The “horrifying” scene Anthony Hopkins will never forget: “But it excites us”
There are some movie scenes you just never forget, likely because they elicited such a visceral reaction in you when you first watched them.
Maybe it’s something that made you cry, or perhaps a scene that made you gasp in shock, but what about a good horror movie scene that leaves you screaming, turning away in horror, or suppressing a bit of vomit? Those indelible scenes live on in our minds forever – the moment we see the killer’s identity in Don’t Look Now, the first time Michael Myers appears in his mask, when Leatherface opens up the door and reveals a house full of bones and pure terror.
Horror often produces the most acute bodily sensations in us, our stomachs turn, our mouths start to taste acidic, our eyes wince. These days, we’re all pretty well accustomed to these kinds of scenes, but imagine heading to the cinema in 1960 to watch a movie, not knowing you’re about to be in for a genre-defining, expectation-defying experience.
Psycho changed everything. For Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar for his role as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs – a rare example of a horror movie earning a nod from the Academy – this was a revolutionary moment he was lucky enough to witness firsthand. It flicked a switch, perhaps inspiring his interest in the genre, because he came to understand just how intrinsic the experience of being scared is to being human.
“We are fascinated by the darkness in ourselves, by the shadow, by the boogieman. We get on the rollercoaster to give ourselves a good fright when we are children or even when we are adults. We go to see Hitchcock’s Psycho to get ourselves a fright,” the actor explained.
In particular, Hopkins singled out the iconic shower scene that defines Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece, which truly took audiences off guard when the movie was first screened in cinemas. Horror hadn’t shown anything as explicit as this before – you actually see a swirl of blood going down the drain and the knife poking at Leigh’s stomach.
This is a moment of supposed safety completely destroyed, a place of cleanliness now covered in blood, audiences were horrified, but at the same time, people were excited… they wanted more.
“When Janet Leigh is being stabbed by Anthony Perkins in the shower… It’s horrifying, but it excites us because it’s part of our mechanism, it’s the duality in our psyche. Darkness and light, light and darkness… I believe this is the pure paradox of human nature,” Hopkins continued.
The kick of watching something so terrifying in the comfort of your own home or the cinema is very real, because it exposes us to that fine line between fear and exhilaration by safely containing it to the screen. “It’s part of human nature to give ourselves frissons of fear, terror,” Hopkins added, making a great case for why people also love his character, Hannibal Lecter, despite the fact that if you met him in real life, you’d want to run as soon as he opened his mouth.
