Horror Film : Humans As The Monsters And Aliens

From a Psychodynamic perspective, Norman’s behavior springs from unconscious desires and childhood conflicts. Norman’s unconscious desires are to please his mother. Based on the Famous novel, Psycho, Norman’s mother, was very controlling. She mentally and physically abused him; and also drilled into his brain that all women, except herself, are dirty, untrustworthy, and evil. She taught him to never let himself have feelings for women. Once Norman was physically attracted to a woman, he would black out and murder her. When he snapped out of it, he wouldn’t remember a thing. His unconscious state, unlocked many unconscious motives. Norman’s behavior reflects his childhood conflicts with his mother. From a Psychodynamic perspective, Norman was turned

Normans mother is dead, but is alive in the mind of Norman. She is therefore dominating Normans mind. Alfred Hitchcock makes us infer that the mother was alive throughout the film. This manipulates the audience throughout the film. The audience thinks that the mother is alive, and therefore, she can potentially be the killer in the film.

King begins this article with the attention grabbing statement, “I think that we’re all mentally ill: those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better—and maybe not all that much better, after all.” (King, 2013, p 641) Even if his readers immediately disagree, he has accomplished capturing their attention. Next he describes a few crazy behaviors that are common to most people: talking to oneself; making faces when no one is looking; and giving in to irrational fears of snakes, the dark, tight places, and things lurking where we cannot see them. Most people can relate to these behaviors and can reason this is true. He then moves on to explain how we face these fears and give our emotions a break by watching a horror movie. He likens this to a roller coaster that is a mixture of fun and delicious terror as it takes its participants by surprise with a 360-degree loop or, “plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop.” (King, 2013, p 641) The next example pulls on the emotion inside his readers to measure up to the perfect standard of beauty. He says horror films tend to make people feel more normal because the comparison is so grotesque that the readers know, “we are still light-years away from true ugliness.” (King, 2013, p

Since it’s infancy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, horror has followed certain conventions that results in an awakening of the senses, evoking intense emotions of fear and terror in the audience. Horror feeds off triggering the primal fears embedded within all of humankind, creating a sense of menace that is the very substance of this genre. Furthermore, the central menace of a piece tends to enlighten the human mind to the world of the paranormal and the enigmatic, dark side of the unknown. The movie “Psycho” directed by Alfred Hitchcock is a perfect example. Infamous for its shower scene, but immortal for its contribution to the horror genre, “Psycho” was filmed with great tact, grace and art in regards to horror conventions.

Alfred Hitchcock in the film Psycho and Peter Shaffer in his stage production Equus both explore the true nightmares that manifest from sexual and emotional repression. The writers emphasise the motives and the reason for the characters actions opposed to how the causations of this repression occurred. Conversely, both works draw on the common theme of the disturbed human psyche, offering a critical perspective on the upbringing of each individual with regards to their early development, each characters subcontious fixations and abnormal behaviours through the use characters behaviours and representations. The characters Norman Bates and Marion Crane in Psycho and Allan Strang and Martin Dysart of Equus all face internal struggles against

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.

People watch horror films to renew their feelings of normality. Caught up in our lives, we all begin to lose our sense of feeling like a normal person. By watching the peculiar events and characters in a horror movie, a person can replenish their normality. Stephen King offers another example from a horror movie that compares humans to the ugly personae in a horror movie--“Freda Jackson as the horrible melting women in Die, Monster, Die!” (King, “Why We 1) makes us feel, to put it bluntly, normal. King continues to use this example to prove we are “light- years from true ugliness” (King “Why We 1). Humans require the strangeness of horror movies to demonstrate they are normal. A short story by King represents an example on how to compare a “regular” person to the main character of the story “Strawberry Spring.” King states that everyone is a tiny bit insane, and they need horror films to contain their insanity. King describes how even a “normal” person has a minuscule piece of insanity living inside them, “ Your insanity leads you only to talk to your self when you are under stress” (King, “Why We” 2). The average person has a mild case of insanity and to view a horror movie or read a terrifying story about strange characters it reestablishes their sense of normality. In “ Strawberry Spring” the main character loses control of his own mind when the fog comes. When he loses control he carves

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

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

Throughout cinema, there has always been space in our hearts for the gore and intrigue that come from horror films. Though they come with different plots, there remains “the monster”, the character that brings along disgust, horror, suspense, and even sympathy. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), our monster is Norman Bates, the boy next door. This was one of the first times in American cinema that the killer was brought home, paving the way for the future of horror movies. According to Robin Wood in “An Introduction to the America Horror Film” (183-208), Bates follows the formula of the Monster being a human psychotic. This is conveyed through his normal façade portrayed with his introduction, the audience’s ambivalence, the use of

Norman is criminalized but as a psychotic he cannot be kept in prison and so is put in an asylum. He cannot be justified even though he has gotten away with Marion for the sake of his long dead mother. The obsession and love for his long dead mother never help him to lead a normal life. Norman’s love for his mother makes him act like her and from his point of view his actions are right which is very clear from the parlor scene. Here the son who has lost his father early and a mother who has to marry another one are not responsible. The mother fixation of Norman is to be blamed entirely for his tragedy and others. Social institutions like marriage and family are involved here. The crime here is premeditated and violent. Norman Bates contorted by psychosis and dual personality syndrome, acts out his homicidal urges in the guise of his dead mother. His masochism suffers while seeing a sexually attractive woman as he already had a substitute marriage with his mother. Compelled by the split personality syndrome, he commits the crime and at the same time tries to protects her crime and destroys the evidence by washing the blood from the floor and dumping Marion’s body along with the

When "Bates Motel" begins, Norman seems to be a normal teenage boy, who is a bit of an introvert. He prefers school work and reading to going out and being social. He has an extremely

Sigmund Freud 's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Development states that there is a structural model of the psyche, which splits the human identity into three instances of Ego, Superego, and ID. In Psychoanalytic Stage of Development, there are five stages: Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital. Even though Sigmund Freud never was writing about the movie _Psycho_, theories of Freud, have a great connection with the personality of Norman Bates. According to Oedipus complex, by Sigmund Freud, it introduced the term for a child 's libidinal attachment to the opposite sex parent, while experiencing jealousy and dislike of the same

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.

Alfred Hitchcock is widely considered one of the most essential directors of all time and has undeniably revolutionized the cinematic art form and horror genre movement. A key ingredient to his productions is the psychoanalysis of the movie’s villains and the deceivery at comes with deep psychosis. These elements are what have taken Hitchcock from a good director to a legend. Hitchcock layers his movies in ways in which every time one watches his films they can pick up on a new detail that deepens the meaning and effects of the storyline. This is exactly what he does in his 1960 film, Psycho. By layering Freudian psychoanalysis, creating a twist ending and suspense, and giving the villain of the story, Norman Bates, a deeply rich background story, Hitchcock creates phenomenon in the audience arguably scarier, then Norman’s murders. Through this use the psychoanalysis and backstory, the audience also feels sympathy for Norman. This duality is what makes Hitchcock a wonderful artist and Psycho, a piece of art.