Blackwell UK
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The Moment of Psycho
How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder
ISBN: 9780465003396
Format: Hardback
Publisher: The Perseus Books Group
It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry …
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It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry - even America itself - would never be the same.
In The Moment of Psycho, film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Hitchcock's career, re-creating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood, Thomson shows how in 1959, Hitchcock, then sixty years old, made Psycho as an attempt to break personally with the dullness of his own settled domesticity - a struggle which then mirrored the sexual, creative, and political ferment that soon overtook the nation.
Psycho was not just a sensation in film: it altered the very nature of our desires. Sex, violence, and horror took on new life. Psycho, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a file - and, as The Moment of Psycho demonstrated, still does.
