Black
& White in Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock manipulates the audience into watching every scene
filled with terror and anxiety due to his usage of black and white for the film.
Instead of using color for the film, which was already commonplace, Hitchcock
uses this simplicity to his advantage by knocking out the most important sense:
sight. But, because we have not lost all of our sight, the film seems rather
creepy with its elongated shadows, a liquid resembling dark blood (FYI it was
chocolate syrup!), and the eerie house next to the Bates Motel. As a result,
these very ominous signs lead us to our instinctual fear of the unknown: we can
see it, but we do not exactly know what it is and we cannot quite put our hands
on it.
With
our decreased vision, a chain of events unfolds. We now have to depend on our
ears to grope through the nothingness of the dark. As an "auxiliary
sense," our ears just amplify what our eyes do not see. That is, our ears
reinforce the obscurity of the objects and translate them into pure terror of
the unknown. The first thing that terrifies the viewer is the fast-paced
reoccurring background music. It
tends picks up one's heart rate and makes one very tense. The lack of any major
sound effects proves to be vital. What little sound effect there is, it is taken
in as something quite important and thus, ads to overall fear. The sound effects
reiterate and force us to associate them with events. The water dripping down
the drain: Miss Crane being stabbed to death. Bubbles oozing: Miss Crane's car
slowly sinking to its swampy grave. Our extra sense of hearing combined with our
"damaged sight" gives Hitchcock an excellent way to control us into
being afraid of something mysterious that is not quite right.