The Soundtrack to Your Demise - Psycho (1960)

aka the string orchestra explosion of your dreams

That’s right, just like with One Good Scare, we start this recurring segment off properly with a trip to the Bates Motel. Come in. There’s a lovely shower you can use…

Spoilers for Psycho, so just in case you haven’t seen it, you are warned.

Also, you should probably stop reading and go and watch it and then come back if you haven’t seen it, tbqhwy.

I have stressed this before and I will stress this once again, dear readers: I am not an academic, and I am not able to give you an academic dissection of arguably horror’s most famous piece of music. I can however feel my way through it with you through the lens which I use for all matters on this Substack: that of storytelling.

And clown-nosed yapping, of course.

Anyway, I don’t need to really introduce this one, do I?

Two things we need to know to delve in

1) who the hell is Bernard Herrmann?

Bernard Herrmann, looking decidedly unimpressed there

Born Maximillian Herman on July 29th, 1911, Bernard Herrmann was the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origins. His father was the one who encouraged him in musical activity, taking him to the opera and encouraging him to learn the violin. Once Herrmann won a composition prize at the age of thirteen, he decided to focus on music and attended both New York University and the prestigious Juilliard School.

He worked as a staff conductor for CBS (later working his way up to chief conductor to their symphony orchestra) and made a name for himself as an invigorating influence on radio music, often championing rarely heard and newer works. During this time, something crucial happened: he met Orson Welles, and started collaborating with him on scores for his radio plays. He conducted the infamous live performance of Welles’s adaptation of The War of the Worlds and wrote his first film score for Welles’s Citizen Kane, receiving his first Academy Award nomination in the process.

His association with director Alfred Hitchcock started with the score for The Trouble with Harry, and would last until a disagreement over the score for Torn Curtain abruptly ruptured the partnership. It was, unfortunately, never mended, and Herrmann died on Christmas Eve 1975, shortly after completing his final score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. He left behind a formidable body of work on radio, television and in film soundtracks, as well as the legacy of one specific piece of music that came to define horror soundtracks…

2) what the hell is Psycho?

…

Alright, just because you do need some context as to the story of Psycho in order to understand how the theme comes into play, here’s a very quick summation of Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1960 horror masterpiece.

Adapted from the 1959 novel of the same name by writer Robert Bloch, Psycho both is and isn’t the story of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a real estate secretary from Phoenix who steals $40.000 in cash from her employer after her boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), complains that his debts are delaying their marriage. After stealing the money, she sets out to drive to Sam’s home in Fairvale, California, switching cars on the way after catching the eye of a suspicious policeman.

Caught in a rainstorm, Marion is forced to stop at a motel a few miles outside Fairvale. The motel - Bates Motel - is owned by a man named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Soft-spoken and gentle seeming, Norman lives near to the motel in an ornate, Second Empire-style home, and Marion overhears him speaking tensely to his mother regarding his invitation for Marion to dine with him.

They have dinner and while the chat seems fairly harmless, Norman gets terse when Marion brings up the idea of having his mother institutionalized. Marion returns to her room, having decided to drive back to Phoenix the following morning to return the money. Unfortunately, fate has other plans for her - and as she takes a shower, a shadowy figure gains entry to the room and cruelly stabs Marion to death. Not long after, Norman comes to check on Marion and is horrified to find her dead. He calmly cleans up the murder scene, putting her body, her belongings and (unbeknownst to him) the cash in her car before sinking it in the swamp.

The story cuts to a week later, switching the focus to the film’s real protagonist, Marion’s sister Lila Crane (Vera Miles), who arrives in Fairvale looking for answers to her sister’s disappearance. She informs Sam that Marion is missing, and together the two decide to investigate further, eventually untangling the complicated truth at the heart of the Bates Motel and its proprietor…

so about that theme then

When we talk about the score from Psycho, we mainly talk about two things: the main theme, and The Murder aka the shower scene cue. Hitchcock insisted Herrmann score the film, despite the fact that they were working with a lower budget. Herrmann initially refused to accept a lower fee, but eventually came on board and wrote the score for a string orchestra rather than a larger symphonic orchestra. This results in a score which basically acts as a giant warning sign from the beginning.

A thought experiment: imagine yourself sitting down to watch the latest Hitchcock film in 1960. You see Janet Leigh’s name on the poster, you see that opening where Sam and Marion are in bed together, and you think “this is going to be a romance”. But something’s not right. The score is not right. The score playing over the opening titles is more akin to a mounting panic attack, all screeching strings hurtling forwards. It informs the audience before the film itself even knows that things will not end well for Marion.

The scene that to me is the most effective use of the main theme is the scene in which Marion is driving away with the money. Over the theme, we hear snippets of dialogue: the man at the car dealership puzzled at her offering him $700 in cash, her boss and colleague discussing why she’s not at work. We cut from the road, to Marion to the road, to Marion, a mounting panic in her eyes as it gets darker and darker outside, a bite of the lip, eyes wide and watery as the rain outside begins to pour. She struggles to focus on the road, and eventually she pulls over. The theme stops, as through the rain clouding the windshield, Marion can make out a sign for the Bates Motel.

Her fate is sealed.

But we don’t know that yet.

All we know is something is wrong. We just don’t know what it is.

the murder

There have been so, so fucking many words written about the shower scene. It’s one of the most famous scenes, not just in horror cinema but in cinema, period. Hell, there’s an entire documentary dedicated to the filming of this one sequence (Alexandre O. Philippe’s 2017 documentary 78/52, named after the fact that the scene contains 78 camera setups and 52 cuts). It has been paid homage to, parodied, referenced in so many ways that fucking TV Tropes has an entire page dedicated to it. If you know about Psycho, the chance is that the first thing you know about it is this scene.

But again, think yourself into a cinema seat in 1960. And think about how you would react seeing Janet Leigh, the supposed star of this movie, stabbed to death in the shower one-third of the way through the plot. Hitchcock played off of Bloch’s approach to his novel, in which he repeatedly introduced sympathetic protagonists only to kill them off, playing on the reader’s expectations of traditional plots, leaving them uncertain and anxious. And because Hitchcock was a little rascal when it came to messing with the viewer, he recognized the effect this may have on an audience and utilized it in his adaptation, blindsiding the audience by killing Marion at the end of the first act.

Originally, Hitchcock wanted the scene to be unscored, but after Herrmann played him the cue he had written for the scene, Hitchcock changed his mind and approved the use of the cue. When Herrmann reminded Hitchcock of his instructions to not score the shower scene, Hitchcock replied (and yes, you may read this in your best Hitchcock voice): “Improper suggestion, my boy, improper suggestion.”

To imagine the shower scene without The Murder is a bizarre thing; it is so intrinsic to the storytelling of the movie, so important in putting us into Marion’s point of view that I almost cannot believe Hitchcock ever thought to leave it without music. The Murder pierces through the quiet as the shower curtain pulls back to reveal Marion’s shadowy assailant, the stabs of the knife made into stabs of string instrument. The music is Marion’s reaction, the sheer panic of the moment, the struggle as she tries and fails to fight her attacker off. It is a brutal moment, because only moments before we see Marion at ease for the first time. She’s safe in the shower, safe from the outside world and her impulsive decision to steal the money and go on the run. Her ease is horridly stripped away from her in a matter of seconds, and when the killer retreats, we watch her, slowly sinking into her death, managing to pull the shower curtain down with her last strength. The blood washes away in the still-running water, the soundtrack now still as Marion lies, lifeless, her body folded over the rim of the bath.

We are one-third of the way through the movie and everything we think we know about this story has just been pulled from under us. As a filmmaker, Hitchcock was above all things a trickster. A god of chaos. And arguably, this stands as his most audacious trick. But would it have worked half as well without Herrmann’s most famous musical cue?

One can but wonder.