Landmark Works
Psycho
Sound Film
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Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller, shot cheaply in black and white with his television crew to keep the plot twist secret, follows Marion Crane to the isolated Bates Motel and its proprietor Norman Bates. Its shower scene, cut to Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings, is one of the most analyzed sequences in film history, and the film set a new level of acceptability for depicted violence and psychological disturbance in American cinema.
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1. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationReception sectionQuote, Reception section
It set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behavior, and sexuality in American films.
1. Wikipedia
1. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationCreated By: Alfred Hitchcock, Infobox, directed byView the Source 1. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationCreated By: Paramount Pictures, Pre-production sectionQuote, Created By: Paramount Pictures, Pre-production section
Paramount distributed the film, but four years later Hitchcock sold his stock in Shamley to Universal's parent company MCA, and his remaining six films were made at and distributed by Universal Pictures.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, about a killer who films his victims' deaths, opened in Britain in April 1960, five months before Psycho reached American screens. Powell's film was so savaged by contemporary critics it effectively ended his career, while Psycho was an immediate popular and critical success. Only decades later did film scholarship rehabilitate Peeping Tom and credit it, alongside or even ahead of Psycho, with the voyeuristic camera and murderous psychology the slasher genre would later systematize, so crediting Psycho alone with founding the modern slasher template overstates a contested case.
A dissenting reading, from an independent laneWikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation
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