Hitchcock And Faulkner: A Gothic Analysis

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In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho made headlines as an atypical psychological thriller. This film closely mirrors that of William Faulkner’s 1930 short story, A Rose for Emily, a work that similarly employs gothic elements to explore how parents condition their children. Through the gothic elements of an atmosphere of mystery and suspense and “The Grotesque”, Hitchcock and Faulkner reveal the harrowing impact of childhood trauma in breeding insanity, ultimately justifying that a child is the product of his or her upbringing. Both Hitchcock and Faulkner respectively establish that Norman Bates’s mother and Emily Grierson’s father domineered his or her child through an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, thus insinuating that an