The Master Of Suspense In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

Captured Audience

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock is a most significant director and is considered “the master of suspense”. He achieves in capturing the audience’s primary senses of suspicion and awareness in the film Psycho (1960). The film language affects and manipulates the audience with recurring narrative and visual elements of style, using shot choice, mise-en-scene, narrative structure and soundtracks. Conveying a lasting sense of anxiety through an intensifying theme within the audience.

Hitchcock misleads the audience to create a shock in Psycho, following the character’s journey. When Marion Crane sees an opportunity to improve her living, she steals $40,000. After escaping, she finds herself at the Bates Motel on the road run by a suspicious Norman Bates. Marion can hear Norman and his mother arguing in their house. Marion and Norman have a few chats, later on, she is murdered by what could be an older woman. An investigator arrives searching for a missing person and he is then killed. Her sister and former lover make a journey to the Bates Motel and discover “Mother”.

The shot pans, giving the audience time to anticipate the next event, capturing the sense of awareness and suspicion in Marion’s situation. The audience is drawn further to understand abnormal behaviour in Marion’s journey by car; the audience is compelled to identify her actions. The audience can identify themselves with Marion and imagine the view of the character. “The cinematic manipulation of the direct narrative causes the audience to sympathise with the character’s behaviour” (Kato, 2001), contributing character development in visual modes and