It’s one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, it took seven days to film, lasted just 3 minutes, and had 77 different camera angles providing 50 different cuts.
The infamous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, Psycho.
What else is the shower scene famous for? Yes, those piercing, shrieking violins, in tandem with Today the stabbing motion from the psychopathic killer of the title, in a score written by one of the greats of Hollywood music history, Bernard Herrmann.
“The shower sequence took up one third of my shooting time, actually. I worked three weeks on the movie. The shower sequence took seven days. That was a good chunk of my work… The scene itself was so brilliantly conceived. Mr Hitchcock brought us to this point where it became what we thought we saw, not what we saw.”
They were the words of Janet Leigh, recalling the rigours of filming the scene, and featured on the Today programme this morning, presented by Keelin Shanley.
Keelin was speaking to Olan McGowan in advance of two very special screenings of Psycho at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Halloween, Monday, October 31st, when the film will be rolled in sync with the live performance of that iconic soundtrack.
The shower scene, in particular, is something to behold, especially with a live orchestra. It’s a scene which has entered into Hollywood folklore, with rumours doing the rounds about how it was shot. Included in that folklore was a rumour that Hitchcock had instructed one of the crew to throw a bucket of ice cold water over the shower curtain where Janet Leigh was washing herself with warm water. All in the interests of getting an authentic scream from his star.
Not true, according to Janet Leigh. He was a gentleman, extremely patient and understanding. But one gem she did offer was in relation to the sounds they achieved to mimic a knife piercing through flesh.
“The sounds they used for the stabbing. He had a prop man bring various melons, and he would stab the melons and Mr Hitchcock wasn’t looking, but he knew what each one was. He said, ‘the casaba’.”
I bet you’ll never look at a melon the same way again. And just to go one further: the blood, draining out of the shower towards the end of the scene? That was actually chocolate syrup, which worked better in black and white than the standard red studio blood.
But it’s the music, as well as the pictures, that really create the atmosphere and the thrills in this Hitchcock classic, according to Olan McGowan.
The two screenings, featuring the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, take place at 3:30 PM and 8 PM this Halloween, Monday, October 31st, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin - more details here.
But there was so much more to this discussion, in relation to how this scream classic was made - listen to it in full below:
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