Alfred Hitchcock has long been considered the “master of suspense,” most commonly because of how he used cinematography to instill fear in the audience. Yet, Hitchcock made distinct use of other elements of filmmaking along with visuals to induce horror. Together with composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock crafted a visceral atmosphere for his thriller Psycho (1960). In order to captivate audiences and ensure their fright, Hitchcock and Herrmann intertwined sound and image to achieve the desired effect. Along with sound and the lack thereof, an analysis of Affect Theory and Dr. Paul Ekman’s six basic emotions is useful when examining the emotional impact of the famed shower scene. Herrmann claimed he believes music and film are inseparable, which is evident in Psycho’s storytelling through sound (Sullivan 26). In Psycho, Hitchcock integrates sound and scoring into the film as part of its visual world; the space he creates becomes all-encompassing through his conjoining sound, music, and visuals to amplify and escalate suspense.
Psycho’s musical score strengthens its visual horror by emphasizing the most intense moments through jarring yet rhythmic melodies. It would be fruitless to analyze Hitchcock’s interplay of music and image without examining their effect in the famous shower scene. Initially, Hitchcock instructed Bernard Herrmann not to write music for the scene; he aimed to create a bleak atmosphere deprived of score. However, Herrmann’s “The Knife”and its impact transformed Marion’s death from potentially anticlimactic to gut-wrenchingly effective and crucial for the tone of the film. The difference the presence of music in this moment makes is it emphasizes the violence of the knife. Tom Gunning in New England Review recalls that Hitchcock himself described the knife in that scene as tearing out from the screen, targeting the viewer. The camera’s proximity to the violence depicted on screen forces the audience to take in this aggressive act. As if the visuals were insufficient, “The Knife” then comes in to reinforce the severity of this deed with its sharp staccato strings. According to Jack Sullivan in Cinéaste, during this rapidly-assembled montage, lasting 45 seconds and including 78 shots, the music does not confine itself to the background, but is rather “a force of aggression” that slices through the silence as strikingly as the knife itself (Sullivan 21-25). Without music, the emotions of this scene would be conveyed notably less intensely. Throughout the film, though epitomized in this scene, Herrmann’s score supplements Hitchcock’s visuals by drawing out the tensest moments with sudden, terror-inducing melodies.
In crafting Psycho’s immersive atmosphere, Hitchcock and Hermann play on three basic emotions that both “The Knife” and the silence succeeding it generate: fear, surprise, and disgust. It is useful to employ an understanding of Affect Theory here to analyze the significance and role of these emotions during this pivotal scene. Affect Theory is researched and expanded upon in a myriad of ways, but at its core it explores the phenomenology of emotional responses (Figlerowicz 3-4). Horror as a genre lends itself well to an exploration of Affect Theory, as horror films are meant to be experienced viscerally and emotionally, since fear is a primal emotion used mainly for survival. As such, in order to survive, the experience of fear creates a situation in which your brain goes into fight, flight, or freeze mode: it relays the message that you must escape. The presence of fear poses an environmental challenge to survival which requires escape (Panksepp 1628). The genius in Hitchcock’s filmmaking then lies in the lingering shot of Marion’s eye once she is dead (Figure 1); Hitchcock denies the audience escape for 45 uninterrupted seconds. The affect then transitions from fear to disgust, the last of Ekman’s basic emotions in this sequence. The viewer’s established consternation at the events of this scene is heightened with the effect of experiencing such innate emotions. The lack of a possibility of escape triggers a deeper sense of fear than the event itself.
Fear is also one of Dr. Paul Ekman’s six basic emotions. Ekman is attributed with describing six basic emotions that cross cultural boundaries in the universality of the facial expressions they give rise to, three of which are fear, surprise, and disgust (Sauter 2408). Hitchcock, along with Herrmann, drew those three main emotions out by withholding music at critical junctures in tension, such as when Marion begins to shower and a shadow arises from behind the curtain, signaling to the audience the coming onset of danger. Additionally, only employing diegetic sounds of the water running in the shower then suddenly beginning such forceful, accented non-diegetic music creates a juxtaposition which leads to shock and surprise. Finally, the dreadful, permeating silence of Marion’s death is when the realization washes over and disgust at the event’s aftermath sets in, being reinforced by Hitchcock’s slow zoom out from Marion’s dead but open eye. Only a few diegetic sounds remain, such as the continuous shower running, the sound of Marion pulling down the shower curtain, and her falling to the floor. The bare, exposed nature of the end to this scene allows the audience to sit and take in this act of sudden violence with the shock and reflection that Hitchcock intended.
Although music buttresses on-screen visuals to engender horror, silence can be equally as effective to produce the desired effect. Silence has the power to permeate dread; the absence of a musical cue to expect something evil is perhaps even more significant than the presence of music, because it induces nervous suspense in preparation for the next ominous occurrence. Hitchcock himself believed “silence could be more sinister than any music,” and utilizes that hypothesis in switching between music and silence (Sullivan 23). A quintessential example of silence inducing dread and fear in Psycho is at the end of the shower scene. The audience is left to sit with what has just happened as Hitchcock trains the camera on Marion’s lifeless eye for 30 uninterrupted seconds, long enough for the shock of the event to sink in. Hitchcock denying the audience escape by not cutting to a different shot accentuates the effect of disgust, following fear and shock. Even though Herrmann’s score in Psycho is haunting, engrossing, and effective in aiding the visual storytelling, the lack of music and use of only diegetic sounds at the end of the shower scene instill a much more visceral reaction than if non-diegetic music had been relied upon.
Whether through score or silence, Hitchcock concocts a gripping tale of horror by accentuating the intensity of the film’s images with sound. Herrmann’s memorable score brings out the most striking moments to increase shock value; Hitchcock himself claimed he believes one third of Psycho’s power derives from its score (Sullivan 26). In addition to music creating tension, intermittent silence with only diegetic sound bridges the gaps between scenes with music to withhold tension and produce fear, shock, and disgust. These three basic emotions, as Ekman categorized them, are so primal to human survival that remaining focused on a shot that strongly causes a gut reaction of a basic instinctual emotion significantly increases the horror experienced by the viewer, as not being able to look away initiates an almost animalistic fear response. In horror films following Psycho, this technique was often used; filmmakers tended to linger on shots of particularly disturbing or frightening occurrences to force the audience to sit longer with fear. The enduring legacy of Psycho continues to penetrate the psyche of audiences in its all-consuming atmosphere and still inspires filmmakers to experiment with the use of sound and music, their role in intertwining or contrasting with image, and the effect of this combination on emotions today.
References
Figlerowicz, Marta. “Affect Theory Dossier: An Introduction.” Qui Parle, vol. 20, no. 2, 2012, pp. 3–18. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.20.2.0003. Accessed 16 Feb. 2023.
Gunning, Tom. “Hitchcock and the Picture in the Frame.” New England Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 2007, pp. 14–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40244980.
Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Psycho. Paramount Pictures, 1960.
Panksepp, Jaak. “The Cross-Mammalian Neurophenomenology of Primal Emotional Affects: From Animal Feelings to Human Therapeutics.” Journal of Comparative Neurology, vol. 524, no. 8, 2016, pp. 1624-1635.
Sauter, Disa A., et al. “Cross-Cultural Recognition of Basic Emotions Through Nonverbal Emotional Vocalizations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 107, no. 6, 2010, pp. 2408–12. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40536598. Accessed 16 Feb. 2023.
Sullivan, Jack. “Psycho: The Music of Terror.” Cinéaste, vol. 32, no. 1, 2006, pp. 20–28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41690433. Accessed 16 Feb. 2023.
Author Biography
Lena Streitwieser is currently a student in Trinity College Dublin and Columbia University’s Dual BA program in Film. She enjoys analyzing the impact of film scoring, the importance of coming-of-age films, and how life experience informs perspective in films. She is an independent filmmaker currently working on her sixth short film.
