The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST see from the beginning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, given how early in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a policy: “Every theatre manager, everywhere, has been instructed to admit no one after the start of each performance of Psycho,” declares Hitchcock himself in its print advertisements. “We said no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States or the Queen of England (God bless her).” Even in 1960, ordinary moviegoers still had the habit of entering and leaving the theater whenever they pleased. With Psycho’s marketing campaign, Hitchcock meant to alter their relationship to cinema itself.
As for the trailer’s form and content, audiences would never have seen anything like it before. Containing no actual footage from the film — and indeed, constituting something of a short film itself — it instead offers a tour of its main locations personally guided by Hitchcock. Those are, of course, the Bates Motel and its proprietor’s house, “which is, if I may say so, a little more sinister looking, less innocent-looking than the motel itself. And in this house, the most dire, horrible events took place.”
In his telling, these buildings are not film sets, but the genuine sites of heinous crimes, about which he proves only too happy to provide suggestive details. We complain that today’s trailers “give the movie away,” and that seems to be Hitchcock’s enterprise here.
But after these six minutes, what, in a world that had yet to see Psycho, would you really know about the movie? It would seem to involve some sort of grisly murders, and you’d surely be dying, as it were, to know of what sort and how grisly. Who, moreover, could fail to be startled and intrigued by Hitchcock’s sudden reveal of a screaming blonde woman behind the motel-room shower curtain? Hitch fans might have recognized her as Vera Miles, who’d been in The Wrong Man in 1956 and the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents the next year. They might also have noticed the name of no less a movie star than Janet Leigh, and wondered what she was doing in such a sensationalistic-looking genre picture. One thing is certain: when they finally did take their seat for Psycho — before showtime, of course — they had no idea what they were in for.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
