ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
June 16
“Oh, God, Mother—Blood, Blood!” Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho Is Released
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On
this date in 1960, the face of horror changed forever: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho opened at the DeMille and Baronet theatres
in New York City.
Audiences
queued around the block and, ever the showman, Hitchcock had insisted that no
one be admitted after the film began. What they witnessed in that hour and
forty-nine minutes not only rewrote what cinema could do to a human nervous
system, but was also one of the most complete explorations of the Jungian
shadow ever committed to film.
Hitchcock
certainly didn’t think of himself as an occultist—although his classic
filmography touches, at times, on both dream theory and the psychological
exploration of self. Raised in a British Catholic household, his films are
decidedly secular. Yet, the film he made in 1960 is saturated with esoteric
symbolism, whether intentional it or not: the house on the hill; the mirror as
a reflection of duplicity; the bird that watches with knowing eyes; the mother
who is not dead, but lived on a voice within her son’s psyche. Psycho is a grimoire of the unconscious, and
sixty-six years on it has lost none of its power…
Bloch’s Original “Norman”
Psycho’s psychological insights begin with the original novel and its author, Robert Bloch—himself a significant figure in the occult literary tradition, a close associate of H.P. Lovecraft's circle and a lifelong student of all-things strange (they inspired his fiction, after all). Bloch published Psycho in 1959, loosely inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein two years earlier, the Wisconsin serial killer who had been discovered living in a farmhouse with his mother's exhumed corpse and the body parts of numerous victims fashioned into household objects. Gein, too, had been found to have adopted his dead mother's personality, wearing her skin literally as well as psychologically; the heinous crimes shocked 1950s’ America, the violence and bizarre circumstances causing a wildfire of news coverage. But what Bloch did with this grim material was nothing short of “pulp alchemy,” transmuting the grotesque facts of the Gein case into a horror of depths—a study in what happens when the shadow consumes the self entirely. In a remark that should delight anyone who has spent time with the Western esoteric tradition, Bloch later explained his creative process: “Although I much prefer Jung if I have to stick with anybody, I decided to develop the story along Freudian lines.”
Bloch’s
Jungian instinct was correct; Psycho is Jungian to its bones, and the
Freudian framework the psychiatrist delivers in the final scene is one of
cinema's great red herrings. Hitchcock—already a powerhouse studio director
coming off a string of blockbuster films—was instantly drawn to adapting the
material. A notorious eccentric perfectionist, he purchased as many copies of
the Bloch novel as he could find to suppress the plot twists before release. When
Paramount initially refused to fund the project, citing the violence, sexual
themes, and complete absence of a traditional hero, Hitchcock financed the film
himself, shooting on a television budget in black and white with the crew from
his Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series. In hiring Janet Leigh,
one of the most recognizable bombshells in Hollywood, he gave the impression
that a major star would be the story’s driving force. And then he killed her in
the first act...
Then, of course, the iconic shower scene: seventy-eight camera setups, forty-five seconds of screen time, edited by the extraordinary George Tomasini to Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings; perhaps, the most written-about sequence in film history. But its esoteric function is often overlooked: Janet Leigh’s “Marion Crane” is not simply murdered, but is sacrificed in order to shatter all audience expectations. From the moment she slides down the shower wall, every assumption the audience has brought into the theatre is null and void. Now, they’re put over the shoulder into Norman's world—which is to say, we are in the world of the unintegrated shadow—and there’s no exit.
For this, Hitchcock and production designer Joseph Hurley created an entire immersion: the Bates Motel, standing in the shadow of the Bates family home—a decrepit mansion that, even in daylight, deliberately stands as a typical haunted house. Here, we see the superego made architecture, like Norman’s internalized maternal authority casting that shadow over every interaction that takes place below. (The motel itself is horizontal, modern, efficiently anonymous: very much like the world of the persona, or a “surface functionality.” The house, however, is vertical—Victorian, and very much alive with the past. Norman Bates, of course, occupies the space between, moving up and down between the two levels with the compulsive regularity of a man whose entire psychic life is organized around the maintenance of a boundary already broken.
Even in Bloch’s original novel, Norman is the “threshold figure,” and keeper of this liminal space. His parlor—stuffed with taxidermied birds, lit by a single lamp, presided over by a reproduction of the Rape of the Sabine Women—is the sanctum of his private mythology. (Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that Norman’s birds were chosen with care: “Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to Norman's masochism. He knows the birds and he know they're watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes.” The bird that watches from the dark and reflects the observer's guilt back at him—this is the “familiar” of the unconscious, a figure of Norman’s shadow-self. And Hitchcock put it in the frame and pointed the camera directly at it.)
“Mother” and the Annihilation of Self
Jung
described the shadow as “the sum of everything the individual refuses to
acknowledge about themselves,” acting as the repository of unacceptable,
denied, and repressed emotions. Left unexamined, it does not disappear. It
waits. And eventually, under sufficient pressure, it acts. As it stands, Norman
Bates stands as the most complete portrait of “shadow possession” in modern
cinema; not shadow work but, rather, shadow possession: the state
in which the unacknowledged, unintegrated contents of the unconscious have
grown powerful enough to displace the conscious self entirely.
Norman's psyche is completely overwhelmed by the “devouring mother”—Jung's term for the negative aspect of the mother archetype: possessive, consuming, refusing to allow the child to individuate and become a “self” separate from her own. “Norma Bates,” as we reconstruct her from fragments, was this archetype made flesh. She taught Norman that attachment to any other woman was a betrayal to their mother-son connection, and that the world beyond their property was a form of contamination. When she died (or, rather, killed by Norman himself, as revealed in a later installment in the franchise) the only way Norman could survive the loss was to carry her inside him. What the film shows us in its final sequence—Norman sitting in the cell, smiling, Mother's voice narrating from inside his skull—is not simply madness; it’s the completion of an inverted initiation. Norman has crossed the threshold, but in the wrong direction. Instead of integrating the shadow and emerging with expanded consciousness, he has been consumed by it. The self has been obliterated; only the archetype remains, wearing Norman’s face.
Psycho arrived in 1960 at the precise moment when the
Western world was still grappling with the radical instability of the self—largely
through Freud, Jung, and the first wave of psychedelic research. The
comfortable postwar consensus that the human personality was a fixed, reliable
thing was cracking, and Hitchcock presented Norman Bates was the crack made
visible: proof that the self was not a solid structure but a contested
territory; that the thing calling itself "I" might be sharing the
premises with something older, stranger, and considerably less governable.
And
that is an esoteric proposition. It’s also, sixty-six years after that
first New York screening, the proposition that anyone who takes the magical
path seriously eventually arrives at—not as horror, but as the beginning of
real work. Leave it to Hitchcock to introduce such a concept in one of the
greatest horror films ever made.
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