Hitchcock - Genre and Audience

The film Psycho (1960) is a thriller/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This film was one of influential horror films in history. It inspired the films such as the Friday the 13th series, the Halloween series, the Scream series and many other films along with a whole horror sub-genre called, "slasher." Psycho is categorized under the thriller/horror category because of it's cinematography, act and sound design. The cinematography really utilized quick cutting and blocking to give the audience suspense and manipulate their emotions. The act helped manipulate the emotions of the audience too because of violence and gore in the film. At the time, violence and gore like Hitchcock used in the film was rare and unmoral, but stretched the boundaries for film. In all horror films, sound design plays a big role. Whether its the score or the sound effects, it could make a film, a horror film. This film had suspenseful soundtrack to go along with it's suspenseful cinematography. Music in horror films are always kind of slow and have a build up that get the audiences' hearts pumping. The sound effects are big part in horror too like knife stabs, footsteps and other eerie things like that. In this movie specifically, during the infamous "shower scene," the knife stabs and screams sound so real and would scare people out of their shoes. Rumor has it that they stabbed some sort of meat to get that almost real sound to stabbing human flesh. From this film, we can tell that Hitchcock was really into manipulating the emotions of the audience. He wanted to be able to make the audience feel like they were really in the film and have the emotions that the characters seemed to have. The film can attract many theme's, but the main one is "you get what you deserve." Because of Marion's thief actions, she was murdered which is like karma in a way. The target audience is adults and he addresses them by his mature genre of the film.