Hitchcock's Psycho Research Articles

Queer Psycho and the He Circus: Applying Queering, Magic, and More-than-Human Theories to Immersive Visual Story Worlds as an Antidote to Late Capitalism

Abstract Two immersive visual story worlds (IVS), Queer Psycho and HE Circus, are at the center of this article, one made by each of us. Individually we found our works necessitated the development of new frameworks for IVS construction, namely (1) Brechtian a-effect and queering, and (2) magic and more-than-human theories. These new framings were needed to realize our desire to use IVS to create spaces of active resistance from psychological harm imposed by political and ableist structures designed with rigid ways of seeing the world through straight/neoliberal lenses. When both story worlds and their frameworks are viewed side-by-side, they lay bare the prejudices and normative framings of IVS software and industries. Thus, the outline of these new framings with this article makes an original contribution to the field by calling into question those who are designing IVS software and typical frameworks by asking who and what they are benefiting, and proposing alternatives to illustrate how neither should be considered fixed. Finally, the topic of each IVS, that of Hitchcock's Psycho and neoliberal structures of contemporary higher education, offer critiques of systems which serve to highlight our arguments.

A Neurocinematic Study of the Suspense Effects in Hitchcock's Psycho

As a new and rapidly emerging cross-disciplinary research field, neurocinematics focuses on movie research from an empirical perspective, adopting functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other cognitive neuroscience technologies as well as theoretical methods. By verifying and exploring relevant film concepts, neurocinematics tries to establish a scientific basis for the movie theory and better understand frontier subjects in movie studies. We designed this experiment to detect audiences' brain activity when watching movies and verify the manipulation power of narrative film. We selected the shower murder scene in Hitchcock's Psycho as the experimental material. The results of the experiment showed that the trends of the audiences' brain activity were almost consistent with the specific movie plots. By observing audiences' brain activity while watching the movie, the experiment verified the specific effect of Hitchcock's set-up of suspense and explored the neurocognitive brain mechanisms behind the suspense effect.

‘We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes. Haven't You?’ Musical Empathy in Hitchcock'sPsycho

ABSTRACTThis essay explores a web of cognised and embodied empathies that emerge while watching Hitchcock'sPsycho, focusing on the role of musical empathy as it relates to Marion Crane's story. Drawing on work on empathetic music in film music studies, I explore how the actors, the characters, the musical score and the filmic audience are drawn together by a ‘sigh’ figure, a symbolic gesture that unifies the soundtrack.

Disability and the American Counterculture

On 1 March 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress on his meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta, from which he had just returned. The conference was, of course, a pivotal moment in the shaping of post-War Europe and did much to establish the tense East-West relations that endured for most of the following half century. While the Cold War was indubitably a key shaper of the domestic and international environs within which the counterculture emerged and-for a short time-thrived in the United States, Roosevelt's address was significant in another way, more directly pertinent to this special issue. Since his illness (he was diagnosed with polio in 1921) and, more so, since he decided to run for president, Roosevelt had been careful to downplay the full extent of his lower-body paralysis, avoiding being seen in public using his wheelchair and developing considerable upper-body strength to keep himself upright when delivering speeches. The address to Congress was different: the President began by stating,I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.While it would be far-fetched to suggest that Roosevelt's decision not only to sit, but also to explain why he was sitting, was the harbinger of a swift and painless revolution in the treatment and representation of disability in the United States, or to argue that it immediately tore down the barriers to full and equal participation in public life, it does serve as at the very least a symbolic start to a long, slow, and still ongoing process that has adopted a recognizably modern form since the end of the Second World War. Since then, the place of disabled people in national life has undergone many positive changes, both in terms of legislation and popular understanding; nevertheless, the Cold War culture of the 1950s also did much to codify certain forms of behaviour-most notably, homosexuality-as new kinds of freakery, replacing the popular fascination with the display of the physically othered freak that had been a central tenet of American popular culture from the 1890s to the 1930s.1There were few positive, central representations of physical (or mental) disability in the American popular culture of the post-War years, and key examples that did portray disability often focused on the return to normalcy of men injured in the line of duty. Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950), for example, was a critically acclaimed if commercially unsuccessful representation of a paraplegic war vet (Marlon Brando), coming to terms with his new situation. Brando would become an iconic figure for two generations of the counterculture and, while The Men was hardly central to this process, his depictions of angry, disturbed outsiders certainly helped to create an environment in which figures straddling the boundary between sane and insane could acquire a hip presence for would-be rebels. In contrast, Ironside (1967-75), launched, ironically enough, during the Summer of Love, cast the (non-disabled) Raymond Burr as former detective Robert T. Ironside, forcibly retired after being paralysed by a sniper, before returning to the force as a special consultant and triumphing in case after case. While Ironside was very much an establishment figure, the series was significant in being aired prime-time while having a disabled central character represented positively and repeatedly triumphing over normal adversaries, often characterized by their own deviant criminal behaviour. At the other extreme, movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) did little to challenge the notion that the mentally ill were a danger to everyday life, even if Hitchcock's vision also targeted the hypocrisies of that life and the limitations of psychoanalysis as a means to understanding the mind. …

Notes towards a semiotics of kinetic typography

This paper traces the development of a new semiotic mode, kinetic typography. Kinetic typography began with the experiments of filmmakers like Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Later, film title designers like Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro drew on the shapes of letters with inventive metaphors – serifs, for instance could make letters walk, because they can stand for shoes as they are elongated horizontals on which something stands. In Saul Bass’ titles for Hitchcock's Psycho, the splitting of letters became a metaphor for the split mind of the film's main character. Such inventions eventually became part of a lexicon of clichés drawn on by designers across the world. Eventually, researchers and software designers began to formalize and systematize the language of kinetic typography, and the fruit of their work is now widely available, not only to specialists, but also to anyone who uses PowerPoint or Adobe AfterEffects, even though users may not always be aware of the lexico-grammatical rules which underlie the menus they choose from. And computers, being agnostic as to the kind of “objects” their operations operate on, apply these grammars to letters as well as other graphic forms, thus consolidating the multimodality of the language of movement. The second part of the paper discusses these formalizations, drawing on the kinetic design literature. Based on M.A.K. Halliday's transitivity theory, it sketches the outlines of a systemic grammar of movement that can make the meaning potential of kinetic typography explicit. The paper concludes with an analysis of art works created by David Byrne which use PowerPoint as a medium. Using PowerPoint's relatively simple movement grammar, Byrne has nevertheless succeeded in using movement creatively, giving us a glimpse of a future of creative writing which has kinetic typography at its very centre.

Remaking horror: Hollywood's new reliance on scares of old

Remaking Horror chronicles the American horror genre in its development of remake titles from the 1930s to 21st century films. The book investigates Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) as the watershed moment when the horror genre opened its doors to the possibility of that horror movie--classic, modern, B-movie, and more--might be remade for contemporary audiences. Staple horror franchises--Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)--are highlighted along with their remake counterparts in order to illustrate how the genre has embraced a phenomenon of remake productions and what the future of horror holds for American cinema. More than 25 original films, their remakes, and the movies they influenced are presented in detailed discussions throughout the text.

Folk Psychology for Film Critics and Scholars

Film scholars, critics, filmmakers, and audiences all routinely employ intuitive, untutored "folk psychology" in viewing, interpreting, critiquing, and making films. Yet this folk psychology receives little attention in film scholarship. This article argues that film scholars ought to pay far more attention to the nature and uses of folk psychology. Turning to critical work on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the article demonstrates the diverse and sometimes surprising ways that folk psychology is used in criticism. From an evolutionary perspective, the article defends the critic's and audience's interests in characters as persons. It also defends folk psychology against some of its most vocal detractors, and provides some guidance into how cognitive film theorists might employ folk psychology, arguing that such employment must supplement and correct folk psychology with scientific psychology and philosophical analysis. Finally, the article argues that the application of folk psychology to films is a talent, a skill, and a sensitivity rather than a science.

Psycho and the orchestration of anxiety

Since its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho has entered the consciousness of our culture as have few other films. Its striking imagery, combined with its universally recognized score, has prompted a wealth of scholarly output. New understanding in the areas of emotion and cognition now affords us the opportunity to re-examine this film from a less familiar vantage point. This article places Psycho within the context of American television drama of the 1950s and explores the effect of Bernard Herrmann's music on the emotional responses of the viewer, as well as the possible consequences of this effect on the literal reading of the film.

Is Your Shower Like the Shower in the Bates Motel

Ever since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, showers have seemed potentially lethal. Janet Leigh, who played the victim in the famous murder scene at the

Ritualizing Life: Videos of Jalal Toufic

The videos of Jalal Toufic almost always lead their of a certain public or private ritual.In Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins Toufic documents a very public Shiite ritual of Ashura, the day of commemorative mourning for the saint Hussein ibn Ali. But some other rituals are of a more private nature. In The Sleep of Reason a private ritual of sleep is followed by a ritualized slaughtering of animals. The latter is shown in all its cruel details that the public usually tends to overlook. And in Mother and Son figures referring to Hitchcock's Psycho are shown involved in the deeply intimate rituals of death and mourning. The ability to reveal the inner complicity between ritual and the medium of video is one of the reasons Toufic's videos so powerfully capture the imagination of the viewer—beyond the immediate impact of their respective narratives.

"Have You Ever Seen the Inside of One of Those Places?": Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness

This essay situates Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization within the postwar context of deinstitutionalization, as well as a modernist tradition of overvaluing madness known as schizophilia. Although Hitchcock and Foucault participated in the tradition of schizophilia, their appeals to both history and the avant-garde enabled them to produce works that broke with traditional ways of conceiving madness.

Medieval McGuffins: The Arthurian Model

The Round Table Medieval McGuffins: The Arthurian Model NORRIS J. LACY In our continuing efforts to comprehend and define medieval merhods of literary composition, it is crirical ro use, or at least consider, all the approaches available to us. Those approaches obviously include everything we can learn from medieval manuals of rheroric, from authors' own commentary, and other sources conremporaneous wirh the texts in question. However, in many instances a modern concept, even if drawn from a non-literary conrexr, may offer a useful key to the function of earlier texts. This essay will examine the potential applicability of a cinematic phenomenon to a study ofmedieval narrarive, and specifically to Arthurian romance. That phenomenon is the McGuffin. The concept of a McGuffin was fundamentally Alfred Hitchcock's, though it came to him as an anecdote recounted by a friend. As one version of the story has it, Two men were traveling by train from London ro F.dinburgh. In the luggage rack overhead was a wrapped parcel. What have you there?' asked one of rhe men. 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin,' replied the other. 'What's a MacGuffin?' It's a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'But there aren't any lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'Well, then, that's no MacGuffin. This anecdote, however amusing, does little or norhing to clarify the term, but fortunately, Hitchcock and others were sometimes less enigmatic and more informative. Here, then, is a preliminary but standard definirion for our purposes: a McGuffin is a plot element that exists to propel the story but that may have little orno intrinsic importance. 'For example, in Hitchcock's movie North by Northwest, thugs are on the look out for a character named George Kaplan. Roger Thornhill, an ad executive, gets mistaken for Kaplan and so he is chased instead. Meanwhile Thornhill himself rries ro find Kaplan who doesn't even exist.'4 An even mote revealing example, I believe, is from Hitchcock's Psycho. It is the robbery ar the beginning. That event leads us to expect a chase and an attempt to recover the money, but of course rhar is not at all what the film is about. The robbery serves simply to introduce Janet Leigh into the motel and into the shower, thus plunging us into the middle ofa situation that we could not have been led to expect. ARTHURIANA IJ.4 (2005) 53 54ARTHURIANA Hitchcock's definitions and descriptions were inconsistent and sometimes even contradicrory. However, in most instances his explanations do agtee on rhe cenrral point: a McGuffin is something—a person, an objecr, an event—the primary purpose ofwhich is to motivate the characrers and rherefore the plot, whether or nor that 'something' possesses any implicit significance. Hitchcock once temarked that in spy films the McGuffin is usually important or 'secret papers,' even though they are often imporrant only because someone has srolen rhem or is trying to steal them, and the consequences oftheir loss might be dire. We may not even know the subject of these documents, and even ifwe did know, what is in them is no more important rhan anything else that mighthe in them. As long as the characrers think something is important, and that 'something' propels rhe plot, we are dealing wirh a McGuffinization. A review ofa David Mamer film, Ronin, says much rhe same thing: The 'McGuffin,' coined by Alfred Hitchcock, is a plot device that drives the motivations of the characters. It is not important what the McGuffin is, or how it works—what is important is that the characters feel that it is important. In David Mamct's directorial debut 'The Spanish Prisoner,' the McGuffin is a mathematical model that would allow a company to profit from the stock market. In 'Ronin,' the McGuffin is the briefcase—nobody knows what's inside, but they do know that it is important enough to kill for it.' One additional example, this one drawn from the current television series 24. The recenr two seasons have presented national crises related to terrorism—a nuclear bomb in one, a deadly virus in rhe other. Each one provides the impetus for exactly one season (twenty-four...

Waiting for Instantaneity

Waiting for Instantaneity

Retelling Psycho

Retelling Psycho

"If Thine Eye Offend Thee...": Psycho and the Art of Infection

O NCE all the narrative surprises of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho have been discovered and its more obvious emotional provocations understood, I find that the most potent sources of my uneasiness while viewing it are still unaccounted for. Discomfort with this work is, in my experience, an endlessly renewable response; it is like a slowly spreading stain in the memory. The film feels as stifled and stifling as the indecipherable mind of its protagonist, Norman Bates. Not only does Psycho contain no point of release for the viewer-it also remains unclear what precisely the viewer expects (or needs) to be released from. Psycho offers a number of gestures of release-a snarling tow chain craning a vehicle out of a swamp, Marion's slowly upraised arm as she sits in the tub after the shower stabbing-which turn out to be no release at all. In the latter episode, for example, Hitchcock caresses us, in the dying woman's presence, with a hope of recovery, then immediately crushes it out as Marion's arm extends beseechingly to us (Why don't you do something?), clutches the shower curtain and collapses to the floor. Marion's gesture to save herself answers our felt need, then instantly turns that need against us. Part of Hitchcock's complex achievement in the film is gradually to deprive us of our sense of what safe ground looks like or feels like.