Ask five random people to name one Alfred Hitchcock movie, and chances are good they’ll all say Psycho first, whether they’re classic-movie superfans who could name all his works going back to the British silent-movie days, or they couldn’t pick Hitch out of a crowd in one of his famous director’s cameos. You could argue all day with those people about whether Psycho is Hitchcock’s best movie, but it’d be hard to claim that anything else in his filmography has had more cultural impact or lasting reach, both on horror movies and on cinematic storytelling in general.
But while endless essays have been written about how Psycho’s boundary-pushing, censor-baiting action changed moviemaking, and while its biggest twists and famous central shower-murder scene have been so absorbed into pop-culture trivia knowledge that they don’t feel shocking out of context anymore, it’s easy to forget that Hitchcock’s most-discussed movie is still a terrific watch that holds up 65 years after release. With Psycho now streaming on Netflix, it’s easy for Hitchcock-lovers to revisit the movie, or for newbies to finally check out.
The real fun, though, is watching it as a double feature with Hitchcock’s only other R-rated movie, Frenzy, which is also on Netflix now. Watched back-to-back, they’re an incredible lesson in how fast art and culture changes — and how much impact one movie can have on those changes.
Psycho wasn’t always rated R — it was released in 1960, eight years before the Motion Picture Association launched the system of film ratings it still uses more or less uses today. The MPA didn’t rate Psycho until 1984, and the ratings organization’s notorious bias against nudity, sexuality, or sexual situations (especially in cases with any hint of queerness) likely came into play with this movie. In the era of phenomenally graphic horror that copies Psycho while getting lovingly anatomical about everything Hitchcock could only hint at, Psycho’s carefully edited, non-revealing shower-slasher sequence seems just as tame as the other once-transgressive, now-quaint elements that gave studio censors fits in 1960, like the gasp-inducing shot of a flushing toilet, or the opening-scene implication that a non-married couple has recently had scandalously non-married sex.
But Psycho isn’t a movie to watch for shocks, not after decades of other movies mining all Hitchcock’s innovations, and putting new spins on them. (Consider the mid-film protagonist-switch in Zach Cregger’s 2022 horror hit Barbarian, for instance, and how it borrows from Psycho’s structure.) Instead, it’s worth watching for the performances, the writing, the clever foreshadowing and tension-building, and above all, the creepy, indelible framing around Anthony Perkins as hotel proprietor Norman Bates.
Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
In particular, the quietly ominous scene where Norman sits down to chat with newly checked-in guest Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) about the “private traps” people build around themselves, then “scratch and claw” at without ever escaping, is a master class in character-building. It’s a terrific, queasy short melodrama that stands on its own even today. It’s also one of the many parts of Psycho that’s enhanced, rather than spoiled, by knowing where this story is going.
And the famous murder sequence still has a frightening power, when it’s viewed within the context of the story Hitchcock is telling. Out of context, it feels dated — but it plays differently when it comes after the slow-burn, intense build of Norman and Marion’s fleeting connection, the framing of the crime she commits before coming to his hotel, and the weight of all the things the audience learns about the stranger who’s watching and evaluating Marian from the moment she enters his orbit.
If you only know Psycho’s most famous, most culturally echoed moments — or if you’ve forgotten the rest of it because it’s been a while since you went back — the film is surprisingly satisfying and unpackable as a standalone movie experience, instead of as an Important Classic or grandfather-of-horror homework experience.
Frenzy, rated R and rightfully so
It’s hard to say the same of Hitchcock’s 1972 movie Frenzy, his only other R-rated project (in this case, justly rated R on release), one of his oddest movies, and another recent Netflix streaming addition. While Frenzy was adapted from Arthur La Bern’s 1966 novel, in many ways it plays as a stealth remake of Psycho for a much less rigid and easily offended age of cinema, and a much more lurid, permissive one.
Hitchcock made Psycho in the waning days of the Hays Code, the moral rules Hollywood imposed on movies to avoid government censorship. The Code mandated that evil acts must always be punished, Sunday school morals must be respected, and women in romantic scenes must always keep one foot on the floor. But even though Frenzy came only 12 years later, it was made in an age heavily influenced by Psycho and other boundary-pushing cinema: the era of exploitation cinema and giallo horror, an era where Frenzy’s protracted on-screen rape led to rave reviews instead of Hollywood blacklisting.
Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Even so, Frenzy’s beats are familiar from Psycho. Once again, there’s a serial murderer on the loose, a man who appears harmless and even charming, but who secretly murders women out of a tortured mixture of lust, spite, jealousy, and sociopathy. As before, the centerpiece of the movie is a murder sequence that mixes horror and grotesque sexual titillation. Again, mouthpieces dutifully explain the villain’s pathology to each other, and therefore the audience, in laughably stuffy hunks of undigested exposition. And then there’s the investigation of the murder we just watched, though this time, the cops are on the case instead of a PI and a couple of amateurs.
Some of the differences between Psycho and Frenzy are immediately obvious: Hitchcock made the former in black-and-white to save on budget, and it’s small-scale and intimate, shot in just a few settings. Frenzy, made in sometimes garish color, is much more visually expansive, starting from the opening helicopter shot roaming up the Thames and finding a tour group by the riverbank. Where Psycho is largely solemn or scary, Frenzy occasionally veers into extremely odd morbid humor. Sometimes that humor is playful — one of the characters, a Scotland Yard inspector investigating the movie’s central murders, is the center of a running gag where his wife keeps experimenting with fancy, unappealing French food, when he’d prefer simple steak and sausage. Other gags just feel distasteful, particularly the sequence where the killer wrestles with the stiffened naked corpse of one of his victims, and keeps getting a rigor-mortis-ified foot in his face.
But the real difference is in the permissiveness in Frenzy’s filmmaking, and the leering exploitation angles Hitchcock leans into. The director famously wrestled with the Production Code Administration office over small details in Psycho, where the censors complained they could see a hint of Janet Leigh’s out-of-focus breasts during the shower scene, and forced Hitchcock to shorten shots of Norman Bates looking through a peephole as Marion undresses. They also objected to the suggestion of premarital sex at the beginning of the movie. Reportedly, a single shot in the shooting script would have also included a shot of Marion’s corpse that would have briefly shown her buttocks.
Compare all this to Frenzy, where the open sequence features a woman’s naked corpse bobbing down the Thames, bare ass flashing in the sun, breasts exposed as the policeman haul her out. There’s a disturbing, in-depth (albeit somewhat carefully visually coded) rape sequence midway through the movie, and a number of naked female corpses. In Psycho, Hitchcock handles his murders with a certain sympathetic gravitas. Frenzy is a much more leering movie that sometimes feels completely miscalculated — particularly in the ridiculous shot of a woman just after her rape and strangulation. With her eyes bugged out and her tongue protruding at a weird angle, she doesn’t evoke the tragedy of loss, like Marion lying dead in the shower: She looks like she’s making a goofy face at someone behind the camera, like she’s trying to entertain a small, fussy child.
Frenzy isn’t entirely lacking in value: Its “wrong man accused” plot is more complicated and nuanced than most of Hitchcock’s wrong-man movies, particularly since the wrong man in this case is almost as frightening as the killer. Down-on-his-luck military vet Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) is bad-tempered, short-sighted, and abusive toward his supposed closest friends and loved ones. As a noose of circumstantial evidence against him tightens around his neck, his choices are selfish and sometimes cruel. His increasing rage and frustration gives the movie a sense of bite it needs, though, when it sometimes gets too languorous to maintain its tension.
Ultimately, though, Frenzy is most compelling as a movie when seen alongside Psycho, with the two movies in conversation. They’re the perfect illustration of how much and how fast American cinema changed from the 1960s to the 1970s, and how differently Alfred Hitchcock expressed the same goals and tastes in horror over the course of his career. Netflix’s Hitchcock collection is a perfect chance to catch up with his work, but there’s no better illustration of his highs and lows than this particular before-and-after double feature. It’s a film-history education in just two movies, a handful of radically differently styled murders, and a couple of director cameos.
Psycho and Frenzy are both streaming now on Netflix.
