My fellow Offenders Iris and Elaine have been blogging this month about the films they think should have been nominated for Oscars (see examples here, here and here). Of course there were also many deserving individuals who never won the gold statuette and I think none of the “losers” were more deserving than director Alfred Hitchcock. Known as the “Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock helmed such classic thrillers as Notorious, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Rope, The Birds and, of course, Psycho.

In fact, the shower-murder scene in Psycho may not only be the most famous sequence in all of Hitchcock’s films, but one of the most famous in all of cinema. In an era of extreme horror films like the Saw series, this scene may no longer have the same power to shock audiences like it did when it was released in 1960, but it still retains its power 50 years later. Hitchcock should have won a directing Academy Award for this sequence alone. But since he didn’t, I’d like to pay homage to it as part of our Oscar “flavah of the week” by examining what makes Psycho’s shower-murder one of the most effective moments to ever be captured on celluloid.

Psycho stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, a lowly secretary who steals $40,000 from her workplace so she can run off and marry her boyfriend. While making her way out of town, she gets stuck in a rainstorm and decides to spend the night at a motel run by young Norman Bates (the perfectly cast Anthony Perkins) and his domineering mother. Later that night, Marion comes to the decision that she will return the money. But while she takes a shower, Norman’s mother (we will later learn it is Norman himself in drag) sneaks into the bathroom and stabs her repeatedly with a knife until she is dead.

Hitchcock made the film independently for a budget of around $807,000 (Paramount was the distributor), which was low even for that time so that he could maintain complete creative control over the project. He used the TV crew from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents series because he knew they could shoot quickly which would be necessary to stay on schedule and budget. In fact, many of the scenes were shot in one day, while the more complicated shower sequence took a week to film. Even though Hitchcock had been shooting color films, he decided to make Psycho in black and white so the “graphic” moments (i.e. the shower scene) would make it past the censors.

The shower scene runs about 3 minutes and features 77 different camera angles and 50 cuts. Hitchcock told fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich how he approached this scene: “As far as I’m concerned, you see, the content is secondary to the handling; the effect I can produce on an audience rather than the subject matter. When I was making Psycho, Paramount made for me a whole torso out of rubber for the shower scene. When one plunged a knife in it, blood would spurt out. Oh, it was wonderful. But I wouldn’t use it. That would have been too simple. Instead I spent one week shooting that sequence and the knife never touches the body on screen. We give the impression that it does, but actually it doesn’t. The effect is achieved, you see, through montage. Also there is no part of the woman’s body shown that may be considered taboo. The illusion of nudity is achieved through montage as well.”

A big part of what gives the scene its power is how it’s set-up. The murder happens about 40 minutes into the movie. We have followed Marion from the start of the story and she has been established as the film’s protagonist. It was a big surprise for the audience when they realized that the star of the movie (and Leigh was a big star at the time) whom they thought was going to be the “hero,” gets killed that early and abruptly. The murder also happens in the moment after Marion decides to do the right thing and return the stolen money. When she steps into the shower, it’s a sort of baptism; a washing away of her sins so the fact that the brutal killing occurs then gives the scene even more weight (the scene also ends with a camera move into a close-up of the stolen money on a nightstand to remind us what caused all this and what will never be).

Something like this had never been seen before in a “mainstream” movie (one of the reasons Hitchcock made Psycho independently and cheaply was because a studio would not have allowed its big star to be killed so early in the picture), but it was deliberate on Hitchcock’s part. He knew this choice would completely shock the audience and have them on edge for the rest of the movie because if the big star could be murdered so quickly and brutally, that meant anything could happen (It would be like going to an Indiana Jones movie and seeing Indy get killed by Nazis after the first action sequence).

“Well, that’s what life is like,” Hitchcock said about that choice. “Things happen out of the blue. You may say I’m going downtown to the movies, but on the way you might be killed. One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.”

Hitchcock made it clear that there were certain rules that needed to be respected when making this type of movie: “When making a suspense picture, one must never confuse the audience. Always give them the fullest facts. Occasionally one even provides the audience with information the character doesn’t know (an example of this is in Vertigo when the audience learns Kim Novak’s true identity before Jimmy Stewart, the film’s star, does). That builds suspense as well. But one must always play fair with the audience. Take a look at Psycho a second time. It’s honest; you can check all the details; all the clues are provided during the picture.”

Some fun facts about the shower scene:

What makes the scene even more effective is Bernard Herrmann’s now classic score featuring the screeching violins, violas and cellos. Hitchcock originally didn’t want to use any music for the scene, but Herrmann (who composed a number of classic Hitchcock scores) begged the director to let him take a stab at it, so to speak. When Hitchcock saw how well the scene played with the music, he gave Hermann a fat raise.

Almost as famous as the murder is the scene’s penultimate shot—the camera starts on an extreme close up of Leigh’s eye and slowly moves out. This was intended to be one long shot and many people who have watched the film remember it as such, but there is one cut/insert that breaks up the scene. The reason? Leigh’s supposed to be dead, but unintentionally took a small breath in the middle of the shot forcing Hitchcock to cut away to the shower head for that one moment before cutting back to Leigh. But it’s so masterfully done, most viewers still register it as one shot.

Even though Hitchcock claimed that nowhere does the knife actually touch the body, if you do a frame-by-frame analysis, there is one quick shot where the knife penetrates Leigh’s prosthetic torso.

The “blood” in the scene is actually chocolate syrup–chosen because the chocolate looked more like blood than actual blood did on black and white film. The sound of the knife going into Marion’s body was made by stabbing a knife into a melon.

Saul Bass, who designed many of Hitchcock’s opening title sequences (including the one for Psycho) publicly has stated that he directed the shower sequence with Hitchcock’s approval. But all of the surviving cast and crew members have argued that is false and that Hitchcock alone was responsible for the sequence.

And speaking of the sequence, here it is. Enjoy: