In this episode, Alex and Andrea look through an illicit peephole into the world of the mad and macabre. Both Peeping Tom and Psycho caused sensations when they were released in the same year, causing Western audiences to question the nature of evil, our proximity to one another and how many women we can watch die on screen.
REQUIRED READING
Peeping Tom. Dir. Michael Powell, 1960.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960.
EXTRA CREDIT
Class of 2018 T-shirts – Get ’em while their hot!
Salem Horror Fest – We’ll be back October 12-14! Get your tickets now.
Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema. Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay on the cinematic gaze
Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Carol Clover’s genre-defining book from 1992.
“Have You Ever Seen the inside of One of Those Places?”: Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness. Cynthia Erb’s essay on institutionalization and Psycho.
Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’: the film that killed a career. An overview of the release and reaction to Peeping Tom.
The Misogyny of the Modern Slasher Film. Anna Biller’s blog post about the slasher sub-genre.
LISTEN
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I will make this quick and brief. I just want to say I thoroughly enjoy the Faculty of Horror, you and your co-host have a great rapport with each other, and I thoroughly enjoy your insightful discussions on horror films. I especially enjoyed your episodes on Buffy and Get Out. I look forward to listening to your future episodes in the subsequent future. Take care and keep up the great work.
You touched on this lightly, but I thought it was worth expanding on. Before Psycho, whatever was showing (Typically a couple of cartoons, a 20-30 minute serial, then the main feature) ran on a loop all day and you could walk in at any time, including the middle of the main feature, and sit there the rest of the day. Psycho was the beginning of the end for that, and the beginning of official showtimes.
I talked to my father about this, and he told me that it was not uncommon to walk in during the middle of a movie, and sit there until you got to that point of the movie again. I can’t imagine watching a movie like that, but apparently before 1960 people thought nothing of it.