Psycho Music

Alfred Hitchcock thought Pyscho was a dud until he heard Bernard Herrmann‘s score for it, reports Jack Sullivan in the Wall Street Journal (6/16/10). Hitchock’s direction had been to use little or no music in the film, a device that had worked well in previous films, like Blackmail. But it wasn’t working for Psycho and so Herrmann decided to take matters into his own hands, and in direct defiance of Hitchock’s orders, added shrieking strings to the infamous shower scene (video) where Hitch had specified silence.

Hitchock loved it, "suddenly became enthusiastic about Psycho and gradually assented to other cues as well, including the anxious violas during the camera’s inspection of Marion’s stolen money on the bed and the creepy Peeping Tom theme in the Bates Motel … It wasn’t just the shower cue that astonished, but everything, beginning with the sultry chords in the opening scene that erupt when the lovers rise from the hotel bed and begin talking."

The score invested "the most banal images — a suitcase on a bed, a car on an empty highway — with dread." Hitchcock himself "said that the music raised Psycho’s impact by 33 percent." The film was the sixth Hitchcock-Hermann collaboration but Hitchcock later came to feel "that his style was too dependent on Herrmann’s music, and that may have wounded his pride," suggests John Williams, another Hitchcock composer. Hitchcock eventually fired Herrmann for misbehaving again by writing music where Hitch had demanded silence for the big murder scene in Torn Curtain in 1966.