Before he shot a frame of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock tried to murder the ending. Through intermediaries, he bought the film rights to Robert Bloch's 1959 novel anonymously for a famously modest sum — reportedly around $9,500, a bargain Bloch never stopped ruing — and then, so the well-worn story goes, had his staff quietly buy up copies of the book from shops to keep the twist out of circulation. Whether the buy-up was as systematic as legend claims, the intent was real: nobody was to know in advance that the heroine dies less than halfway through, or who Mother really was.
Paramount hated the project. The studio thought a black-and-white shocker about a cross-dressing murderer was beneath the director of North by Northwest, refused his usual budget, and refused to provide him space on their lot. Hitchcock called the bluff: he financed the film largely himself, deferred his fee for a share of the profits, shot it quickly for roughly $800,000 using the lean television crew from his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and gave Paramount mere distribution. It became the most profitable gamble of his career, and the profit share made him a very rich man.
Seven days in a bathroom
The scene everything hangs on lasts a shade over three minutes on screen and took the better part of a week — generally given as seven shooting days in December 1959 — to film. The marketing arithmetic became scripture: 78 camera setups, 52 cuts. Janet Leigh stood under the water for take after take (a body double, Marli Renfro, covered some shots), while the crew solved problems no one had faced before. Blood needed to read correctly in black and white, so the prop team used Bosco chocolate syrup, which photographed darker and thicker than stage blood. The sound of a knife entering flesh was auditioned like an actor: the winning performance came from a blade plunged into a casaba melon. The knife is never actually shown penetrating skin — the horror is assembled in the viewer's head by the editing, which is precisely why the scene became the most studied minute in film-school history. The title designer Saul Bass storyboarded the sequence, and decades later claimed he had effectively directed it — a claim Leigh and others on set flatly rejected, insisting Hitchcock was behind the camera for every setup. The myth says Bass; the witnesses say Hitch.
Then there is the music. Hitchcock originally wanted the murder to play with no score at all, only the shower's hiss and the screams. Bernard Herrmann ignored him, wrote the shrieking, stabbing glissandi for strings alone — the entire Psycho score uses only a string orchestra — and played it to the director, who reversed himself on the spot. Hitchcock acknowledged the debt in the most practical way available: he nearly doubled Herrmann's fee, and later remarked that a third of Psycho's effect was the music.
Selling the secret
Psycho's release in June 1960 weaponised the secrecy. The trailer was a droll six-minute tour of the Bates Motel conducted by Hitchcock himself, ending on a scream in the shower — supplied not by Leigh but by Vera Miles in a blonde wig. Hitchcock also imposed a then-novel policy that no one would be admitted to the cinema after the film had begun — enforced with lobby signs, recorded announcements and, where needed, police presence — turning a projection schedule into an event. Critics were initially sniffy, some reviewing it as a cheap shocker; audiences queued around the block and screamed on cue. The film collected four Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Leigh, though it won none. Censors, meanwhile, fussed over details that now seem quaint: the film is often cited as the first mainstream American picture to show a toilet being flushed on screen, which troubled the Production Code office nearly as much as the stabbing.
The shower scene's afterlife has outgrown the film around it. Herrmann's strings are shorthand for murder in a thousand parodies; Leigh said for the rest of her life that she took baths, not showers. Anthony Perkins, forever Norman Bates, filmed his side of the story knowing none of the audience's sympathy tricks that the screenplay was playing on them. And students still count the cuts — because Hitchcock, denied colour, denied a budget and denied his studio's blessing, demonstrated in one week of chocolate syrup and melons that terror is not what the camera shows. It is what the scissors withhold.
Quiz nuggets
- Hitchcock bought the rights to Robert Bloch's novel Psycho anonymously for a reported sum of around $9,500.
- The shower scene took about seven days to shoot, with a publicised count of 78 camera setups and 52 cuts.
- The blood was Bosco chocolate syrup, and the sound of the knife was made by stabbing a casaba melon.
- Bernard Herrmann scored Psycho for strings alone, over Hitchcock's initial instruction that the shower murder have no music.
- Psycho, released in 1960 on a budget of roughly $800,000, pioneered a strict no-late-admission policy in cinemas.