5 'Psycho' Surprises: Inside the Most Familiar Scene in Movies
A still from "78/52," a documentary all about the shower scene in "Psycho." IFC Films
At three minutes and change, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is one of the most familiar in film history. The deadly encounter between Marion Crane and the cross-dressing Norman Bates was shot over seven days in 1959, and every element is instantly recognizable: the shadowy figure tearing aside the shower curtain, the stream of blood and water circling the drain, Bernard Herrmann's shrieking violins. The scene has been dissected by scholars and critics and parodied by everyone from Mel Brooks to "The Simpsons"; its score has become aural shorthand for "something really scary is about to happen." Is there anything a "Psycho" fan still might not know about this most famous of cinematic moments?
Turns out, plenty. In his new documentary "78/52," the director Alexandre O. Philippe examines the sequence in myriad ways, looking at, for example, audience reaction in 1960 (sustained, unremitting screams) and the film's visual obsession with shower heads. In addition to talking with directors, historians and others, Mr. Philippe pored over the original storyboards and Hitchcock's handwritten notes. Mr. Philippe estimated that he's seen the iconic scene thousands of times.
Still, the documentary maker continues to be fascinated by it. Since completing the film, he's talked with the choreographer Sean Curran about the movement of bodies within the sequence, and hopes to look at the Bauhausian use of triangles, squares and circles. "There's so much I'm still discovering. That's why people keep going back to it, because it goes so deep," he said, adding, "There's only a handful of movies that do that."