They Don’t Make Trailers Like That Anymore: PSYCHO (1960 and 1998)

One more piece tied in with Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday....

Perhaps one of the most famous trailers of all time is the six minute one that preceded the release of Psycho.  Like his later trailer for Frenzy, this is just a Hitchcock monologue as he takes us on a tour of the Bates motel and associated mansion, hinting at key plot points without actually telling us much of anything.  It’s amazing how long and leisurely this trailer is.  It’s seemingly paced in emulation of Hitchcock’s deliberate, almost plodding diction that became his signature as host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  And the whimsical musical cues that he uses as transitions--there’s a slight sense of mockery to it. The combination of those music cues and Hitchcock’s reactions crack me up, making me wonder if The Most Famous Director In The World was amusing himself at our expense.

Of course, the most amazing thing about this trailer is that there’s only about five seconds of the actual film.  The actors are mentioned at the very end as part of the outro crawl (unlike with the trailer for Frenzy, which keeps mum about them), but in a begrudging sort of way.  And if that isn’t enough, we get a delicious take on the old ‘no one will be admitted...’ trope that was popularized by people like William Castle--who, a great filmmaker and producer in his own right, probably went to bed every night praying he would wake up as Alfred Hitchcock.

It’s interesting to see how, almost forty years later, the conundrum of how to sell Gus Van Sant’s painstaking recreation of Hitchcock’s ground-breaking film.  With his stunt, Van Sant was trying to prove his contention that a great screenplay was like a great stage play, able to be re-interpreted as is by other filmmakers--but admittedly he probably could not have sold his version as effective as Hitchcock did his.

(Well, to be fair, no one sold this movie, period...)

Still, they tried to be as evasive in their trailer as the original’s was.  I get the sense that this is more of a studio driven than an auteur driven product.  The tropes of the late 90's film language is all over this piece of celluloid--jittery shots, erratic editing, music video-esque montage, liberal use of white noise and meta elements such as the picture decaying and skipping from frame to frame. I almost expect to hear Slipknot launch into their latest hit after the extended shot of Vince Vaughn smiling.

To be fair, there is still an attempt to withhold information from the audience.  While, unlike the original, there is about a minute from the footage of the film, that footage is not done to create a narrative.  It takes advantage of our knowledge of our original, giving us very quick cuts of images we kind of know from that text in an effort to summon up our memories of Hitchcock’s version--and more importantly, our relationship to that version.  I wonder how much more effective this trailer would be without the snatches of dialogue that are included within it; Vaughn’s lines come off as too on-the-nose, like the editor of this trailer is poking us in the ribs going, ‘Remember?  Remember?’  Still, it’s effective in its own way.

Trailers courtesy of Movie Clips Classic.