In part that was because it was subversive, not just in its violence (though it did single-handedly invent the slasher) but in its portrayal of sex, voyeurism, and, oddly, being the first American film to show a flushing toilet.įor all Psycho’s legendary horror, and the frenzy of the shower scene, its opening is mundane. Another called it “a blot on an honourable career”. Some critics hated it The Observer’s reviewer, CA Lejeune, walked out and promptly resigned in protest at it. Following the slick, colourful, globetrotting North By Northwest, Psycho is a pulpy, lo-fi black-and-white flick set in rural Nowheresville. "But no more than screaming and yelling on a switchback railway… so you mustn't go too far because you want them to get off the railway giggling with pleasure.” “ was intended to make people scream and yell and so forth," Hitchcock said in 1964. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years." 9.
"Nobody wanted to see it," Hitchcock told Langlois. Hitchcock suggested foregrounding haunting images which evoke the human weight of the Nazi atrocity: piles of wedding rings, of glasses, of toothbrushes. It is deeply, gutturally, viscerally shocking and sickening. Shelved after screenings in September 1945 but restored in 2017, it’s lost none of its impact. It goes some way beyond its initial goal of simply proving beyond doubt that the atrocities happened.
While Hitchcock didn’t direct this documentary of the liberation of Bergen Belsen in 1945 – his month-long involvement as 'treatment advisor' only started after all the reels had been filmed – it’s his advice to avoid editing in favour of long, slow pans and unbroken shots which gives the film its air of solemn, truthful witness. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror." "At the end of the war," Hitchcock told Henri Langlois in the Seventies, "I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know.