Psycho shower scene

In Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror film Psycho, a pivotal sequence depicts on-the-run embezzler Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) being murdered while she showers. This sequence, commonly referred to as the "shower scene" or "the shower", has become a popular culture phenomenon and one of the best-known in all of cinema. It became key to the film's success and influence, with its performances, cinematography, production, and sound design earning lasting acclaim.

Synopsis

The full shower scene

Prior to the scene, Marion Crane, a secretary turned embezzler from Phoenix, has rented a cabin at the Bates Motel. She has a conversation with proprietor Norman Bates, after which she decides to drive back to Pheonix to return the money she stole. She is then seen at her room desk scribbling math in a notebook, before tearing out the page and shredding it.

The sequence begins when Marion enters the bathroom, discards the page in the toilet, and disrobes to take a shower. After stepping into the shower, she unwraps the soap and turns on the water. As she showers, a shadowy figure enters the bathroom and pulls open the shower curtain. The figure, wielding a knife, stabs Marion multiple times as she screams and struggles. As the figure leaves, Marion collapses to the floor and pulls down the shower curtain as she dies.

Shortly after, Norman is heard horrified at his mother and enters the bathroom to find Marion dead. He haphazardly cleans up the murder scene and sinks Marion's body and her belongings—including the hidden cash, unbeknownst to him—with her car in a swamp.

Background

Development

Hitchcock acquired rights to Robert Bloch's 1959 novel of the same name for $9,500, and reportedly ordered Robertson to buy all copies to preserve the story.^[1] Hitchcock chose to film Psycho in black-and-white; one of his reasons for doing so was his desire to prevent the shower scene from being too gory.^[2] In the novel, Marion is decapitated in the shower rather than being stabbed to death.^[3] The showing of the toilet also provided some shock effect because toilets were almost never seen in American cinema at the time of the film's release.^[4]

The film was then independently produced and financed by Hitchcock on a tight budget of $807,000.^[1][5][6] It was shot at Revue Studios from November 1959 to February 1960.^[7][8] The $62,000 crew cost was Bernard Herrmann as the music composer, George Tomasini as editor, and Saul Bass for the title design and storyboarding of the shower scene.^[9] To portray the character of Marion Crane, Hitchcock cast actress Janet Leigh as his first choice for $25,000, a quarter of her usual fee.^[10] Because of Hitchcock's reputation, Leigh agreed having only read the novel and making no inquiry into her salary.^[11]

Production

Janet Leigh filming the shower scene with Alfred Hitchcock

The shower scene was shot from December 17–23, 1959, after Leigh had twice postponed the filming, first because of a cold and then because of her menstrual period.^[12] Before production, Leigh and Hitchcock fully discussed what the scene meant:

Marion had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the consequences, so when she stepped into the bathtub it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters. The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption from her mind, purging the evil from her soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace.^[13]

To capture the straight-on shot of the shower head, the camera had to be equipped with a long lens. The inner holes on the shower head were blocked and the camera placed a sufficient distance away so that the water, while appearing to be aimed directly at the lens, actually went around and past it.^[14] The final shot in the scene, which starts with an extreme close-up on Marion's eye and zooms in and out, proved difficult for Leigh because the water splashing in her eyes made her want to blink, and the cameraman had trouble as well because he had to manually focus while moving the camera.^[15]

The soundtrack of screeching violins, violas and cellos was an original all-strings piece by composer Bernard Herrmann titled "The Murder". Hitchcock originally intended to have no music for the sequence (and all motel scenes),^[16] but Herrmann insisted he try his composition. Afterward, Hitchcock agreed it vastly intensified the scene, and nearly doubled Herrmann's salary.^[17][18][19] The blood in the scene was Hershey's chocolate syrup,^[20] which shows up better on black-and-white film, and has more realistic density than stage blood.^[21] The sound of the knife entering flesh was created by plunging a knife into a melon.^[22][23]

The finished scene post-production runs some three minutes. After the completion of the film, Leigh was no longer available for filming so Hitchcock had Vera Miles don a blonde wig and scream loudly as he pulled the shower curtain back in the bathroom sequence of the preview. Because the title Psycho instantly covers most of the screen, the switch went unnoticed by audiences for years. However, a freeze-frame analysis clearly reveals that it is Miles and not Leigh in the shower during the trailer.^[24]

Censorship

According to Stephen Rebello's 1990 book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the censors in charge of enforcing the Production Code wrangled with Hitchcock because some of them insisted they could see one of Leigh's breasts. Hitchcock held onto the print for several days, left it untouched, and resubmitted it for approval. Each of the censors reversed their positions: those who had previously seen the breast now did not, and those who had not, now did. They passed the film after the director removed one shot that showed the buttocks of Leigh's stand-in. The board was also upset by the racy opening, so Hitchcock said that if they let him keep the shower scene he would re-shoot the opening with them on the set. Because board members did not show up for the re-shoot, the opening stayed.^[25] Another cause of concern for the censors was that Marion was shown flushing a toilet, with its contents (torn-up note paper) fully visible. No flushing toilet had appeared in mainstream film and television in the United States at that time.^[26][27][28]

Internationally, Hitchcock was forced to make minor changes to the film, mostly to the shower scene. In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) required cuts to stabbing sounds and visible nude shots, and in New Zealand the shot of Norman washing blood from his hands was seen as disgusting. In Singapore, though the shower scene was left untouched, the murder of Arbogast and a shot of Norman's mother's corpse were removed.^[29] In Ireland, censor Gerry O'Hara banned it upon his initial viewing in 1960. The next year, a highly edited version missing some 47 feet of film was submitted to the Irish censor. O'Hara ultimately requested that an additional seven cuts be made: the line where Marion tells Sam to put his shoes on (which implied that he had his pants or trousers off), two shots of Norman spying on Marion through the hole in the wall, Marion's undressing, the shots of Marion's blood flowing down the shower, the shots of Norman washing his hands when blood is visible, repeated incidents of stabbings ("One stab is surely enough", wrote O'Hara), the words "in bed" from the sheriff's wife's line, "Norman found them dead together in bed", and Arbogast's questions to Norman about whether he spent the night with Marion.^[30]

In 1986, the uncut version of Psycho was accepted by the BBFC, which classified it at 15.^[31] In 2020, Universal Pictures released the uncut version of the film on Blu-ray for the first time to coincide with its 60th anniversary.

Myths and misconceptions

Janet Leigh's filming experience

There are varying accounts whether Leigh was in the shower the entire time or a body double was used for some parts of the murder sequence and its aftermath. In an interview with Roger Ebert and in the 1990 book by Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Leigh stated she appeared in the scene the entire time and Hitchcock used a stand-in only for the sequence in which Norman wraps Marion's body in a shower curtain and places it in the trunk of her car.^[32] The 2010 book The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower by Robert Graysmith and the documentary 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene contradicts this, identifying Marli Renfro as Leigh's body double for some of the shower scene's shots.^[33][34] Graysmith also stated that Hitchcock later acknowledged Renfro's participation in the scene.^[35] Rita Riggs, who was in charge of the wardrobe, claims it was Leigh in the shower the entire time, explaining that Leigh did not wish to be nude and so she devised strategic items including pasties, moleskin and bodystockings, to be pasted on Leigh for the scene.^[36] Riggs and Leigh went through striptease magazines that showed all the different costumes, but none of them worked because they all had tassels on them.

As you know, you could not take the camera and just show a nude woman, it had to be done impressionistically. So, it was done with little pieces of film, the head, the feet, the hand, etc. In that scene, there were 78 pieces of film in about 45 seconds. ^[37]

A popular myth emerged that ice-cold water was used in the shower scene to make Leigh's scream realistic. Leigh denied this on numerous occasions, saying the crew was accommodating, using hot water throughout the week-long shoot.^[38] All of the screams are Leigh's.^[39]

According to Donald Spoto in The Dark Side of Genius and Rebello in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Hitchcock's wife and trusted collaborator, Alma Reville, spotted a blooper in one of the last edits of the film before its official release: after Marion was supposedly dead, one could see her blink. According to Patricia Hitchcock, talking in Laurent Bouzereau's "Making of" documentary, Alma spotted that Leigh's character appeared to take a breath. In either case, the postmortem activity was edited out and was never seen by audiences.^[40] Although Marion's eyes should have been dilated after her death, the contact lenses necessary for this effect would have required six weeks of acclimatization to wear them, so Hitchcock decided to forgo them.^[41]

Effects and sound design

It is often claimed that, despite its graphic nature, the shower scene never once shows a knife puncturing flesh.^[42][43][44] However, a frame by frame analysis of the sequence shows one shot in which the knife appears to penetrate Leigh's abdomen, an effect created through lighting and reverse motion.^[45][46]

There were rumors that Herrmann had used electronic means, including amplified bird screeches to achieve the shocking effect of the music in the shower scene. The effect was achieved, however, only with violins in a "screeching, stabbing sound-motion of extraordinary viciousness".^[47] The only electronic amplification employed was in the placing of the microphones close to the instruments, to get a harsher sound.^[47] Besides the emotional impact, the shower scene cue ties the soundtrack to birds.^[47] The association of the shower scene music with birds also telegraphs to the audience that it is Norman, the stuffed-bird collector, who is the murderer rather than his mother.^[47]

Count of shots and cuts

The shower scene's flurry of action and edits has produced contradictory attempts to count its parts. Hitchcock himself contributed to this pattern, telling Truffaut that "there were seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage",^[48] and maintaining to other interviewers that there were "seventy-eight pieces of the film".^[49] The 2017 documentary 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene, by director Alexandre O. Philippe, latches onto this last figure for the production's tagline, "78 Shots & 52 Cuts That Changed Cinema Forever".^[50] But in his careful description of the shower scene, film scholar Philip J. Skerry counted only 60 separate shots, with a table breaking down the middle 34 by type, camera position, angle, movement, focus, POV and subject.^[51] Absent an alternative tabulation, Richard Schickel and Frank Capra, in their 2001 book The Men Who Made the Movies, concluded the most reasonable calculation was 60. Many are close-ups, including extreme close-ups, except for medium shots in the shower directly before and directly after the murder. The combination of the close shots with their short duration makes the sequence feel more subjective than if the images were presented alone or at a wider angle, an example of the technique Hitchcock described as "transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience".^[52]

Saul Blass's claim to credit

Aside from the cold water myth, another claim was that graphic designer Saul Bass directed the shower scene. This was denied by several figures associated with the film, including Leigh, who stated: "Absolutely not! I have emphatically said this in any interview I've ever given. I've said it to his face in front of other people ... I was in that shower for seven days, and, believe me, Alfred Hitchcock was right next to his camera for every one of those seventy-odd shots".^[13] Green also rebuts the claim: "There is not a shot in that movie that I didn't roll the camera for. And I can tell you I never rolled the camera for Mr. Bass".^[13] Ebert, a longtime admirer of Hitchcock's work, summarily dismissed the rumor: "It seems unlikely that a perfectionist with an ego like Hitchcock's would let someone else direct such a scene".^[53]

Commentators such as Rebello and Bill Krohn have argued in favor of Bass's contribution to the scene in his capacity as a visual consultant and storyboard artist.^[54] Along with designing the opening credits, Bass is termed "Pictorial Consultant" in the credits. When interviewing Hitchcock in 1967, Truffaut asked about the extent of Bass' contribution, to which Hitchcock replied that in addition to the titles, Bass had provided storyboards for the Arbogast murder (which he claimed to have rejected), but made no mention of Bass' having provided storyboards for the shower scene.^[55]

According to Krohn's Hitchcock at Work, Bass' first claim to have directed the scene was in 1970, when he provided a magazine with 48 drawings used as storyboards as proof of his contribution.^[56] Krohn's analysis of the production, while rebutting Bass' claims for having directed the scene, notes that these storyboards did introduce key aspects of the final scene—most notably, the fact that the killer appears as a silhouette, and details such as the close-ups of the slashing knife, Leigh's desperate outstretched arm, the shower curtain being torn off its hooks and the transition from the drain to Marion Crane's dead eye. Krohn notes that this final transition is highly reminiscent of the iris titles that Bass created for Vertigo.^[56] Krohn also notes that Hitchcock shot the scene with two cameras: one a Mitchell BNC,^{[citation needed]} the other a handheld French Éclair camera that Orson Welles had used in Touch of Evil (1958). To create an ideal montage for the greatest emotional impact on the audience, Hitchcock shot a lot of footage of this scene that he trimmed down in the editing room. He even brought a Moviola on the set to gauge the footage required. The final sequence, which his editor George Tomasini worked on with Hitchcock's advice, however, did not go far beyond the basic structural elements set up by Bass's storyboards.^[56]

Analysis

The heavy downpour can be seen as a foreshadowing of the shower, and its cessation can be seen as a symbol of Marion making up her mind to return to Phoenix.^[57] French film critic Serge Kaganski wrote: "The shower scene is both feared and desired. Hitchcock may be scaring his female viewers out of their wits, but he is turning his male viewers into potential rapists because Janet Leigh has been turning men on ever since she appeared in her brassiere in the first scene".^[58] Film theorist Robin Wood also discusses how the shower washes "away her guilt". He comments upon the "alienation effect" of killing off the "apparent center of the film" with which spectators had identified.^[59]

Reception and legacy

Leigh herself (pictured as Marion Crane in a 1960 promotional photo for the film) was traumatized by the shower scene.

The shower scene was described by the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes as its most infamous scene.^[60] It has become a pop culture touchstone and is often regarded as one of the most iconic moments in cinematic history, as well as the most suspenseful scene ever filmed. Its effectiveness is often credited to the use of startling editing techniques borrowed from the Soviet montage filmmakers,^[61][62] and to the iconic screeching violins in Bernard Herrmann's musical score. The scene has been frequently parodied and referenced in popular culture, complete with the screeching violin sound effects (such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, among many others).^[63][64]

A critic in The Daily Telegraph who only gave the initials of R.P.M.G. praised Leigh's performance in the scene, specifically writing, "Leigh also gives a pleasing performance as the girl he kills with a knife while she is under a shower".^[65] Leigh herself was so affected by the scene when she saw it that she no longer took showers unless she absolutely had to; she would lock all the doors and windows and would leave the bathroom and shower door open.^[66] She never realized until she first watched the film "how vulnerable and defenseless one is".^[40]

Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith writes that the music for the shower scene is "probably the most famous (and most imitated) cue in film music".^[67] A survey conducted by PRS for Music, in 2009, showed that the British public considers the score from 'the shower scene' to be the scariest theme from any film.^[68]

In 2000 The Guardian ranked the shower scene at No. 2 on their list of "The top 10 film moments".^[69] In 2007 Bravo Network featured it as number four on the list of 100 Scariest Movie Moments.^[70]

78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene, a documentary on its production by Alexandre O. Philippe, was released on October 13, 2017. It features interviews with and analysis by Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamie Lee Curtis (Leigh's daughter), Karyn Kusama, Eli Roth, Oz Perkins, Leigh Whannell, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Elijah Wood, Richard Stanley, and Neil Marshall.^[71][72]