Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

5. Deviant Bodies

141 I finally convinced myself that it was good to do it, necessary to do it, and that the public wanted me to do it. The latter part I believe until this day. I believe that many were rooting for me. —David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam” killer Welcome to prime time, bitch! —Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors The story of Marion Crane, a beautiful young woman having an illicit affair, seemed to follow the general outline of Hitchcockian narratives . Crane steals money from her boss in hopes of attaining the postwar American dream of domestic bliss and conspicuous consumption. Then she goes on the lam. Audiences came to see Psycho expecting a suspenseful thriller along the lines of North By Northwest or simply a big-screen version of the offbeat espionage and crime tales on Hitchcock’s popular television series. Packing in to theaters all over the country to see Psycho , the forty-seventh film by the “Master of suspense,” moviegoers received a shocking, blood-drenched welcome to the 1960s. Psycho’s opening scene titillated viewers with Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in white negligee, talking to her lover in a hotel room about their need for money. Audiences, though they would have likely disapproved of her when she steals from her boss, likely identified with her Five DEVIANT BODIES Monsters in America / 142 as she sets out for a new life. Viewers experienced a growing unease as Crane gets lost on a dark and stormy night and stops at a hotel with a frightening, California gothic house leering over it. The young proprietor Norman Bates, though strange, comes across at first as shy and even charming. Moreover, Tony Perkins played the role of the odd young man, and his previous film work had been in light comedy and romance, suggesting that he might become Crane’s ally and maybe even a new romantic interest. Suddenly, like thrill-seekers on a roller coaster that had slowly bumpeditswaytothetopofthetrack,audiencesfelttheirstomachsheave as the film took a precipitous and terrifying plunge. As Leigh, alone in her room, begins to take a shower, the curtain suddenly rips open and a shadowy figure with a butcher knife begins plunging the weapon repeatedly into Leigh’s naked flesh. Thirty-four segments, edited together at furious speed into a sequence lasting less than a minute, increased the feeling of the attack’s suddenness and brutality. Leigh’s body crumpled over the edge of the tub with blood swirling down the drain while audiences went from shocked screams to stunned silence.1 Esquire called Psycho “a reflection of the most unpleasant mind, a mean, sly sadistic little mind.” Numerous reviewers exuded distaste and not a little anger at the director himself. The New York Times called the film “a blot on an honorable career.” One reviewer, after calling it “the most vile and disgusting film ever made,” added that he found it especially disheartening that a director of Hitchcock’s prominence had been responsible for it.2 Early critical rejection did not prevent Psycho from changing American movies forever. A box-office smash, the film exercised enormous influence over American filmmaking, opening the door for young directors like Sam Peckinpah, who made use of explosive violence to create riveting human dramas. Psycho also prepared the way for the mainstreaming of violence in widely distributed horror films that gained a much larger audience than older drive-in, exploitation fare had ever succeeded in garnering.3 Norman Bates became an early representation of a new American monster. The end of the twentieth century belonged to the murdering maniac, a creature not born from the supernatural shadows or cobbled together in a lab, but coming to deadly life in the midst of American family structures. As a debate simmered over cultural change, the horror film accused the American family of producing monsters. Psycho wielded its knife in the middle of a broad American conversation about mental health, crime, gender, family life, sex, and the societal changes of the 1960s. Deviant Bodies / 143 Tales of Love and Death The very title of Psycho shook Americans in 1960, especially given the amount of attention the nation’s public culture had given to mental health in the fifteen years since World War II. The growth of the psychiatric profession in those years, as well as the frequent prescription of tranquilizers, was a response to a growing number of...