How many timꦐes has documentarian Alexandre O. Philippඣe watched Alfred Hitchcock’s shrieky-strings “Psycho” shower scene?
“Thousands of times is probably not an overstatement,” he t𒈔ells The Post. “But the scene is a Pandora’s box. I feel like I’m just now scratching the surface.”
When “Psycho” premiered in 1960, viewers had no idea what was coming. They assumed Janet Leigh, a movie star, would be the heroine. Less than halfway thr𒆙ough, 🔯she’s brutally murdered.
“Hitchcock is removing his protagonist 40 minutes into the film, which at the timܫe was completely novel,” Philippe says. “I think most people were thinking, ‘There’s a trick here.’ And then he lingers. He lets it sink in. This is a different kind of cinema; this is not what people signed up for.”
Philippe’s film “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” which refers to the number of setups and edits in the deeply unsettling scene, unpacks its legacy: “It had a profound effect on cinema and on culture,” he says, “but it’s also very problematic. It was the first time murder 𓆏became an acceptable part of entertainment. And when you add that it’s a woman, vulnerable, naked, alone in a🔥 shower — and the sort of cinema that spawned — we can still ask: Was it good that it happened, or not?”
Here, he looks at several formative shots from the scene that is to showering what “Jaws” is to swimming in th♐e ocean.
