Psycho

    Accustomed to today’s fast-paced thrillers that frequently depend on visually disturbing makeup and prosthetics and shocking the audience with figures popping out of the darkness, viewing Psycho was a unique experience that used a variety of techniques to create a suspenseful masterpiece.  Alfred Hitchcock did not sacrifice a complex storyline or characterization for terror and suspense.  He killed off the main character, and created tension between scenes with varying tempos, and dialogue between fear of the unknown and what pops out in front of us.  The viewer comes to understand the characters and their motives, even Norman Bates, when killers traditionally aren’t profiled or interpreted as anything except evil.  Montage contributes to the audience’s understanding of the characters because it narrows the viewer’s attention to a detail, and throughout the movie, scenes are mixed with shots of each character reacting to the storyline's events, creating more comprehensive scenes. Montage was used in one of the final scenes, when the action cut between Sam questioning Bates in the motel’s office, and Lila sneaking into Bates’ house in search of his mother. This montage creatively showed the progression of time as Sam and Lila struggled to solve this mystery, sped the tempo of the film making the rising action feel hectic, and culminated at the climax when Lila encountered Mrs. Bates’ skull and Norman Bates revealed himself as the murderer.