Before the work of Hitchcock, the horror genre was largely dominated by films depicting supernatural creatures such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster instead of the slashers and serial killers associated with modern horror cinema. Hitchcock’s thrillers and horrors, films including Vertigo, The Birds and most notably, Psycho were instrumental in marking this transition.
Psycho, with its shocking murder of the female lead in the shower by the fictional serial killer Norman Bates, made film history despite its low budget. This was due to the powerful performances of the lead actors, the chilling score and suspenseful cinematography, not to mention the violence that shocked 1960s audiences, and still has the power to unsettle modern viewers to this day.
The continuing influence of Psycho in the modern film and TV industry is obvious, with films such as Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre taking inspiration and furthering the idea of the serial killer trope in horror. Most recently, the Netflix drama Monster: The Ed Gein Story has pushed Psycho back into the public eye, as allegedly both the film and the original novel by Robert Bloch were based on the Ed Gein case, with both portraying similar psychologically damaging mother-son relationships.
However, many of Hitchcock’s forays into the horror genre proved to be terrifying not only for cinemagoers but also for the actors who worked on the projects. In The Birds for example, in the famous scene where the attic is invaded by thousands of birds, the lead actress Tippi Hedren was pelted by live birds despite promises to the contrary, adding a sense of real fear to her acting. Despite the use of real birds throughout the film, the technology was improving, allowing for some new special effects to be used in Hitchcock’s horror, including mechanical birds which had been used in some previous scenes. Arguably, the film inspired many others in the apocalyptic horror subgenre with its bleak tone and ambiguous ending – the harsh cries of the birds being the only soundtrack.
Although not belonging to the horror genre themselves, Hitchcock’s thrillers have also been important in inspiring future psychological horror films. Vertigo, for example, contains haunting dream sequences intermingled with themes of ghosts and possession – perpetuating ideas of ancestral hauntings that remain popular to this day.
Overall, Hitchcock’s work was groundbreaking for its time and into the modern day, subverting ideas about the horror genre, using effects and camera work to create horror classics that have inspired many later works.
