Movies - Psycho

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	Movies - Psycho

Psycho film, is a film genre. It is often regarded as a subgenre of the horror film, largely because the term itself was not widely used until Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
in 1960, setting off a string of related psycho-films in its wake. It has relied on most of horror's stock-in-trade stylistic conventions such as intense suspense leading to shock shots, gory killings, and a seemingly invincible evil menace.

It is the latter element that distinguishes it as a separate genre, however, for the evil menace here is human, not supernatural. The menace is a criminal, usually determined to have a mental illness or psychopathic personality (so "psycho") during the course of the film. It should be noted that the frequent use of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and split personality to explain the nature of the "psycho" frequently involves a wholly fictionalized interpretation of these real-life illnesses, which do not necessarily predispose their sufferers to violence.

Thus the consequences of the intrusion of a human evil into everyday life characterize the genre. The usual elements of this intrusion are bizarre and shocking acts of violence committed by characters such as adult males with abnormal relationships to their mothers, biker gangs, inbred families, hillbillies, cannibals, devil worshippers (albeit without a real devil) and religious cultists, rapists and sexual sadists, revenge-seeking thwarted narcissists, stalkers, child molesters and killers. The existence of such evil in the real world allows some overlap with the biographical genre, unlike most horror films. The conventional "mad scientist" may, however, ally the psycho genre with the horror, or more likely with the science fiction film.

Silent-Era Psycho Films

The first psycho film of note may have been The Phantom of the Opera, 1925, USA, starring Lon Chaney as a disfigured musical genius who in his madness has retreated to a lair in the sewers beneath the Paris Opera House. There he falls in love with a soprano, whom he watches from the secret passages of the opera house that comprise his world. He eventually abducts her to his quarters and, in a classic shock shot, his resistant love snatches off the mask he wears, revealing his hideously scarred face. While literary license may have been taken in determining the extent of his disfigurement, he is after all a human, and meets a tragic demise in a wholly natural way.

In England in 1927, Alfred Hitchcock added to the genre, making the first film adaptation of Marie Belloc-Lowndes's novel The Lodger, a tale of Jack the Ripper, a real-life psycho.

1930s and 1940s

Psycho films tended to be overshadowed during the classic film period in the USA by horrors and science-fiction films with horror elements, of the sort turned out by Universal Pictures, e.g. Frankenstein (1931). One noteworthy exception was Edgar Ulmer's version of The Black Cat
(1934) starring Boris Karloff as a devil-cult master intent on sacrificing a young bride who has become an accidental visitor to his home, and Bela Lugosi as a revenge-driven psychiatrist who tries to rescue her. In 1933 RKO offered The Most Dangerous Game, about a madman who hunts fellow human beings for sport on his isolated island home. Most famously, from Germany came Fritz Lang's M
, featuring a child stalker-killer played by Peter Lorre.

In 1945, the genre received something of a boost from two of RKO producer Val Lewton's films: a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher
, directed by Robert Wise and starring Boris Karloff as a grave-robber (following in the murderous footsteps of his mentors, Burke and Hare) psychologically tormenting the recipient of his "wares" (Henry Daniell); and Isle of the Dead
, also starring Karloff and directed by Mark Robson.

1960s and 1970s

In 1960 two films of particular importance to the psychological thriller or psychological horror genre were released: Psycho
by Alfred Hitchcock and Peeping Tom
by Michael Powell. These films initiated the slasher trend of the 1960s and 1970s.

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