The Science of Monsters

Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho, a novelized account of Ed Gein’s house of horrors, was published in 1959. Once Hitchcock read the story of Norman Bates, a man with a mommy complex which charged his sick compulsion to kill women, the famously fastidious director knew he had the subject for his next picture. So certain that his film version would shock the proper filmgoers of the era, Hitchcock ordered his assistant to buy up copies of the novel in order to keep the twists a secret.

The climb for Alfred Hitchcock’s production was a steep one. He was alone in his vigor for the macabre project, eventually financing the movie with his personal money. Paramount Studios, reluctant to be a part of Psycho, finally agreed to distribute the film if Hitchcock waived his director’s fee. The production of Psycho itself was rife with Hollywood drama, later becoming the subject matter of the film Hitchcock (2012) starring Hannibal Lecter himself, Anthony Hopkins. As depicted in the Hitchcock biopic, as well as the podcast Inside Psycho (2017), the making of Psycho became a watershed moment in the film industry, particularly in the relationship between auteurs and the stolid protectors of decency, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). From Hitchcock’s bold insistence that the MPAA allow what was considered highly violent imagery for the era, to the first filmed flushing toilet in cinematic history, Psycho pushed boundaries. Star Janet Leigh (Marion Crane) recounted her time on the set in the 1995 book she co-wrote entitled Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. Leigh recalled Hitchcock’s unconventional methods, including how she once walked into her dressing room to discover the director had secreted the “mother corpse” there to scare her. Whether this was to test the efficacy of the prop, or to keep Leigh in character, she never knew.¹

The impact of Hitchcock’s arguably most famous and well-received film ripples on. Psycho boasts several of the most iconic sequences in history, including the notorious shower scene. Marion’s shocking murder, only a third of the way through the film, sparked a fear of bathing for generations. No one can watch Psycho and then jump into the shower without a creeping dread! This vulnerability, of being murdered in a common place by a man who most would deem safe is why Psycho transcended the horror films of its time. It is Norman Bates’s (Anthony Perkins) sweet, shy nature that disarms Marion, as well as the audience. He is not a typical monster, a skulking vampire with glistening fangs. Norman appears sincere in his banality, the sort of man who is not sexually appealing to Marion, nor threatening. It is in this aspect that Norman is so similar to his real-life influence, Ed Gein. Both men were able to maintain a facade that ultimately crumbles into brutal violence.

Though one trait of Norman Bates that is dissimilar to Gein is the presence of dual personalities. Gein was indeed consumed by the significance of his dead mother’s opinions and rules, but he was never known to actually embody her voice or personality. Norman, on the other hand, seems to slip between two distinct selves. While Marion Crane waits in the motel’s parlor, she hears Norman argue with his mother. Not the ravings of a madman, but two voices, two consciousnesses. This scene is particularly chilling when watched with the full knowledge of the twist. And in the end, we once again see Norman’s alternative personality modeled after his domineering mother. She takes over Norman’s body. Hitchcock even employs a superimposing film technique to illustrate this phenomenon. The audience is then left with Norman’s lingering, creepy smile which finishes the film.

This strain of the good and the bad harkens back to the original literary monster of dichotomy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In a 2007 study, Kieran McNally described Stevenson’s novel as inspired by several sources: “it drew on theological and literary influences concerning humanity’s primitive capacity for good and evil, Charles Darwin’s simian conclusions from The Descent of Man.”² It’s fascinating to note that evolution was a key point in the contrast of female and male serial killers (see Chapter Three (pg. 13)) and is also integral in the understanding of the age-old contrast of good and evil. While the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, recognized this pull of both light and dark through a scientific lens, Stevenson poetically described it for readers of Victorian literature: “with every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”³