“Secrets of the ‘Psycho’ Shower Scene”
So you’re a Hitchcock fan. You think you know everything about his movies. What about the famous shower scene in Psycho? From a recent Salon article:
Fifty years ago this month, untold numbers of Americans stopped taking showers. The cause of this sudden downturn in personal hygiene was not a shortage of soap or water but, rather, an overabundance of fear and dread after viewing what all film buffs know simply as “the shower scene” in Alfred Hitchcock’s just-then-released “Psycho.”
One angry father wrote to the brilliant director, saying his daughter had not bathed since viewing a bathtub drowning in the 1954 French film “Les Diaboliques,” and now she was refusing to shower after seeing Janet Leigh’s character slashed to death in “Psycho.” Hitchcock responded, “Send her to the dry cleaners.”
The chilling scene has been called “a masterpiece within a masterpiece”: 78 pieces of film perfectly edited into a 45-second sequence featuring the piercing shriek of Bernard Herrmann’s violin. It’s become a staple of film classes, and in college, I wrote a paper on Hitchcock, watching the scene over and over, terrified and fascinated as Anthony Perkins’ character, Norman Bates, wearing a dress and wig, his face obscured, repeatedly stabs the hapless and helpless Marion Crane.
But was the actor who actually dressed up like Norman Bates’ mother and stabbed Janet Leigh’s character Perkins — or not? The article’s author Steve North interviewed Perkins years after Psycho’s release. This key excerpt:
Sitting with Perkins and hearing his stories was a moviegoer’s dream come true, but I had to take a stab at bringing him back to the nightmarish shower scene. I told him what I had heard, and asked if he would confirm the secret of “Psycho”: that during the filming of the horrific moment where Norman Bates, in drag, dispatches Miss Crane, Anthony Perkins himself was nowhere near the movie set.
A slight pause for suspense … and then: It was true, he told me, with a sly smile on his face. And contrary to what I had read — that Perkins had to be in New York that week to rehearse a play and was therefore unavailable — the actor set the record straight, revealing that his non-appearance was quite intentional. “Hitchcock was very worried that the dual role and nature of Norman Bates would be exposed if I were to appear in that scene. I think it was the recognizability of my silhouette, which is rather slim and broad in the shoulder. That worried him.”
Perkins added that the director, in effect, broke his own long-standing rule with that decision. “He was outspokenly eager to not play any tricks on the audience in his films, to do anything that couldn’t be thought of as fair play, but in that instance, he in fact did. The guy he chose, from the ‘extra’ pool, was very unlike the silhouette of Norman Bates, as played by me. So in a way, Hitchcock didn’t exactly play by the book when he cast someone else in that scene.”
For more on the scene, including a link to a shot-by-shot breakdown of it, go here. And here is the scene from the movie: