Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [16]
The most serious grudge that horror directors hung on to was that Hitchcock ruined Psycho when he explained the madness of Norman Bates in the final scene. Much of the movie attempted to see life through the eyes of a psychotic, but when the police caught Norman and locked him in a room for questioning, Hitchcock returned to a more comforting point of view—the safety of a diagnosis from the medical establishment. By contrast, most New Horror directors thought that ambiguity and confusion are not only scarier than certainty, but also reflect the reality of a world where the Vietnam War and Watergate are in the headlines.
Even in his movies that owed the most to Hitchcock, such as Sisters, which killed off its star early on and used a score by Herrmann, Brian De Palma did not pay homage to the last scene, refusing to put the audience at ease. Instead of order restored, he more often added a disorienting dream sequence as a coda. William Friedkin, whose movie The Exorcist includes long scenes where doctors are unable to explain the problems of a troubled little girl, calls the last scene of Psycho the masterpiece’s major flaw. “If you took the scene out and you end on just Norman Bates, with Bernard Herrmann’s music, it would have iced people in a way that it did not,” he said. “Most intelligent people do not want simple answers.”
Hitchcock also had a teasing style that handled murder and crime with a dry sense of humor. He made films when the Production Code mandated a certain morality. He got around the censors through suggestion and subtle manipulation of point of view. By the freewheeling seventies, such subterfuge seemed about as relevant to some young horror directors as Tennessee Williams’s old winks at homosexual subtext. Immorality was fair game now and you could joke about almost anything you wanted. To the new generation, Hitchcock’s movies could seem stuffy. “Psycho was kind of restrained I always thought,” Craven says.
Hitchcock surely knew about this criticism, and he mounted a defense of himself in one of his most underrated films, Frenzy. His penultimate movie, the 1972 thriller had a typical Hitchcock suspense plot involving a mistaken identity and a detective trailing a killer, wrapped inside a piece of film criticism.
Telling the story of a serial killer who murdered London women by strangling them with a necktie, the movie includes one notorious oncamera rape and the murder occurs at the beginning of the film. The camera pauses on the woman’s face as you wait for Hitchcock to turn it away, to shift to a quick-cutting sequence as in the shower scene in Psycho. It never happens. Instead of building suspense through indirection and clever pacing, he plants the camera in front of a brutal act of violence and then gets closer and waits. The tenor of the horror film changed. It wasn’t enough to titillate or direct the audience. Now you had to assault them. Later in the movie comes the real shock.
After following the killer upstairs to the room of another victim in what appears to be a murder, the camera this time, right at the moment of confrontation, backtracks down the hall, through the stairs, and out the door. It sits there watching foot traffic, discreetly standing outside, while the audience waits for the inevitable scream. In a quintessentially meta-cinematic joke, Hitchcock is telling us something with these scenes—that he can do rape and torture and mayhem with the best of them, just like the young guns, but the worst crime on camera does not compare with the hint of one offscreen.
IN THE SIXTIES, most scary movies still left much to the imagination. This opened up a niche for the unabashedly hard-core violence pioneered by the low-rent auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis, the director of drive-in gross-outs such as A Taste of Blood and Scum of the Earth!