This book is an original study of one scene in one movie: the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and it includes extended interviews with individuals who worked on the original film—including Janet Leigh, Hilton Green, and Joseph Stefano. The chapters take a range of approaches to film criticism, covering aspects of Hitchcock’s career, the techniques and methods he used to generate suspense and terror, and the extraordinary impact that this one scene had on moviegoers when they saw it for the first time. The new edition includes a new foreword by a renowned Hitchcock scholar; a new introduction surveying the ever-increasing amount of scholarship and criticism devoted to Psycho and the shower scene; an interview with Amy Duddleston, who edited Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Psycho; an interview with Marli Renfro, who was the (nude) stand-in for Janet Leigh in the shooting of the original shower scene; and a chapter on the music in the shower scene by scholar Steven Smith, author of the definitive book on the composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s key collaborator on Psycho and several other of his key films.
