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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spooky Owl!" data-source="post: 182366" data-attributes="member: 57984">I don't think anyone was neglecting PSYCHO. Many of us listed it. But this is still a fairly new thread.PSYCHO apparently upset the studios because they were expecting a glossy, technicolor thriller like Hitch had been doing in the '50s. But Hitch deliberately went with B&W, using the crew from his TV series, in order to give PSYCHO a drab, downmarket look.Interestingly, Hitchcock got the idea to do PSYCHO based on William Castle's artless B-level horror movies which were doing well at the box office, his wondering how the end result might be if "somebody good" (i.e., himself) did one. Later, Castle was so impressed, he did PSYHCO homage, HOMICIDAL, one of his more polished pictures. So, with HOMICIDAL, you had an imitation of an imitation from a man imitating his imitator.PSYCHO put off some critics (Walt Disney called it a "dirty movie" and refused to allow Hitch to film TORN CURTAIN at Disneyland because of it) who, like foolish Bosley Crowther, gave it a bad review that Summer of 1960, and then placed in their Ten Best list that December. So one has to remember the cultural context of the time that saw the film as vulgar and "nasty," when one today might wonder what they were talking about. Norman peering through that peephole into Janet Leigh's room today barely gets  notice (and he doesn't seem to be entertaining himself in the manner in which Vince Vaughn did in the 1997 reshoot, although one assumes that the implied moniker, Master Bates, was intentional).I was watching recently a mini-doc about the making of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967) and someone astutely pointed out that any kind of sexual scandal which ever emerged about anybody in the press always felt "really dirty," even through the mid-'60s at the very least.PSYCHO's shower scene became the most famous movie murder scene of all time, or at least held that honor for decades. And is today cited as the first "modern horror film" because it deals with a serial killer (instead of monsters or Victorian gothic romance in a windswept castle) -- a trend from which cinema has never recovered, really. Though PSYCHO remains unique after 60 years for being a rare entry in that it both humanizes the victim and the perpetrator, something unheard of during the slasher film era of the '80s really let loose after Miss Leigh's daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, did HALLOWEEN (1978) a genuine B-movie which was nonetheless superior to its imitators.But a lot of PSYCHO's power comes from the TwilightZone/JFK/ColdWar flavor of the early-'60 when The Bomb was new and virtually all you had to do was turn a camera on and everything felted haunted and ghostly, as if the veil between this world and the next was somehow briefly thinner in all its sacredly pre-apocalyptic mournful desolation.Which is why it still works. I once said at a startlingly early age that "if you don't have the sad, you don't have the scary." PSYCHO had both, in its cold-as-ice '60s way, even if it seems tame by the graphic standards of subsequent decades.<img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/01/30/article-2270937-11D8AC45000005DC-787_634x422.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></blockquote>

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