Kids These Days Couldn't Find The Bates Motel On A Map: ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EDITION!
Reflections on Psycho, one year after the fact
It’s the one year anniversary of So Desensitized!!! I can hardly believe it made it this far! Seriously, if you’d told me a year ago that I’d still be keeping this up in a year’s time I might have cried. So first, thank you all for reading. If you’ve been here since the beginning, extra thanks, if you haven’t, still thanks! You’re all here, and you’re reading my writing, and that’s all that matters.
Now, a little recap of the year! We totaled:
37 posts! Which is…
32 critical essays!
1 of which was professionally published in January and…
9 of which were part of this year’s Spooky Season Spooktacular! (Not including the announcements and reflections!)
And 5 of which were my Fearmongering series, which covered over a century of horror, history, and culture! Which brings us to…
2 huge series! Which both took huge amounts of time, energy, and work, but were so worth it! And now, we celebrate…
1 WHOLE YEAR!!! Of hard work, time, and rambling about horror movies and hoping people read it!
And throughout all of that, I’ve been active in my school’s theater department, writing, editing, and revising a book, traveling, and being in high school. I really couldn’t have done it if I didn’t have people reading it and talking to me about it. So thank you all again.
Now, without any further ado: Psycho - one year anniversary edition!
Psycho was the first post I ever wrote for So Desensitized because, while it misses being the first horror movie by about forty five years, it is the first slasher movie. And, as you all may have noticed, slashers are my favorite genre. Throughout this year, I’ve analyzed movies differently the more I write, and the more series I do. So, for this analysis of Psycho, I’m going to take a look at the movie through two different lenses. First, Psycho in terms of the larger context of the horror genre and society that it came out into. Second, Psycho in terms of what came after it - the Psycho pipeline, if you will. I hope y’all enjoy!
Psycho came out in 1960, fifteen years after World War Two ended, and right before a huge period of upheaval in America began. It had one of the most infamous marketing campaigns ever, with its director, Alfred Hitchcock, refusing to give critics advance screenings, and placing cutouts of him in the lobby of every theater it opened in with a speech bubble that said “Don’t reveal the ending of our film - we don’t have another!”. No one was let into or out of the theater after the movie started. This kind of marketing was unheard of at the time, and is even extreme now. But it worked - and not just because it was sensational. It worked because Psycho is a damn good movie that came out at just the right time.
Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name, Psycho tells a story that would eventually birth the slasher genre, one of the most widely-known, and widely-loved subgenres there is. It famously becomes a different movie halfway through, with the infamous ‘shower scene’ in which the woman who was positioned as the protagonist up until that point is stabbed to death in a motel shower. What follows is an investigation into her whereabouts interspersed with more killings. In terms of the culture it came out into, there are two main chords that Psycho struck: mental illness, and communism paranoia.
Following the devastating effects of World War Two, psychotherapy grew in popularity through the 40s and 50s. Not in the ways we know it today, and still not by any means widespread, but just widespread enough that the public was starting to take notice. This meant that knowledge of what we now know to call mental illness, namely PTSD, was becoming more widespread as well. By 1960, psychotherapy was, if not common, not unheard of. The idea that someone the average person knew might have a mental illness wasn’t so shocking anymore. So having a character like Norman Bates, who suffered from trauma, attachment issues, and the kind of stylized “psychosis” that is common in media even today, had a huge impact on audiences. To see any kind of mental illness depicted in someone like Anthony Perkins, who looked just like any other American guy, was something new, and relevant to the times.
The idea of Norman Bates as a murderer who looked just like everyone else played into another common mindset of the time, however. Communism paranoia was near its all-time high in America, leading to movies like Invasion of The Body Snatchers, and other Red Scare style movies. Anyone could be a communist, just like that quiet young man who runs that motel off the highway could be a killer. The fact that Norman’s first victim is a young blonde woman also adds to the Red Scare factor - as does the fact that said woman is established in her introduction as being engaged in sex outside of marriage, playing into the idea of the collapsing nuclear family under communism. The audience could see that a communist - or a killer - could be anyone. Whether it was a nice blonde girl having extramarital sex, or a shy young man murdering anyone who came to his motel, anyone could have any number of secrets in Psycho. Which was exactly what audiences in 1960 were most afraid of in real life.
But where does Psycho fit in to modern horror and culture? Well, as these things go, the Psycho pipeline is a pretty straightforward one, with two main pathways. The first, and most obvious, being the slasher genre.
Psycho is, no matter what anyone says, the first slasher. And I will kill people on that hill. It introduced the idea of sex meaning death, and of killers having weird, psychosexual hang-ups. Marion Crane’s murder is also the first proper slasher kill, even with the minimal gore allowed under the restrictive Hays Code, there’s the killer’s silhouette holding the knife, the swirl of Marion’s blood down the drain, and her famous screams. Despite the fact that the first slasher boom was still about thirteen to fifteen years off, depending how you look at it, Psycho is the movie from which all slasher movies come from. The name Loomis is a reference to Halloween in Scream and a reference to Psycho in Halloween. The music sting during a jump scare came from Psycho, as did the butcher knife as a standard slasher weapon. Every summer camp slasher, every teen slasher, every chainsaw slasher, every psychological or ‘elevated’ slasher - it all comes from Psycho. All of it.
And, as though an entire genre wasn’t enough, Psycho introduced a whole new type of character in Norman Bates: the cross-dressing killer.
When Norman Bates ran down the Bates Motel’s rickety basement stairs in his deceased mother’s old dress and a wig he opened the door for decades of cross-dressing slashers. Angela Baker, Buffalo Bill, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface - the list goes on, all descended from the owner of the Bates Motel. Now, for what I think are obvious reasons, this trend has a huge spike in the eighties, just like slashers themselves. But the trend continued long past that, into The Silence of The Lambs, House of 1000 Corpses, and even Terrifier. The cross-dressing killer is such a phenomenon that it’s a trope, analyzed by countless queer (and not) academics and authors every year. And it all started with Psycho. Every male slasher in a dress, every male slasher with unsettlingly feminine characteristics, from long hair to fingernail-esque knife gloves to a whole damn basement of dresses with plans to make a woman skin suit, all came from that penultimate scene in Psycho, when Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates changed movies forever.
Psycho was the first movie I wrote about for So Desensitized because it’s the first slasher. It isn’t the first horror movie - that’s widely considered to be The Golem (1915) - but it is the first in the most infamous subgenre of horror. So it started it all for countless horror tropes that come from the slasher genre, it started it all for queer horror, and it started it all for So Desensitized. Psycho is a brilliant movie, and holds a very special place in my heart, for all of those reasons and more.
So thanks for a whole year of So Desensitized, everyone! I hope you enjoyed it, I hope you learned something from it, and I hope you watch a horror movie today. Any one you want. Happy reading, happy watching, and stay spooky!