As a long time horror fan, I’m quite interested in the new biopic of master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, which is simply titled Hitchcock.
The film is actually about the making of Hitchcock’s most notorious classic, Psycho, which is probably the veteran director’s most talked about film today. As you may recall, the shower scene is one of the most seen, studied, and legendary moments in cinematic history.
And as a long time metal fan, I was surprised to learn that the director of Hitchcock, Sacha Gervasi, also helmed the documentary Anvil, about the long lost Canadian band. The movie gave Anvil a new lease on life, and amused audiences who’d never heard of them before, but looked at them as somewhat of a real life Spinal Tap.
While metal fans often dig horror movies, it’s hard to think of there being a hard connection between the two films, although Cinema Blend believes they both “[drew] attention to artists whose influence goes unrecognized by the public.”
In the case of Hitchcock, they’re referring to Hitchcock’s wife Alma, who was Alfred’s closest confidant and coworker on his films. “I think she was a genius in her own way,” Gervasi told Blend. “With editing, with script, with all these things.”
As Gervasi continued, taking nothing away from the great master director, “Often with a great artist or genius, there’s someone lurking in the shadows a great partner who’s able to really say the right thing, do the right thing, and who can make the critical difference between something being okay, and something being great.”
Psycho has been considered by many to be the beginning of the modern horror film, and it’s hard to argue against that. It was one of the first times the monster wasn’t living in a castle in Transylvania, but here he was your next-door neighbor, a real person who’s hiding an awful psychosis behind his seemingly normal façade.
As far as what Hitchcock would think of horror films today, Gervasi told Blend, “I think he’d be absolutely pleased…I think he’d be rather pleased and proud and rather sickeningly satisfied…I think he would think here we are 52 years later still talking about [Psycho]. As far as he’s concerned, mission accomplished…”
