Spooky Scary Skeletons

I love horror movies of all kinds- from the Alien movies, to The Silence of the Lambs, to even the Saw films (or at least the first couple of them). While blood and gore can sometimes be fun and a good time, the real scary stuff is elsewhere. I like psychological thrillers, movies that make you think, draw conclusions, be paranoid about what's right around the corner for the characters, literally perhaps (although jumpscares have to be done right in order to have merit in my book). The ones that leave an impression are the ones that screw with my mind.

Psycho is the classic horror movie at its core. Whereas in Jaws, you almost never see the shark, in Psycho, you never actually see the face of the assailant until the very end of the film where everything is revealed. When attacking Marian, the face is kept as a silhouette. The only real view of the assailant as he stabs Arbogast is a top-down shot. The film kept this information from the viewer on purpose- the less the viewer knows about the danger, the more scary the danger is. It's the same reason people are afraid of the dark- they can't see the potential danger. Humans need information. We feel better knowing everything so we can properly analyze the situation and make decision. But when the audience is kept mentally in the dark during a horror film, they don't know what to think. And this was shown to an audience not accustomed to such movies like we are. I can't imagine the thought process that accompanied the reveal that the mother died years ago.

There were many other defining parts of Psycho. Need I mention the music? The scores from the killing parts are the most iconic sounds in the film industry. It's loud, it's discordant, it's shrieking, and it's unstoppable. It set the stage for many films to come. Thus, while it might not be that scary to people today, it certainly scared the ever-loving crap out of anyone 50 years ago.

My favorite scene has to be Marian's sister walking in on the corpse in the chair in the basement. As she knocks the hanging lightbulb in her fear, throwing shadows around the room. The light bounces through the hollow eyes and mouth of the corpse's head, casting eerie, moving shadows in them. It's creepy as hell.