Exploring How Alfred Hitchcock Manipulates The Audience In Psycho

For example, in the scene when the birds begin to attack the gas station in town, Hitchcock focuses greatly on the sound of birds cawing and flapping wings. This technique shows the viewer that the birds are the most important and dominant element of the scene, as well as making the viewer feel like they are partaking in the scene. The loud cries of birds and people make you feel anxious and apprehensive about the result of the scene and how the characters will be after the scene. Additionally, when the birds are about to break into the Brenner’s home through the chimney, the sounds of banging and thudding progressively gets louder. This increases the viewer’s anxiety about what the sounds are, why they are getting louder, and what is going to happen later through the plot. As you can see, Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” better uses and creates suspense by increasing sound to create a feeling of anxiety and apprehension in the

Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly --very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep.” His madness is definitely on a different level than just a psycho. He is insane and loosing it every moment of the story, repeating words and using disturbing metaphors and similes. He compares many things such as referring to the eye of the old man as the “evil eye”, and “eye of a vulture”. Metaphors are used constantly to confuse the readers. “I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye.”

     Hitchcock uses misery, tragedy, and death to show the emotions of his characters. At no point is this more obvious than the end of the movie. Hitchcock spends the entire movie building up to this point and in the end he makes it extremely clear how tragedy has changed the relationship of everyone. After the nagging husbands murder of his wife has been confessed you see

Shocking audiences of the 1960’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ is one of the most influential films in motion picture history, often being referenced to as the the origin of thriller films. Hitchcock successfully incorporates cinematography, music, and multiple techniques, rendering the perfect amount of tension and suspense right until the climax of the film. Thus, evoking the thrill after which the genre is named.

Personally to us, the director’s intention was to show how the psychology state of a man depending on his condition can affect his life and those around him. In this case, Norman Bates is affected by the various scenarios that happens in his life. His mother’s passing affected him the most as he murdered her. He took over his mother figure to get rid of guilt and started being her. He was in need of help, but he isolated himself from the outside world and this ‘mother’ personality had a very dominant role in his personal life which resulted in the murders he

In Rear Window, Hitchcock uses visuals in order to capture the perfect cinematic film and experience. We as the viewers identify with Jeff because much like how he is watching his neighbors, we are also speculating his life as a film. Our hero, L.B. Jeffries or “Jeff”, out of boredom creates an outdoor theater for himself by spying on his the people outside his window. Hitchcock uses “murder-as-entertainment” and the idea of watching a cinematic film as ways to captivate the viewers and make us subconsciously take part in intruding on someone else’s life. Hitchcock then punishes Jeff and the viewers for being “peeping toms” and casting our unwanted voyeurism on other people’s private lives. Through fear and embarrassment, Hitchcock puts our actions into perspective as we become self-conscious of our indecent objectification toward human lives.

Hitchcock’s Psycho is a great representative of horror and thriller genres. The director masterfully creates an atmosphere of suspense and creates tension. Hitchcock blends characteristics of a thriller with horror, making the audience terrified. The director creates situations that can happen to anybody of the viewers, and thus, makes such scenes even more scaring and disturbing. For instance, the scene of the murder in a shower impresses the audience to a

For example, if a confused or sarcastic voice was used when presenting evidence that Shirley Turner had murdered Andrew Bagby, then no one would believe she was capable of such an act. But by the negative connotations in narrations, viewers are malleable in their perspectives on the argument. By the middle of the film, we are all made to believe that Shirley Turner was the murderer, even with little evidence to go off of.

One of the most famous horror films not just of the 1960's but of all

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt is a true masterpiece. Hitchcock brings the perfect mix of horror, suspense, and drama to a small American town. One of the scenes that exemplifies his masterful style takes place in a bar between the two main characters, Charlie Newton and her uncle Charlie. Hitchcock was quoted as saying that Shadow of a Doubt, “brought murder and violence back in the home, where it rightly belongs.” This quote, although humorous, reaffirms the main theme of the film: we find evil in the places we least expect it. Through careful analysis of the bar scene, we see how Hitchcock underlies and reinforces this theme through the setting, camera angles,

more creative. This is a good point as if you have a film were there

does this by using a variety of shocking and unusual details and figurative language throughout

The films of Alfred Hitchcock all feature a cameo by the director himself, sometimes subtle and other times overt. Similarly to the visual cameos Hitchcock is known for, Nabokov deftly incorporates himself into his literary works through the use pseudonyms. Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory includes the character of “Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend”, who “used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time”(218). By using a pseudonym, Nabokov is in essence creating a stage name for him, which he can impart a sentiment through a thin guise of anonymity. Conversely, Hitchcock seeks to shatter anonymity that comes from being behind the camera by including himself in all his films. Hitchcock’s trademark appearance in Shadow of a Doubt is especially symbolic because it features the director, back to the camera holding a deck of cards, a clever nod to his authority and attention to

- From the films it is obvious that everybody else is potentially a victim, an accomplice, an accessory after the fact, a witness, or a sleuth. Hitchcock through his films have given a different perspective about life as a cliffhanger, where the life of the hero or his lover or adversary or bystander will be in danger, while the positive note is that there will be a reassuring presence of someone who will try to save the endangered person even if the survival is not so sure.

Before the Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock made its way into theaters across the world, film was produced in a completely different way. Some of the elements that were in Psycho were things that nobody saw in movies before. According to Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, when the movie came out, it took place in “an atmosphere of dark and stifling ‘50s conformity” and that the elements of the film “tore through the repressive ‘50s blandness just a potently as Elvis had.” (Hudson). Alfred Hitchcock changed the way that cinema was made by breaking away from the old, “safe” way of creating a movie and decided to throw all of the unwritten rules of film making out the window. The main ways he accomplished this task was by adding graphic violence, sexuality, and different ways to view the film differently than any other movie before its time.