The Fury is his North by Northwest or The 39 Steps, eventually pairing a fugitive with an ironic femme fatale against power mongers in cross-country pursuit of a platonic symbol, though Robin comes to resemble nothing in Hitch so much as the lighted briefcase from Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.
After a tense opening sequence in which Drew Barrymore is quickly dispatched in a manner reminiscent of Janet Leigh's abrupt departure from "Psycho," "Scream" focuses on another teen-in-peril heroine, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), whose mother was mysteriously murdered the year before.
Sidney is being haunted by the specter of her dead mother in a way that's meant to remind us of Norman Bates's mother in Psycho, but that doesn't quite work either.
And thus a whole new era was born, with more blood and gore: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the gore factor raised to a maximum by Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast (1963), Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), and culminating with John Carpenter's Halloween (1978).
The opening ten minutes of "Scream" are masterfully conceived and horrifyingly pulled off, likely as well-known as the shower scene in 1960's " Psycho " or the shark attack that started 1975's "Jaws."
At the time of its release, many people considered the first half of “Scream” to be ingenious but while it does break down all security of the entire story by exploring how anyone (even a beloved child actress) can die in this, Craven steals the exact hit from Janet Leigh’s death in “Psycho” even going so far as to keep the surprise a hush hush secret for audiences going in expecting a movie co-starring Drew Barrymore.
(Hitchcock did that decades before and so much better in "Psycho.")
With references to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and even Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (the first movie "to show the killer's point of view," we're told), Scream 4 is like a perpetual film studies course, a reboot with a lesson plan.
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His remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" smacked of acceptance of Van Sant (if not his lovingly crafted remake) by the big guys on the West Coast.
Despite the hostile response to his near frame-by-frame re-creation of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Gus Van Sant doesn't seem to have shaken off his repetition compulsion.
First he Xeroxed Psycho; here he rehashes one of his own films.
After his disastrous remake of Psycho, director Gus Van Sant has returned to the terrain of his most successful film, Good Will Hunting.
Both Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, his two most recent "mainstream" movies, dealt with damaged young males, and of course his shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho featured a fractured young fellow as its focus as well.
Cregger has said that the inspiration for Keith was Anthony Perkins's portrayal of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho.”
Audiences may be expecting something supernatural, but here too, “Psycho” seems to be the reference point, as “Barbarian” builds shock upon shock, giving viewers another mother they won’t soon forget.
But like horror classics of the past, namely Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho , you never know what awaits you when you spend the night somewhere unfamiliar.
Others of this ilk include Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the snowbound Frozen (2009), and last year’s Wrong Turn—shockers that anticipate our assumptions and defy them.