Why Alfred Hitchcock called some of his fans “idiots”
Legendary French New Wave director François Truffaut once called Alfred Hitchcock “an artist of anxiety”, and few descriptions of a filmmaker’s output have ever been more accurate.
Throughout his extensive filmography, Hitchcock always seemed most at home while trying to find new ways to make audiences feel nervous. He wasn’t called ‘The Master of Suspense’ for nothing, of course, and he prided himself on his ability to turn any story into an excruciating exercise in tension and release. However, to Hitchcock, if an audience watched one of his films and became hung up on the details of the ‘MacGuffin’, as he put it, he had failed in his job.
In his mind, viewers weren’t meant to concern themselves with, for example, what the spies were trying to fucking steal, or why someone would steal money from their goddamn boss. As Hitchcock said, “That’s a lot of nonsense.” All that mattered was that this inciting incident gave him an excuse to craft what he was really interested in: scenes of deliciously nailbiting suspense.
By and large, Hitchcock’s thrilling suspense scenes were all about meticulously composed shots that hinted at horrors rather than outright showing them. They would also usually end with a cathartic release for the audience, which is why they would be left with what he dubbed “the satisfaction of temporary pain.” By this, he meant the audience had endured the agony of suspense, but were happy to do so because the sequence ended with a sense of relief, such as a bomb being defused instead of blowing up. Still, there was one infamous sequence in his career where Hitchcock didn’t grant his audience that release valve at the end – and it scarred many of them for life.
The shower scene in Psycho was so shocking and controversial in 1960 that people reportedly vomited in the cinema or ran screaming down the aisles. These days, it’s obvious that Hitchcock didn’t actually show the violence of Marion Crane’s untimely demise as much as audiences at the time thought he did, as Norman Bates’ knife is never actually shown piercing flesh. However, Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score, along with Hitchcock’s jarring jump-cuts and switches in perspective, implanted the idea in people’s minds that they’d just seen the most grotesquely violent scene in cinema history – and it scared the life out of them.
In the wake of Psycho‘s release, stories began circulating of people literally being scared to shower in their own homes, lest they too be stabbed to death by a deranged murderer dressed as his abusive, overbearing mother. Naturally, this sounds pretty fucking silly, but it wouldn’t be the last time a movie would terrify audiences so much that many of them stopped doing everyday things. After all, post-Jaws, scores of people became too frightened to swim in the goddamn ocean, in case they were chomped to death by man-eating sharks.
In one way, Hitchcock was tickled pink that his movie had horrified audiences so much that it was affecting their normal lives. For a guy who lived to trigger anxiety and sweaty palms in the cinema, this was undoubtedly his greatest achievement. However, the problem came when he actually began to hear from people who had seen Psycho and, for some reason, blamed him for scarring them for life. “One man wrote to me, after I had Janet Leigh murdered in a bathtub in Psycho, that his wife had been afraid to bathe or shower since seeing the film,” a bemused Hitchcock scoffed to Truffaut during their seminal series of interviews in the ’60s. “He asked me for suggestions as to what he should do.”
Playing psychologist for someone who couldn’t differentiate reality from a motion picture wasn’t exactly in Hitchcock’s job description, and letters like this made him wonder if certain portions of his audience were actually less intelligent than he’d given them credit for. “Most of my fans are highly intelligent people, per se, or they wouldn’t be watching my shows,” he mused, before adding, with barely restrained fucking disdain, “Some, however, are idiots.”
So, in the end, what did Hitchcock tell the perplexed man whose wife was petrified to bathe in her own home because of his goddamn film? Hilariously, the iconic director claimed he wrote back, “Sir, have you considered sending your wife to the dry cleaner?”
