Psycho - Thriller Opening - Harry's post

Excluding the lengthy opening sequence the first shot is an extreme long shot of a city; it pans around and then zooms in on a certain tower of flats, at different intervals of this shot it tells you which city it is, what the date is and what time of day it is.

The non-diagetic music that is being played is very dated suspense music, you would not expect it in a modern film, but as this was released in 1960 it would have worked very well back then.  

It then starts to zoom into a single room panning round yet again to a women lying on a bed, instantly it is obvious she is stereotypical eye candy; blond hair, slim figure and accentuated breasts to put it mildly. 

If you know much about movies you will know that Alfred Hitchcock went against the grain when making 'Psycho' in pretty much every way possible by things like; the bursts of violence and sexual explicitness. The sexual explicitness is already obvious here by the way Hitchcock has placed Vera Miles and what her costume is  like (pure white and quite slim fit). 


One of the next shots is a medium shot of Miles with John Gavin in the background lying topless on a bed. The setting is a small room with a dresser and chair in it.  We find out through the dialogue that it is a motel room and they are meeting in secret.

The fact Hitchcock decided to film this in black and white doesn't allow me to analyse the lighting. Hitchcock decided on this for two main reasons, one was that he thought filming it in colour would make it too gory for audiences to view, the other was that he wanted to keep the costs of the film as low as possible trying to keep it under $1,000,000.