If a group of people gathered, there was a bomb under the table in the house. You only tell the story of a group of people, and then they were blown up, and the story has no suspense.
But if you tell the reader in advance of the bomb's existence, and then turn the focus to that group of people, the audience will always pay attention to the reaction of that group of people and when the bomb explodes.
This is Hitchcock's famous "bomb theory", as a world-famous film master, he made a large number of thriller suspense films, and his "Pstycho" was also imitated by later horror film directors.
Like Hitchcock's other films, Horrors follow Hitchcock's tradition of "creating suspense with a simple story", which is divided into two parts: the first half of which shows the heroine Marion absconding in a car with $40,000 in public funds and being killed in a hotel; and the second half in which boyfriend Sam and Marion's sister Leela investigate Marion's whereabouts.
On the lens scheduling ability of a good director
This three-minute-long driving scene, almost all of which are close-ups of the heroine's face, test the actor's acting skills and the director's camera scheduling, and adopt the expression of sound and picture alignment, which not only shows the nervousness of the heroine but also explains the follow-up of the unit to learn that the heroine is missing with money.
This set of shots is a before and after comparison shot of the male protagonist Norman and Marion talking, the first is a flat shot, the two talk normally, when the topic gradually becomes intense, the camera turns to a back shot, coupled with the gaze of the owl behind, depression and tension follow.
Marion then returns to the room, where Norman removes the frame and peeks out of the hole to Marion, who is on the other side, who is about to take a bath. This close-up of the pupil renders the overall horror atmosphere and paves the way for suicide in the bathroom behind.
The most amazing famous scene in the film is the scene of Marion being killed in the bathroom, the ultimate montage technique, just 48 seconds, 78 quick cut shots, although there is no bloody scene, the powerless Marion still received a bento in the 48th minute, and also brought an unprecedented thriller experience to the audience at the time.
And this shower shot has also caused many film lovers to speculate about how to shoot such a clean water shot with the shooting technology of 1960.
Blood mixed with bath water into the drainage hole of the bathtub, the vortex slowly became Marion's godless eyes, as far as the film technology of that year is concerned, this transition can only be said to be bullish, now think of Wen Ziren's "Dead Silence" also uses the drainage hole and the pupil transition, somewhat homage to the meaning.
A good director arranges the truth long before the ending
The specimen bird here implies that the male protagonist's mother has died a long time ago, which is a dry bone like a specimen, and also foreshadows the inferiority of the maternal personality of the male protagonist later.
The full version of this upstairs posture is that the male protagonist twists and turns up the stairs, which also confirms that the male protagonist has another female personality, through the back he carried his mother downstairs, the mother and he did not make a sound at the same time and did not resist the action, the female personality is the male protagonist's deceased mother.
In the end, the smile of the male protagonist can be called textbook acting. Through his self-talk, we can guess that the male protagonist has indeed split into two personalities, one is himself and the other is his mother. Out of love for his mother, he stole his mother's corpse to accompany him, and the mother's personality, which was finally judged to be a crime by the psychiatrist, was actually disguised by Norman himself.
The bomb must not explode, and if the bomb does not explode, the audience will always be worried
Hitchcock's horror films never start with ghosts, but psychologically break down the defenses of the protagonist and the audience. As the "Horror Story" that brought horror films to the peak of the sixties, not a single shot in the whole film was wasted, coupled with montage editing techniques, skillful lighting scheduling, and just the right sound effects, together completed this masterpiece.
Marion absconded with $40,000, very panicked along the way, panicked to see his boss on the road will have a sudden change in face, but the police who meet randomly on the road can detect that she is wrong and track her, with sound effects, the audience will unconsciously substitute for this panic.
From marion being pushed into the swamp by Norman, although we are not sure whether the murderer is Norman, Norman is definitely a dangerous person, so when the inspector goes alone to send the head, when Lila and Sam go to investigate the truth, the audience's heart is also raised to the throat eye.
Unlike other horror films, "Horror" is more of a sense of tension about the unknown, a shock from the depths of the heart, a psychological horror film, although the cost is very low, but Hitchcock's clever montage method easily manipulates the audience's psychology, enough to leave a very important footprint in the history of horror movies.