Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Psycho was a joke’

 

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This article titled “Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Psycho was a joke’” was written by Xan Brooks, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 8th February 2013 12.30 UTC

It was the film that outraged the censors, terrified the public and prompted the Observer’s film critic to storm out of a preview screening and resign in disgust. Yet it now transpires that Psycho may have been tragically misunderstood. Its director, Alfred Hitchcock, always intended it as a comedy.

“The content was, I felt, rather amusing and it was a big joke,” Hitchcock explains in a new discovered tape from the BBC archives. “I was horrified to find some people took it seriously.”

Hitchcock’s made his – perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek – comments on the BBC show Monitor in July 1964, four years after Psycho’s release. The interview now features on the audiobook Alfred Hitchcock: In His Own Words.

“[Psycho] was intended to make people scream and yell and so forth,” the director adds. “But no more than screaming and yelling on a switchback railway … so you mustn’t go too far because you want them to get off the railway giggling with pleasure.”

Widely seen as Hichcock’s best – and most shocking – picture, Psycho spins the hilarious tale of a thief (Janet Leigh) who checks into a remote motel owned by a henpecked young man who loves his sick mother (Anthony Perkins). The behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film is documented in the drama Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins and Scarlett Johansson, which is released in UK cinemas today.

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