Psycho vs. Peeping Tom

psycho by an eyebrow

There's a thread on Peeping Tom; couldn't find one specifically on Psycho, but I probably just missed it. It's such an obvious poll: both appear in the same year, together they probably mark the beginning of the modern horror film (define that however you want), and both have considerable critical cache--I wouldn't even be surprised if Powell's film now has more. Both central characters are off-the-chart perverse. I love them both; I might give a slight edge to Powell's film, which I think is the better overall acted film, but Perkins and Leigh and Balsalm are all great.

"Balsam."

Oh--I thought about throwing in Night of the Hunter, which appeared a few years earlier, and making it a three-way match--in many ways it fits--but it's harder to make a case for that as a horror film.

Peeping Tom is a great and fascinating film but Psycho is a masterpiece imo. Psycho easily despite the tough competition.

Peeping Tom by a reasonable amount, though both films are great. There is something about Peeping Tom that seems to me to be much more advanced, much more modern - the student half of me is wanting to say something about how it is at least partially because its psychology is more Lacanian than straight Freudian, but I think I may get beaten on for that.

Psycho is ironic Freudian, tho

poll should have included Repulsion

Yeah, I can see a case for Repulsion, although Deneuve's character is surely less willfully malevolent than Norman Bates or Mark Lewis. There's only one way to resolve this: a totally gratuitous photo of Catherine Deneuve.

http://coosacreek.org/mambo/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/catherine_deneuve.jpg

peeping tom is dated while psycho is still ahead of our time.

In terms of the psychology or stylistically? Psychologically, I'd be inclined to think the opposite.

Peeping Tom is a great and fascinating film but Psycho is a masterpiece imo. Psycho easily despite the tough competition.

I think there's more to be said about the ideas of "Peeping Tom" than the ideas of "Psycho" - maybe - but the all-around big picture of "Psycho" is pretty indomitable. Just so many people working at the top of their game. Herrmann, Hitchcock. Tomasini, the actors. Though now that I look at it, it's curious the DP didn't do much more of note.

well, he was AJH's DP from the TV show

No need to play down either of these films at the expense of the other, they each do their own thing brilliantly. I'm voting Psycho by the thinnest of margins because I like its background scenes just a little better than PT's, chilly post-Noir versus lurid Guignol-y seediness.

Is Frenzy Hitch's Peeping Tom tribute?

frenzy, now that's an awful film. at least by hitchcock's standards.

baloney

If you want to see a truly insane Peeping Tom tribute, try De Palma's Raising Cain.

Frenzy is great, and return to form after the wretched and boring Topaz.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Is peeping tom the one with brit-accented haley mills and the whistling?

If you want to see a truly insane Peeping Tom tribute, try De Palma's Raising Cain.

― clemenza, Tuesday, June 8, 2010 1:04 AM (3 days ago)

YES. love this movie and it is totally deranged

I called 60/40 for Psycho; final result, 58/42. (If I hadn't voted for Peeping Tom myself, it would have been exactly 60/40.) I'm contacting Nate Silver for a job.

Is peeping tom the one with brit-accented haley mills and the whistling?

That's Twisted Nerve. Tarantino used that whistling theme in "Kill Bill."

i watched psycho recently for the 1st time in years. definite classic. theres a quote on the wiki where hitch gives 33% of the credit of it working to the music. honestly, that might be underselling it imo

I haven't watched Peeping Tom in quite some time, but I also re-watched Psycho not too long ago, and yeah, it's just great all around. Those opening credits and music are such an attention grabber. Perhaps my favorite Saul Bass thing, and that's saying a LOT.

I saw Spartacus a couple of months ago and loved Bass's opening credits.

theres a quote on the wiki where hitch gives 33% of the credit of it working to the music. honestly, that might be underselling it imo

otm. saw psycho at seattle's benaroya hall a while back, projected on a huge screen with the local symphony orchestra playing along. was glorious, and renewed my appreciation of the film and its music (not that either really needed the boost). assume that universal provides music-free copies for the purposes of the events like this, but i don't really know.

Ken Mogg in Senses of Cinema on Psycho, Milton, and Hitchcock's relation to Catholicism (part one).

Milton’s sonnet sets side by side two halves of a central Christian paradox: (1) that God insists on humans engaging in the work of His kingdom; (2) that He needs nothing they can do or give. But poor Marion Crane, feeling that her life is wasted, decides on an impulse to steal $40,000 from her boss in Phoenix and heads for boyfriend Sam in smalltown California. The situation of both film and poem is like the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” one we saw in Kaiser’s play From Morn till Midnight. Marion’s motive is very human – she wants to get married and have a baby – and that particular money must have seemed to her wasted on someone else’s “sweet little baby”, the pampered daughter of oil millionaire Cassidy. The mistake she makes is the decidedly “un-Miltonic” one of clutching at “life”! Instead of “waiting,” she commits an act of blind folly and is cruelly repaid. (In this respect, her death beneath the halo-like shower nozzle corresponds to that of Kaiser’s cashier at the foot of a crucifix, declaiming “Ecce Homo”.) At the moment of her death, Hitchcock is sardonic: the camera dissolves from Marion’s stilled eye to the bath’s plughole, then pans to the now “useless” money concealed in a folded newspaper. (Something of this carries over to the film’s last shot with, arguably, a parallel in Au Hasard, Balthazar.) All very squalid. So much for Marion’s implicit wish, just before she entered the shower, to restore her soul by presenting her “true account”.

http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature-articles/hitchcocks-psycho-part-one/

there is now a feature docufilm on the shower scene, titled 78/52. Check out the Q&A guest here:

http://www.bam.org/film/2017/78-52

video essay made to order

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/video-essay-psycho-tom

https://scontent.fman1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/131247690_10158953335884679_5276224536190407810_o.jpg?_nc_cat=107&ccb=2&_nc_sid=e3f864&_nc_ohc=Pgs7vMGzRv4AX94o559&_nc_ht=scontent.fman1-2.fna&oh=727f40d2b1c053089bb1be0c9c440f6a&oe=5FF85C50

Out of the blue, a restoration of Peeping Tom is playing a nearby rep theatre this weekend.

Went to the above-mentioned screening tonight. I think I saw Peeping Tom for the first time in the early '80s, a late-late-night airing at 3:00 in the morning or something. (I would stay up for such things at the time--not a lot of other options.) I must have read about it somewhere to have noticed it in the listings.

When I rate it on the last-x-movies thread in a few weeks, I'll split the difference and give it an 8.0: 10.0 for how audacious (or perverse, take your pick) and masterful it is, and 6.0 because it's just not a film that I have any desire to see more than once every decade or two. I think I spotted images and lines tonight that are specifically (I'll avoid the i-word) alluded to in Persona and Rosemary's Baby (a line that may have originated with Ira Levin's book), and I wondered it the great last line in De Palma's Blow Out ("It's a good scream") might be a sideways quotation of a scene in Peeping Tom.

What ever prompted the guy who made The Red Shoes to make this?!