Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [15]
Hitchcock had a long career, but among the new generation of horror fans, two movies had the biggest impact, and they premiered during a fallow period for the genre. Psycho revolutionized the then small subgenre of serial killer movies in 1960. Three years later, The Birds became the most potent example of an evergreen brand of horror—when nature attacks—that exploded in the early seventies. Rats (Willard), snakes (Stanley), frogs (Frogs), and even bunnies (Night of the Lepus, starring Janet Leigh) stalked innocent humans before animals calmed down for a while, only to be roused again by Jaws in 1975. As much as The Birds, starring Tippi Hedren as the blond survivor, inspired these movies, however, it did not have the impact of Psycho.
Hitchcock shocked audiences throughout the world by violating one of the oldest rules of Hollywood: the star, good or bad, does not die until the end. The setup of Janet Leigh as an ordinary woman caught up in a crime, stealing money so she can elope with her divorced boyfriend Sam Loomis, worked hard to put the audience on the side of the criminal. She may be stealing and running away, but it’s out of love. Then forty minutes into the movie, she takes a shower and, in a series of hectic cuts, is killed by the stiff-arm of a character in shadow holding a knife aloft like a torch. This murder took one week to shoot and lasts less than a minute. There was no gore, but blood did swirl down the drain. Norman Bates did not just murder a woman. In the context of the movie, he does something even more dramatic: he kills a plotline.
Hitchcock’s influential ideas repeatedly appeared in horror movies of the sixties and seventies. Not just his shots and visual tropes, either. John Carpenter cast Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween to exploit the fact that her mother was Janet Leigh. Tobe Hooper patterned the madman in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre after the same serial killer who inspired Norman Bates, whom the school in Brian De Palma’s Carrie was named after. De Palma, who would cast Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith in Body Double, was probably Hitchcock’s most persistent imitator. He fell in love with the way Hitchcock manipulates the audience through a shot from a character’s point of view. “There’s nothing like it in any other art form,” he explains. “You’re seeing exactly what the character is seeing. It puts you right in their position. It’s unique to cinematic storytelling and that’s why Hitchcock is such a master—because he developed it.”
As influential as he was, the notion that Hitchcock is the inventor of the modern horror genre is overstated. The relationship between Hitchcock and the younger generation of genre directors was sometimes even hostile. They borrowed some ideas, but rejected others. The French critics loved Hitchcock, but appreciating him was slumming. American students and exploitation artists couldn’t afford to do that, and in several crucial ways, their movies represented a pointed backlash against the style of Hitchcock. They respected the elder statesman but also felt the need to rebel.
The directors of the horror movies of the late sixties and seventies wanted more sex, gore, rock music, ambiguity, and political thrills than they got from Hitchcock. Personally, Hitchcock was not a natural father figure. At best, he was the competitive kind who had no interest in revealing his secrets. Hitchcock, a private man, had little interest in mentoring directors. He scoffed at a screening of De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, another homage to Psycho.
“He was personally insulted because in the ads, all the critics said that the movie was Hitchcockian,” says John Landis,