FEATURE:
Needle Drops and Scores to Settle
Scene Four: The Bathroom: Psycho (1960)
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BECAUSE one of the…
IN THIS PHOTO: Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho – leading up to the infamous shower scene, which had a profound effect on audiences (in 1960) and cinema/PHOTO CREDIT: Alamy
most influential films in cinema history turned sixty-five earlier in the year, I wanted to spend some time with its classic score. In the first three features in this series, I have looked at soundtracks. Films that took us back to 2013, 1997 and 1977. Now, I am jumping back to 1960 and one of the most distinct and terrifying scores in film history. Psycho is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films and most notable works. However, you feel that it would not be viewed in quite as high regard were it not for the score by Bernard Herrmann. The incredible German composer used only a string orchestra because of budget reasons and wanted to create a black-and-white sound to match the film’s aesthetic. I don’t think that we dissect film scores enough. I am bringing in a few articles about the Psycho score, so that we can get a deeper impression of how it came together and why it has the legacy it does. Film Independent put Psycho under the microscope for their Anatomy of Great Film Score series:
“Last week in our Know the Score “Anatomy of a Great Film Score” series, we went to outer space to explore Max Steiner’s iconic music for 1933’s King Kong. In this special Halloween-themed bonus installment, we’re coming back down to earth (and checking into a suspiciously dilapidated family-run motel off the highway) to take a closer listen to one of the most iconic horror scores of all time: that for the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic, Psycho.
The score for Psycho is a study in economy. Underfunded, Hitchcock was thinking in terms of working with less—even shooting the project with the production team from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, rather than a “proper” studio film crew.
The audience, too, is forced to work with less. When we watch the black-and-white film, instead of seeing grisly red blood swirling down Marion Crane’s shower drain, we infer its color from the dark stain in the water. And when we listen to the film score, we hear a pared-down sound with just a string orchestra used as the palette for composition.
Hitchcock thought that the score might use jazz and be-bop as a starting place. Which likely would’ve been more to the studio’s liking, as scoring styles in the 1950s and early ‘60s were indeed moving in that direction. But composer Bernard Hermann—one of Hitchcock’s most steadfast collaborators-rejected this approach. He wanted to use traditional orchestral sounds, which he did so masterfully that his Psycho score later came to define the sound of slasher films for a generation.
The use of just strings is a study in restraint, one that perfectly piques the audience’s sense of suspense. The orchestra’s sound is further reduced by the use of the sordino—or “mutes”—on the strings. This sound of muted strings holds back the emotion that a string orchestra would normally have without mutes.
The quieter sound matches the tension on screen, starting with the prelude over opening credits and continuing through the love tryst scene that opens the film. Here, Hermann used the tension of the muted strings to amplify a sense of fear in the music. The effect is that of a strained voice that wants to scream, but which is held back, frustrated and restrained.
Hitchcock and Hermann had a long working relationship that, by the end of the ‘50s, had become a real partnership based on trust. Hitchcock therefore trusted Hermann enough to cede his initial jazz-focused ideas and listen instead to the music Hermann was creating according to his own creative impulses—the orchestral string score.
The most well known scene from Psycho is its infamous shower scene. The scene stands out in cinema history for a few reasons. The first: this is where our leading lady (Janet Leigh) meets her premature demise. The timing of a leading lady’s death one-third of the way through the film was very unorthodox—both then and now—and makes the shock of the violence even stronger. Also, the scene is partially shot from the vantage point of the killer, forcing the viewer experience the action through the murderer’s eyes.
Hitchcock initially wanted the shower scene to play with no music at all. In another example of trust between collaborators, when Hitchcock finally heard the music Hermann had composed for the sequence, he immediately changed his mind.
This decision made way for one of the most iconic uses of score in cinema history, with Hermann’s strings imitating high-pitched shrieks to match the emotions of the victim being stabbed onscreen—a classic sound so often quoted and echoed in the slasher films that followed. This is the only place in the film where the strings play without mutes, their full power released in a shocking marriage of image and sound.
But in the first part of the scene, as Leigh’s Marion Crane begins to relax in the shower, there is in fact no music. With Marion facing the wall, we see behind her someone enter the bathroom—but still, silence. The tension is already high. Then, the music and the action both ramp up and accelerate beyond expectations, as the knife cuts through the shower curtain and the slicing chords high up on the violins rip into our ears.
Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins) voyeurism—at first watching his victim through a peephole in the wall, and later behind her in the bathroom through the shower curtain—is made all the more frightening when the curtain is torn down by the dying hands of our victim as she slumps to the tile floor. The staccato strings in the low register beat out a slowing rhythm. The victim’s heart is slowing down, but we’re also slowly realizing that the film has taken a dreadful turn.
The brutal murder of the leading lady in the first third is a surprising turn that leaves the audience feeling hopelessness. Psycho is a film that owes more than the usual debt to its musical score, more than most other films. And appropriately, although Psycho had a smaller budget than the usual Hitchcock production, Hermann was actually paid twice his usual fee.
As Hitchcock himself said it best: “Thirty-three percent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music”—and probably more, if you ask Bernard Hermann”
Before getting to another featured, I would say to people to read reviews like this of the incredible Psycho score, as you get insight into the different pieces. There are articles like this that theorise that some of the score was not originally written for Psycho. Pieces that were composed years before 1960. I am going to move to NPR and their feature about Bernard Herrmann’s incredible score:
"In the mid '50s, he started working with Alfred Hitchcock on films like "The Trouble With Harry," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Vertigo," "North By Northwest," and all of those films came before "Psycho." So by 1960, when "Psycho" was released, the partnership between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann was very, very close. Hitchcock is famous for having planned every detail of his movies to the smallest one, but it was interesting to discover that he actually left the area of music very, very open to Bernard Herrmann. Hitchcock knew that he had someone who thought very closely along the same lines as he did, who understood not only what a movie was about, but about the subtext of the film."
"Hitchcock was doing something different. He was doing what was, for him, a low-budget film. And everything in the budget got cut back, including apparently the music budget. So Herrmann was working with a little less. He got his fee, but he didn't quite have the resources that he usually had. And 'Psycho,' of course, is a black-and-white movie. And Benny later said that he wanted to complement the black-and-white photography with a black-and-white score. Well, just as there's tremendous range in black-and-white movies in the photography of them, Herrmann found tremendous range within this limited group of instruments, the string section. He made the strings extremely dry. He put mutes; he loved to have mutes on his strings."
"So it creates a very different sound from what we think of as the usual Hollywood romantic film score that used violins. It's the exact opposite. It's cold, it's chilly, and he uses the strings also for percussive effects, since we don't have the traditional things like timpani and all the sort of devices that film composers use to scare or startle people. He created percussive effects in the strings."
"Psycho" was a black-and-white film made at a time when Hitchcock typically worked in color and when moviegoers typically expected color. As film critic Leonard Maltin says, `This was a film that defied all sorts of expectations.'
"There had never been a film, certainly not from a Hollywood filmmaker or a Hollywood studio, like "Psycho." It was exponentially a hundred times more shocking than it is today. Imagine the unthinkable, killing off a major star in the first portion of the film. No one had ever done that; few have done it since. It's outlandish, it's outrageous. It's, of course, brilliant. So to be sitting in that theater in 1960 and hear the sudden shriek of violins as Anthony Perkins pulls that shower curtain and to witness what happens from that point on, I think people must have been thinking, `Am I really seeing what I'm seeing here? Is Janet Leigh dead? Janet Leigh can't be dead, she's the star of the movie.' It was devastating."
The murder of Marion, Janet Leigh's character, is the most famous and terrifying moment in "Psycho," some would say in all of Hitchcock's films, if not in all cinema. Remarkably, Hitchcock at first didn't want the scene to have music at all.
"He thought that it would be most effective if the audience simply heard Janet Leigh's screams, her struggling, the sounds of the knife and then the water running," Steven Smith says. "+His collaboration with Herrmann was so close, however, that Benny knew, `Well, I have a different idea,' and he wanted to try writing music for that. And he knew that if Hitchcock didn't like it, they didn't have to use it. But Benny went ahead and wrote what has become, I think, the most famous hue in the history of film music for the shower scene. And I think one of the proudest moments of his career as a film composer was when Hitchcock later told him that he, Hitchcock, was disappointed with the way the shower scene was playing; that it did need music. And Benny later said that he told Hitchcock, `Well, I did compose something. Would you like to hear it?' And he played it for Hitchcock, and Hitch said, `Well, absolutely, we'll use that.' And Benny, rubbing it in, said, `But you said no music,' to which Hitchcock replied, `Improper suggestion, my boy. Improper suggestion.'"
"It's interesting to watch that sequence without the music, because it's still a very disturbing sequence, but you're watching it as an outsider. You're watching a terrible thing happen, but you're watching it from the viewpoint of someone outside of it. With Herrmann's cue, you are Janet Leigh. You are feeling the absolute terror and panic and loss of control that she is feeling in trying to fend off this sudden attacker. And that was the thing that Herrmann did again and again, especially in Hitchcock's films, was that he forced the viewer to feel what the characters on screen were feeling. He considered film music, in his phrase, the `communicating link' between the filmmaker and the viewer."
Unlike many composers, Bernard Herrmann got to see Hitchcock's film and write to it scene by scene, which isn't to say that every piece of Herrmann's score came to him as he watched Hitchcock's otherwise finished product. Professor Royal Brown says some pieces in "Psycho" were written by Herrmann more than 25 years earlier.
"I interviewed Herrmann very shortly before he died and insisted to me that he always depended upon the film to be inspired for the music. And yet there's a major cue called "The Swamp" in "Psycho" that is taken out of a 1933 symphonetta for strings that Herrmann wrote. And there are several other points in the "Psycho" score that also come from this. So my impression is that Herrmann was exploring very deep, dark, gloomy areas a long time before he met Hitchcock”.
The final feature I am bringing in is from the BBC from last year. Marking sixty-five years of a classic film and score, they wrote about how the terrifying music through Psycho changed film forever. It no doubt had a huge bearing on Horror scores that followed. Still influencing composers to this day. There are few films that are as suspenseful and tense as Psycho. Its lack of gore and genuine terror is what makes it so disturbing and harrowing:
“Screaming violas that sound like they're coming out of an abattoir. Thumping bass notes, which slowly decrease in speed and seem to imitate a victim's faltering heartbeat. Take away composer Bernard Herrmann's score for director Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which turns 65 this month, and it's fair to say this 1960 horror film wouldn't have the same nerve-shredding impact.
Particularly key is the knives-edge music that plays when blonde bombshell Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), not long after checking in to the Bates Motel, is attacked through a shower curtain by a shadowy killer, who later turns out to be the motel's owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), dressed up as his dead mother. "That music is everything," says Rachel Zeffira, a film composer and one half of art-folk duo Cat's Eyes. "It's the birds, it's the bees, and it's the voices in the back of your head."
The project had seemed ill-starred from the start, with executives at Paramount (who had produced Hitchcock's previous five films) showing little interest, not allowing him to film it on their lot, and only distributing it rather than producing it themselves. But despite a paltry budget, Hitchcock proved everybody wrong, and for that he could partly thank Herrmann and his knack for crafting compositions that lifted scenes to new heights.
"Psycho was certainly not a bad film before it was scored, but it lacked tension," explains Steven C Smith, the author of a new book, Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema. Herrmann proceeded to give the film a much-needed jolt by writing music for an all-string 50-person orchestra that marked a "return to pure ice water", as the composer described it to Sight and Sound.
Before writing film music, Herrmann would always read the novel a movie was based on and study the literature, so his score was more empathetic. Every note Herrmann played had meaning – Rachel Zeffira
In the case of the most famous scene, this resulted in a chorus of psychologically jarring, high-pitched squeals that meant terrified audiences no longer saw the shower as a safe space. "Before the shower scene many of the musical cues have a depressive quality and they're not really that loud," Smith says. "But suddenly with the shower scene, the mutes are off the strings, and they screech animalistically. This creates a clever link with Norman Bates, the taxidermist of birds."
Herrmann forced an initially dismissive Hitchcock to watch the shower sequence both with and without his jump-scare music. "Oh yes, we must use it!" Hitchcock concurred. "But I thought you didn't want my music here?" Herrmann sarcastically replied, before the director scoffed: "My boy, improper suggestion."
It's an anecdote that reflects the pair's fiery partnership. Their creative union consistently resulted in film scores that make the viewer feel like they are caught up in a character's murky inner dialogue, privy to both their most romantic dreams and most hopeless nightmares (see Vertigo). Zeffira describes the music that plays whenever Norman Bates is on screen as being "dejected and anxious", which she says "makes you feel sorrow for a killer. I know before writing film music, Herrmann would always read the novel a movie was based on and study the literature, so his score was more empathetic. Every note Herrmann played had meaning".
The origins of Herrmann's genius
An avid childhood reader, Herrmann (or Benny as he was called by friends) spent most of his downtime passionately debating whether literature or music was the greatest art form. Music ultimately won out, and Herrmann was winning classical competitions by the age of 13. Having studied at New York University under the legendary composer Percy Grainger, one of Herrmann's first professional roles as a studio musician was for CBS Radio.
At CBS he worked with Orson Welles, winning his trust with 1938's radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, which was so realistic that some listeners believed it signalled a real unfolding alien invasion. He then became the obvious choice for scoring Welles' 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Working on hundreds of radio plays taught Herrmann how to create compositions that conjured up imagery, and also taught him the power of long pauses: he used silence as another instrument to build suspense.
Professionally, Herrmann was known for having a fiery temper and, as his daughter Dorothy told the New York Times, he "didn't suffer fools gladly". Yet Smith is keen to stress that the musician was less moody than his reputation suggests, and tended to go out of his way to recommended younger composers for jobs. "He was misunderstood," Smith says. "Given his reputation for irascibility, I think people would be surprised at how gentle Bernard could be, especially with animals. He was suspicious of arrogant humans, but he gave unconditional love to his cats."
The film's central theme would also go on to be sampled by dozens of other artists. Perhaps the most exhilarating example is rapper Busta Rhymes' 1998 single Gimme Some More. According to the hip hop producer and contemporary classical composer Michael Vincent Waller, Herrmann's Psycho score is beloved by rap artists. "Herrmann knew how to loop these little nihilistic fragments and become this master of repetition. In many ways, the way he was conducting film music was a lot like how rap producers chop up beats."
Waller says that Psycho didn't just change horror, but wider cinematic storytelling: "The Psycho music is a reference whenever you want to build tension and it's clear John Williams was inspired by Psycho for his stalker-ish bass notes for Jaws. Whenever you hear creepy violins in a horror movie, or feel like a film score has become its own character, then that can all be traced back to Psycho."
The creative relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann ended on 1966's Torn Curtain. The former was incensed that the latter stubbornly refused his orders to make a stripped back pop score, insisting instead on using 12 flutes, 16 horns, nine trombones, two tubas, eight cellos, eight basses and two sets of timpani. Herrmann was fired, but it didn't derail his career, and right until his death from a heart attack in 1975 the composer remained an innovative force”.
I am not sure which score or soundtrack I will look at for the fifth part of this series. Perhaps something from a 1970s or 1980s film. A romantic comedy film or something else. I am not sure. I was eager to focus on Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho, as it is the first score I have talked about and, when we think of the all-time great scores, Psycho springs to mind. Amazing what Bernard Herrmann created with a string orchestra and not a full one. Maybe working with that restriction makes the Psycho score…
SO effective.