October 28, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Psycho and The Birds

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On defamiliarization, horror, and prejudice.

In his essay “Art as Technique,” pioneering Russian Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky (whom I never imagined I’d be discussing in this space, but I am an AmericanStudier and I contain multitudes) developed the concept of “defamiliarization”: the idea that one of art’s central goals and effects is to make us look at the world around us, and particularly those things with which we are most familiar, in a new and unfamiliar light. Such defamiliarizations can have many different tones and effects, including positive ones like opening our minds and inspiring new ideas; but it seems to me that one of their chief consistent effects is likely to be horror. After all, the familiar is often (even usually) the comfortable, and to be jarred out of that familiarity and comfort, whatever the long-term necessity and benefits, can be a terrifying thing.

Stephen King, by all accounts one of the modern masters of horror, seems well aware of that fact, having turned such familiar objects as dogs and cars into sources of primal terror. And Alfred Hitchcock, one of the 20^th century’s such masters (and, yes, a Brit, but he set many of his films, including today’s two, in the U.S.), certainly was as well, as illustrated by one of his silliest yet also one of his scariest films: The Birds (1963). The film’s heroine Melanie, played by the inimitable Tippi Hedren, asks her boyfriend, “Mitch, do seagulls normally act this way?”; it’s a ridiculous line, but at the same time it nicely sums up the source of the film’s horror: we’re always surrounded by birds of one kind or another, and there are few ideas more terrifying than the notion that such accepted and generally harmless parts of our world could suddenly become constant threats. I defy anyone to watch Hitchcock’s film and not look askance at the next pigeon you come across.

The Birds was Hitchcock’s second consecutive horror film, following on what was then and likely remains his biggest hit: Psycho (1960). Psycho relies for its horror more on a combination of slow-burn suspense and surprising and very famous jump scares than defamiliarization, with one crucial exception (SPOILERS for the four people who don’t know the film’s reveal already): the ending, and its relevation of the killer’s true identity and motivations. If that ending is meant to be the most terrifying part of all—and the film’s marketing campaign suggested as much very clearly—then there’s no way around it: the defamiliarization of gender and sexuality that accompanies the revelation of Norman Bates’ cross-dressing is presented as something fundamentally frightening, not only connected to Norman’s murderous ways but indeed the titular psychosis that produced them. That is, while those murderous birds are clearly deviating from their familiar behaviors, I would argue that Bates is presented as deviant in his normal behaviors—and that his gender and sexual deviancy represents, again, the film’s culminating and most shocking, and thus troubling and prejudiced, horror.

Next political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?