Strict censorship boundaries were put in place during the early days of film to restrict violence and sex on the big screen. As a result audiences and film critics were unprepared for the quickly evolving world of cinema brought on by risky filmmakers. Violence and sexual explicitness in cinema prior to the 1960s was scarce, but it became more prevalent due to the groundbreaking work by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho. Due to the success of Psycho other filmmakers started pushing boundaries and Hollywood hasn’t been the same since. Hitchcock pushed the boundaries on censorship and changed Hollywood forever with the way he altered how we watch films, his violent murder scene, and his depiction of an extramarital affair. The way we view films hasn’t …show more content…
Its graphic violence was unlike anything in cinema at the time and it revolutionized the film industry. As the film begins you are introduced to a character, Marion Crane and you follow her as she runs away after stealing $40,000 and ultimately ends up at the Bates Motel. Then as soon as you get to know her she is brutally stabbed to death by a shadowy figure. This was truly groundbreaking because never before had a central character been killed a third of the way through a film. According to David Thomson, author of The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, Psycho is “legitimately among the most violent scenes ever shot for an American film” (Robb 1). The scene was so violent that it took a great deal of work to get it past the censorship restrictions. One thing Hitchcock needed to do to get it past the censorship boundaries was put it in black and white. He knew if critics saw red blood splattering on the walls it would never be in theaters and would be unshowable. As a result of the violence in Psycho, other filmmakers started using more violent scenes in their films. What started with Psycho, led to the bloodshed in Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and today’s torture movies like Saw. Another outcome of Psycho is that the increased violence in film changed people’s attitudes towards film violence; thus resulting in people who are slightly more desensitized to it. In the 1960s …show more content…
He guided the camera as if it were a voyeurist and brought the audience into the lives of the films main character. “Psycho broke all film conventions by displaying its leading female protagonist having a lunchtime affair in her sexy white undergarment in the first scene” (“Psycho (1960)” 1). He took suggestive sexual undercurrent and brought it to the surface, making it very upfront. By starting the film with this scene he was also testing the waters with his audiences’ ability to handle the lack of censorship. Hitchcock truly pushed the boundaries of the times and didn’t let things like the Puritanical Production Code, which restricted anything that could “lower the moral standards of those who saw it”, get in his way of producing a provocatively entertaining film. The world of entertainment in general hasn’t been the same since. Nowadays for example movies and certain TV shows show sex in a much more graphic way then during the