The movies have always provided
a safe place to face our fears.
In that dark movie theater,
we deal with the monsters terrorizing us in our real lives
by seeing them defeated up there on the big screen.
Horror films like Dracula, The Invisible Man,
and The Wolf Man provided a useful catharsis
for a frightened populace.
Those movies gave audiences a place
to share their collective fears,
or even national traumas brought on
by financial instability, World Wars,
and the global tensions that followed.
The financial fears
and the wartime terrors of the '30s and '40s
were soon followed by new threats.
A nation horrified
at the thought of nuclear destruction,
of scientists going too far and wreaking havoc with nature,
and by a Cold War between the Soviets and Americans
that threatened global destruction.
National fears of nuclear annihilation,
Communist infiltrations,
and an even more destructive global conflict
than World War II resulted in horror films
about science run amuck, alien invasions from the skies,
and extraterrestrial body snatchers
right here on Earth.
The public, more than ever, were drawn to movies
that help them confront those anxieties.
The drive-in movie takes care of everything.
Courtship, babysitting, shelter, Marilyn Monroe, food and drink.
There's hot, delicious popcorn, lots of candy, and cold drinks.
Now...
It's showtime.
I grew up in the '50s,
so those were my formative years as a moviegoer
and somebody who loved movies at the time.
So I saw a lot of science-fiction films
and all the giant monster movies,
a lot of radiation-did-it movies,
that type of thing.
1951-- went to a theater in Rochester, New York.
I saw It Came from Outer Space in 3-D.
In the opening of that movie,
this big ol' meteor comes out of space,
comes right into the screen
and out of the screen into the audience
and blows up in your face.
And it blew up in my face, and I jumped up and ran.
But then I stopped, and I thought,
"That's the greatest thing I've ever seen.
I've got to go back and see more."
So that was the beginning of it all.
Well, when I was growing up,
horror meant whatever monster movies were on
on a Saturday on the local station.
I grew up in Northern Virginia, so we had WDCA, channel 20,
and that was, Saturday afternoons,
there was a monster movie on.
I've never seen venom in such quantity before.
You know, there's more venom in this test tube
than you'll find in 100 tarantulas.
As a movie fan, it offered me something
beyond watching two adults talking.
It was, two adults would talk,
and then some kind of crazy, engineered creature--
somebody in makeup or in a costume--
would show up and bring mayhem.
And that, to me, was hilarious.
To me, monsters were scary.
A giant mutated ant, a lizard man,
fish man coming out of a swamp or lagoon to kill you.
For me growing up, you know, in my mind,
Godzilla or one of the half-dozen monsters
that were on Monster Island were going to, you know,
come tramping across the Northern Virginia suburbs
and wipe everyone out for some reason.
Horror films in the '50s,
I believe their popularity came from the fact
that there was a changing perspective,
that it was a world that was saying,
"It's time to look at the entire world
differently than it's ever been looked at before."
And that was heavy.
And I think horror films, just like movies in general,
provided a level of escapism that was unparalleled.
I think in this country, there were people,
especially with the nuclear threat,
the nuclear scare,
there was this unparalleled fear among everybody,
and so you've got a heightened audience already.
A short time ago,
an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima
and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
As the world was reeling from
the frightening destruction caused by the hydrogen bomb,
horror films in the post-nuclear era
began to focus less
on the fantasy of supernatural monsters
and more on the real-life terror that man creates.
I think a lot of horror borrows from its culture
and borrows from its time and makes movies about it
and fashions points of view
that we didn't have when I started.
Got this heightened kind of terror
already instilled in these people,
and now you show them a fucked-up horror movie,
and it strikes a nerve.
But I think that the commentary, especially back then,
allowed people to kind of examine
what struck that nerve in them,
what nerve was struck, how it made them feel.
And I think it allowed people to kind of look at things
a little bit differently and also have some fun
in a time when there wasn't fun.
Everybody was scared all the time, every day,
and there was no fun.
And I think we need to have fun.
We're built for it.
Aah!
As a people, we need to have fun.
In 1954, the horror genre was forever changed
with a Japanese kaiju,
a giant monster film called Godzilla.
The now iconic monster was originally envisioned
as a larger-than-life octopus,
but was redesigned as a mash-up of traits
from prehistoric dinosaurs.
You know, Godzilla, just to me,
he just represents something from my childhood
more than anything.
I mean, like, it's one of these characters
that I'll never be able to remember
the first moment that I saw him,
because he was just always around.
He always existed.
And being obsessed with dinosaurs and things like that,
he just-- he fit perfectly in that
'cause he was a dinosaur with a personality and with a name.
As a kid, when you watch movies,
you're not just watching what's in front of you.
Your imagination is still going,
so the monsters in the suits and the costumes and stuff,
they don't just look like guys in suits.
You feel like they are 100% real monsters.
I think that whenever I was making Godzilla vs. Kong,
I remember the debate out on the schoolyard when I was a kid,
and I remember my best friend at the time,
he came in there, and he was talking about how, you know,
King Kong would win in the fight and all this.
And I just thought he was crazy.
I just couldn't believe
that he would think that King Kong would win.
I'm just like, "Godzilla is Godzilla." You know?
"He's not gonna lose to a big monkey."
I think as a filmmaker, it's very important
to always be half in touch
with that sort of half-formed part of your brain
when you're a kid, because there's still like--
there's a magic there that you can't replicate.
Seeing Godzilla come up over the mountain
for the first time is terrifying.
He's one of my favorite monsters of all time.
I think what audiences love about monster movies
is seeing how characters react to this monstrous threat
and how they all have to come together
to face this thing and understand the rules.
There's always kind of a whole process to a monster movie.
It's like, "What is it?
Oh, my God, that thing can never exist.
Holy crap, it does exist. What are the rules to kill it?"
You know, I think the monster movie as we know it
owes a lot to that original Godzilla.
The original Godzilla was an allegory
for post-war Japan.
Nine years earlier, during the culmination of World War II,
the United States had dropped atomic bombs
on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
killing more than 200,000.
It remains the only time in history
nuclear weapons were used.
The original Godzilla was all about
Japan post-World War II trying to reclaim their identity,
trying to process the aftermath of the atom bomb.
And it really felt like Godzilla was this response
to man's hubris in creating the ultimate weapon.
I can only imagine that watching the original Godzilla
in the '50s in Japan
would have been a pretty intense experience.
I mean, there's images in that film
that are, like, exactly taken
to emulate the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the explosion of the atomic bomb there.
The atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in, what, 1945,
and the original Godzilla came out in '54.
I mean, that's not very long after.
Godzilla embodied the fear felt by the Japanese
in the wake of these attacks.
A destructive beast that, once unleashed,
could never really be fully controlled again.
It's a cautionary tale
that has taken on new meanings over the years.
What I think is really interesting about Godzilla
is he kind of went from representing the atom bomb
to now kind of being the defender of the earth.
Like, there's a lot of allegory for climate change
in the monsterverse right now.
And you can really see that evolve from the '50s.
I think the monster movie as we know it
has changed significantly over the decades.
Throughout the years, monster movies have followed
the evolution of Godzilla,
reflecting what people are most afraid of at any given time.
Mutations are prevalent,
and because of our dabbling in science and playing God,
giant monsters are going to eat us.
And those giant monsters ranged from tarantulas
to giant ants
to giant vulture-looking creature things.
I mean, like, there was just so much out there
that wanted to eat us because of our atomic testing.
One of my favorites from special-effects movies
in the 1950s is 1954's Them!...
...in which we have a group of ants
that get hit with atomic radiation,
and all of a sudden, they go to extreme proportions.
The movie is incredibly effective,
with these giant ants coming after tiny, little people.
Get the other antenna!
He's helpless without them.
It stood out because, suddenly, it was this idea
of the tiniest thing that you can possibly imagine,
an ant, is what is going to stomp on your house.
Like, we did not have
a lot of giant-creature films at this time period,
and so the idea of taking something really small
and blowing it up on screen was awesome.
1954's Them!
was one of the first nuclear monster movies
to be produced in America,
paving the way for countless others to follow.
Released at almost the same time as Godzilla,
the American kaijus were inspired
by newsreels of atomic testing
as countries fortified their nuclear arsenals.
Well, I think a movie like Them!
is just kind of like
that archetypal Atomic Age monster movie.
You know, it's our meddling with atomic testing
out in the middle of some desert.
It's like, Mother Nature, man. Don't mess with it.
Let Mother Nature do its thing.
Horror films tend to revolve around emotional storytelling,
and the emotion that they focus most on is fear,
and fear is a response.
You know, as far back as the 1950s,
there was a fear expressed in horror movies
of the horrors of what atomic radiation might do
and how that might corrupt nature.
Here, gentlemen, is your villain.
They almost never come up unless they're disturbed.
Disturbed? By what?
Hydrogen bombs.
H bombs have been blamed for every freak accident
that's happened since, up to, and including...
Fire!
...great monsters being disturbed.
Some of that was quite laughable.
Like, we watch those movies now
about giant spiders or ants or whatever.
But what we're dealing with now is, around us, we see
what happens when you slowly poison the earth.
Like, what happens
when you just pump toxic effluents into the water.
Like, things die, things mutate, they stop breeding.
Let us face without panic the reality of our times--
the fact that atom bombs
may someday be dropped on our cities.
And let us prepare for survival
by understanding the weapon that threatens us.
Here is the motion-picture spectacle
of all time.
A million tons of water alive with deadly rays.
Awe-inspiring in its significance for man,
who learned how to control the atom,
but must now learn to control himself.
There was a lot to be afraid of after World War II.
You know, the Atomic Age wasn't just relegated
to giant monsters.
There was also stories about atomic experimentation.
You were dealing with mutations.
And that fear,
that fear of radiation because of power plants,
because of atomic testing, all of that,
that wasn't just exclusive to the '50s, I feel.
Like, even growing up in the '80s,
there were two things I was afraid of--
quicksand and radiation.
You know?
'Cause you just never knew,
like, when there might be an accident
or if you were gonna get bombed.
Horror films have always stood as a warning,
like, "This is what happens if you transgress."
And it's one thing when it's like,
"Don't go into the woods, young teenagers,
because the ax man will chop off your heads."
But, really, ecological horror
has been telling us for years now
that we are going into the woods,
and we are going to get our species' head chopped off
if we don't take notice
and behave in a more kind
and responsible manner.
Them! is regarded as kind of maybe like a step up
from the other stuff because
there is a little bit of horror filmmaking
that really works,
like that whole opening scene
where there's this little girl left behind,
and all we hear is that high-pitched sound
of the ant making its noise,
and you don't know what's attacking
this little girl's family and whatnot.
Really scary stuff.
It ended up getting nominated for an Academy Award
and lost to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
but still one of the landmark special-effects films
of the 1950s.
Everything that we see in the 1950s is about paranoia.
It is about our sweet, little, bucolic society
somehow being infiltrated,
whether it be via atomic radiation,
monsters from space, monsters from the deep,
the neighbor that you didn't know was evil
who's been living next to you for years.
It was all about paranoia and fear,
and it came out in many different ways on screen,
but it all links back to us just being scared of everything,
scared that everything that we believe in,
that we hold true as American values,
it's all nothing.
There's a great deal more
to this American way of life, of course,
and it's all familiar enough.
The Main Street of any town is almost a symbol of America.
That's where the stores are. That's where we go shopping.
Candy and ice cream, buy all you want.
Movies-- come early and get the best seat.
The raw, harsh, unpleasant fact
is that communism is an issue.
Don't let the communists use you.
Please, don't be a dupe.
With the onset of the Cold War,
tensions between the U.S. and Russia began to rise.
Americans were petrified by the notion
that communism was everywhere, hiding in plain sight,
threatening to destroy their way of life.
Many feared that
a Soviet nuclear attack on U.S. soil was imminent
and that their-- their neighbors
could be communist spies.
The mass panic opened the door to horror films
that reflected this escalating national paranoia.
As we move into the 1950s, we see film itself
trying to push into new areas.
We've all been sitting in theaters
for decades at this point,
so the filmmakers and the exhibitors are really looking
for ways to get more people in the seats.
And especially with the advent of television,
they have to find a way to get you off your couch now.
So what we see them doing
is really bringing in all of these new innovations.
Tony, this is important.
And the audience that embraced the innovations
and the gimmicks were America's teenagers.
Shh!
"Let's make the screen wider.
Let's make it bigger. Let's make 3-D.
Let's let you sit in your car so you can watch stuff."
And so we see all of these different new kind of gimmicks
coming into play to bring in theatergoers.
In 1953, Vincent Price's House of Wax
became the first color 3-D film released by a major studio.
3-D movies reached out and grabbed moviegoers,
attracting the growing teenage audience
and making them jump from their seats.
In the America of the 1950s,
everything was consumable, from fast food to fast cars.
But the one thing that teenagers couldn't get enough of
were horror movies.
They were going to the pictures in droves.
Horror producers were happy to accommodate with a series
of in-theater experiences,
hoping to find the next 3-D-like craze.
And one of the more, uh, bizarre gimmicks of the '50s
was Smell-O-Vision,
which began and ended with the film The Scent of Mystery.
In short, it stunk.
Oh.
Then there was The Tingler
which used a device embedded in a seat called Percepto!
This would immerse you in the film
by tingling your seat during an on-screen fright.
It turned out that there were only two senses people
wanted at the pictures-- sight and sound,
and the only gimmick that stuck was the drive-in movie,
a place where families could eat popcorn and drink malts
while watching a movie in their comfortable bucket seats,
and where a guy could hug his girl
during the ultimate camp drive-in horror film The Blob.
So The Blob is a really good example of the Red Scare
being exemplified on-screen.
This thing drops in the middle of our town...
Boy, that was close.
...and just starts consuming us,
just starts eating us up, and there is no way to stop it.
Steve McQueen's The Blob comes out,
and it's a whole different thing that's scaring you right now.
It's not the goofy Mummy.
It's not Frankenstein anymore.
That no longer touched the same nerve.
But the Blob...
What's the matter?
Something that you can't even wrap your head around.
Something from space. Something like-- I don't know--
maybe a missile from Russia, is also from space.
And that Blob is very red, just like our enemies.
And suddenly they're in our hometowns,
in our movie theaters,
in our homes coming after us.
Don't go in, Jim. This won't do any good.
It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life.
The Blob is super-campy, but, you know,
through all of its kind of drive-in,
pure drive-in spectacle...
...at its core, and what people
kind of latch onto about its silliness,
is that it is literally a red blob attacking Americans.
Aah!
Kate, stand still. Don't move.
It must have absorbed the old man completely.
So you couldn't be any more obvious
about the Red Scare than that.
The personification of the Red Scare is an amorphous blob
that will just roll around and absorb you.
- What happened? - It's all over us.
What do you mean, it's all over us?!
- Take it easy. - What's the matter?
I think it put a face or a blob face on the thing
that scared us most
and gave us an enemy we could fight against.
What are they gonna do with that thing, Dave?
Well, the Air Force is sending a Globemaster in.
They're flying it to the Arctic.
It's not dead, is it?
No, it's not.
Just frozen.
I don't think it can be killed,
but at least we've got it stopped.
Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold, huh?
The Cold War and the Red Scare, well, they seeped into horror
through movies like The Blob
and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
During that time, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
the original, was sort of a take on McCarthyism of the time,
you know, the conformity of the family unit.
You know, it was a good thing to conform, it was a good thing
to live in suburbia with your two-car garage
and your station wagon and have your two kids
and the perfect American family.
I think Invasion of the Body Snatchers sort of sent that up
and sort of played with it and the idea
that, no, it's not a good thing. It's a really, really bad thing.
I am not insane!
You tell these fools I'm not crazy!
Make them listen to me before it's too late!
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the film
that scared me the most when I was a kid.
It was a fascinating concept.
I had never seen something where something is buried
in this thing and it percolates in there,
you know, until it's ready.
And it decides when it's ready, you know, not you.
So that's pretty scary.
It's like kids being afraid
something's in their closet, you know?
There's nothing in the closet,
but it's just as real as if there was.
Stay here and pray they're as human as they sound.
Communism in reality is not a political party.
It is a way of life.
An evil and malignant way of life.
It reveals a condition akin to disease.
Their goal is the overthrow of our government.
The Communists are red fascists.
Joseph McCarthy was a senator from Wisconsin
who definitely became, like, the face of the Cold War.
And he became the face of this brigade to rid out Communism,
that Communism is everywhere in the U.S.
and they are trying to take over
our more capitalistic way of life,
and we have to rid it out at its roots,
and it is everywhere.
Today, the free world and the Communist world
are locked in a peculiar struggle for the minds of men.
We should remember that practically every issue
which we face today,
from high taxes to the shameful mess in Korea,
is inextricably interwoven with the Communist issue.
Frightening, isn't it?
We see McCarthyism and the Red Scare
really coming into horror films in the 1950s
in the form of paranoia,
that we are scared of everything,
from aliens coming down from above,
things coming up from beneath, to our next-door neighbors.
The Red Scare was us being scared to death
that Russia was somehow infiltrating American society,
that Communists were here, that they were a part of us,
that they could be the government officials,
that it could be, you know,
this person that you know from work.
It could even be your next-door neighbor.
And so not only do we see horror films
about a fear of each other, but it's very much
like that we ourselves could be accused for this.
We see these fears come out in a lot of our alien movies,
and it's very much this belief system of,
we're running our normal, everyday lives.
Oh, look how serene it is.
But at any time, boom, aliens are here,
and we're all destroyed.
Listen carefully.
The Martians are coming this way.
We must evacuate the city.
As Americans became increasingly paranoid,
a new otherworldly terror emerged.
After years of investigation,
I believe that the flying saucers
seen by veteran airline and Air Force pilots
are objects from another planet.
A wave of UFO sightings
throughout the country,
which began with the infamous
Roswell, New Mexico flying saucer crash,
invaded America's collective psyche during the 1950s.
The Air Force itself has officially admitted
that flying saucers exist.
I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucers.
There have been a certain percentage
of this volume of reports
that have been made by credible observers
of relatively incredible things.
With all due respect to the Air Force,
I believe that some of them will prove to be
of interplanetary origin.
And soon the Cold War reached new heights,
literally, when the Soviet Union
launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
Sputnik marked the beginning of mankind's space race
and paved the way for a new spate of sci-fi horror films
that played directly upon Red Scare-era fears.
The 1950s were a spectacular era for sci-fi.
Ray Bradbury had published The Martian Chronicles
in the '50s, and magazines were publishing sci-fi work
from different writers in the genre.
The decade saw a wave of horror films set in space
or films that had aliens attacking Earth.
Between the atomic bomb and Roswell,
where we're talking about the first UFO sighting,
people started kind of freaking out, going,
"Oh, my God, we're not alone.
Not only do we have to worry about World Wars,
but there is another threat-- again, the other.
But the other is coming from outer space. Holy shit."
During a three-year investigation,
I found that many pilots have described objects
of substance and high speed.
One case, pilots reported their plane was buffeted
by an object which passed them at 500 miles an hour.
Obviously, this was a solid object,
and I believe it was from outer space.
There's nothing more intimidating than another person
to a certain degree, and horror is,
by and large, I think, a reflection of that.
You know, like UFO invasion movies from the '50s.
- Where did they come from? - I don't know.
Those films have a very consistent, you know,
sort of Cold War kind of vibe to them.
You can tell, like, the version of people
being scared of each other was very much
based on that sort of like, "Are you a Communist,
are you not a Communist" kind of thing.
I think people in general are just afraid of UFOs
because they're afraid of things they can't understand.
So naturally Hollywood tapped into that,
and we started seeing horror evolve
from kind of classic Gothic romps
to sci-fi-infused stories.
Look at it, will you?
Beings from another world.
War of the Worlds was already a well-known story
before the film was released in 1953.
The H.G. Wells 1898 novel
is considered to be one of the earliest
to envision an alien race invading Earth.
And the 1938 Orson Welles radio play was so realistic
it created a widespread panic throughout the nation.
I'm, of course, surprised that the H.G. Wells classic,
which is the original for many fantasies
about invasions by mythical monsters
from the planet Mars,
a story which has become familiar to children
through the medium of comic strips, novels,
and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate
and profound effect upon radio listeners.
The film version took the story and updated it
to reflect the fears that gripped America in the 1950s,
winning an Academy Award
for its use of special effects in the process.
It is incredibly terrifying.
After the pods crashed into the countryside,
you've got three guys, including, like, a priest,
and they're waving the white flag, and they're like,
"See? We're waving the white flag. We're friendly."
And you just see this giant eye on a tentacle
come up out of the ground.
- We welcome you. - We're friends.
And it just blasts.
Footage looks like sparklers. I was freaked out.
I was, like, gripping my seat, like, "What is that thing?"
When you saw the Martian war machine come up out of its shell
and start flying across the city,
I was just, like, in awe.
But that's what they were selling.
They were selling, like, the other
is no longer, you know, in some remote castle.
It's gonna come from the stars, and it's gonna mess you up.
It's dead.
I think audiences were scared of UFOs
because it was the totally unexpected plot twist
of their lives after World War II.
There would be no more peace in our time.
Imagine surviving World War II
and going through the devastation
and emotional journey of all of that.
And then all of a sudden,
you get word that there are flying saucers.
We have come to visit you in peace
and with goodwill.
People have always needed an outlet for their fear.
I think every generation
has their own sort of external terrors.
Well, I think in the '50s,
you're talking about a generation of people
that are around right after World War II.
So there's been a break from real terror and real tragedy
and people coming home in body bags,
and then they're surrounded by this suburbia,
this new thing, this Baby Boomer generation.
And yet they're hardwired for fear.
You know, movies like War of the Worlds
and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
are two examples of movies
that I think did well with the fear of UFOs
because War of the Worlds, the Martians showed up
and they just started eliminating stuff,
which is, at the time, I'm sure what was prevalent
in everybody's mind, was, "If aliens come to Earth,
they're just gonna, like, go to war with us."
Bilderbeck has calculated how long we have got
until Martians take over the entire world.
You know, The Day the Earth Stood Still
is an alien coming to Earth and basically saying,
"Get your shit together, human race.
If you don't, it's not looking good."
It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet.
But if you threaten to extend your violence,
this earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder.
You know, a lot of these movies that we saw during that era,
it was not just aliens coming to us.
It was us heading out into space.
So you saw films like Forbidden Planet, you know,
where it was, in an effort to advance the space race,
we went exploring and came upon something unknown.
You know, an unknown threat.
So it was kind of like the movie
was a direct result of our greed
and need to beat the Russians at their own game
and get to space first resulted in something catastrophic
or discovering something alien.
In the '60s,
you start getting to the serial killer fear.
It's someone who looks just like us,
who seems nice and polite and does horrible,
horrible things when we're not looking.
And it's that idea of a human predator,
someone who lives amongst us.
After the sci-fi wave of the 1950s started to wane,
horror films began to look closer to home,
at the terror in our own backyard.
In the early 1960s, stories about serial killers
began to creep their way into the news,
pushing an already tense nation closer to the edge.
Ghosts are scary, yeah,
but what's really scary is that guy next door
or that guy you're hitchhiking with.
There was Melvin Rees, the Clutter family killings
that became In Cold Blood,
the Boston Strangler in the early '60s.
And these were all crimes
where people were like, "What is going on?"
These people weren't killing for a reason.
They weren't doing it for money.
They weren't doing it for profit.
They were doing it because they seemed to enjoy it.
These were crimes of passion, not profit.
That coincided with Ed Gein getting arrested.
He was a killer who was arrested for a murder in '57
in a small Wisconsin town.
Police searched his house,
found all these body parts and trophies
and things he made out of his victims
and bodies he'd exhumed from a local cemetery.
He became sort of this-- this bogeyman.
Ed Gein would be the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
And that really threw everyone for a loop.
Psycho is the beginning of modern horror.
I mean, Psycho is absolutely brilliant.
All of this comes from Hitchcock's Psycho.
That was arguably the first slasher film.
Psycho brought a level of terror to film
that I'd never seen before.
It was the first time that I realized there was editing.
It was because of the montage.
That was the whole change of film.
I'd never seen anything
that was as violent as Psycho was, or as terrifying.
And it was because of the brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock.
The first horror film I saw ever was Psycho,
which I saw on television at a slumber party of girls.
And I remember being terrified.
It began the serial killer, the lone murderer,
the senseless killer genre
with at least one scene with extreme gore.
It's a pretty great film, actually.
It's one of the best horror movies ever made.
The thing I like about Psycho is that--
I mean, obviously Hitchcock is a master of storytelling,
but he was also a master of marketing.
And so you had Janet Leigh,
who was this huge movie star at the time.
She's all over the posters.
She was top billing of the movie,
and then she's murdered at the end of the first act
in that very famous shower scene.
"Aah! Aah! Aah! Aah!"
And really, that hadn't been done before,
and audiences were fully, completely taken by surprise.
And after that moment, you're like,
"Anything can happen in this movie.
All bets are off."
Psycho has a totally brilliant opening.
It spends a great deal of time with Janet Leigh.
And you're worried because she's stealing money.
She steals some money in the office and then she runs.
So it's like you're already worried for her.
She's on the run.
What's she doing? This is very strange.
And then, you know, the Bates Motel
is not the most reassuring place with all those stuffed animals.
You know it's not going to go well,
but you don't know how.
The idea of getting murdered in the shower, like,
when you're at your most vulnerable is very terrifying.
It's tied, of course, to nudity, to vulnerability,
to being naked in the shower, but interestingly, not to sex.
It's more to the fact of the moment you're most vulnerable,
alone in a shower, you're naked, you know,
have nothing to defend yourself with.
After that, I think that it's waiting
for the next bomb to explode.
Psycho broke out as being incredibly violent
in the one shower scene, but if you watch the film again,
it's really a psychological portrait.
There isn't that much constant violence in it.
And in fact, it is possibly the beginning of the fascination
with the psychology of the killer.
It was voyeuristic,
and so it violated all kinds of social codes
because you were in the position of being the voyeur.
And there was something else he did--
he made you sympathize with Norman Bates.
He made you sympathize with a psycho killer,
because you knew his mother had driven him to it.
The reviews were so negative, so outraged at Psycho,
that Hitchcock almost pulled it.
He almost thought about pulling and recutting it
and using it as an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
he was so crushed by the initial reviews.
And then they opened it, and the lines were around the block.
That changed everything.
It also changed filmmaking.
Nobody ever thought about doing what Hitchcock did--
moving from the point of view of the killer
and making you feel sorry for the killer.
It was just shocking on every level.
And the acting was just great.
The reveal that he's actually his own mother
is pretty frickin' great, let's face it.
I also loved the twist ending, as everyone did in Psycho.
It's now so overdone, but at the time,
obviously, revolutionary.
We have that shot from outside where he's saying,
"Mother, Mother, you shouldn't have done it."
So you think it's his mother that's doing it.
Then it's not until the very end that you realize
he's stark raving mad and he's mummified his mother.
And, you know, and the chair swings around
and there's Mother!
I mean, every code that he could have violated,
Hitchcock violated.
And he did it with his television crew
in black and white for no money.
It felt like after Psycho horror films shifted
much more into kind of the naivety of society.
This is an ax.
The naivety that we all believe
that we live in this perfect little suburban bubble
or that our little upper-middle-class lives
are so sweet.
But they're not.
...that a ghoul can be killed by a shot in the head.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
Terror and violence are just knocking at our door
at any time.