Once again, I’m shirking my blogging responsibilities today in order to work on a review, for the Book Book blog. (This time around, it’s Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi’s The Monster of Florence.)
As before, I offer you instead a couple of YouTube treats.
Let’s start with a trivia question. Who said this?
There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.
[Theme from “Jeopardy”]
Ding!
If you guessed Alfred Hitchcock, congratulations. (And we’ll see you at the end of the week during our championship round.)
Today was Hitchcock’s birthday, in 1899. (He also seems an appropriate topic on a day when I’m working on a Monster of Florence review.) Below are a couple of videos, from the BBC, of Hitchcock being interviewed in 1964 by Huw Wheldon, for the television show Monitor.
But first, an excerpt:
Have you ever been tempted to make what is nowadays called a horror film, which is different from a Hitchcock film?
No, because it’s too easy. Are you talking about visual horror like Frankenstein and that kind of thing?
Yes.
No, they’re… they’re props. I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience and not necessarily on the screen. I once made a movie, rather tongue-in-cheek, called “Psycho.” And, of course, a lot of people looked at this thing and said “What a dreadful thing to do. How awful,” and so forth. But, of course it was to me… it had great elements of the cinema in it.
The content, as such, was I felt, rather amusing… and it was… it was a big joke, you know? And I was horrified to find that some people took it seriously. It was intended to cause people to scream and yell, and so forth, but no more than the screaming and yelling on a switchback railway.
Now, this film had a horrible scene at the beginning with a girl being murdered in a shower. Well, I deliberately made that pretty rough, but as the film developed, I put less and less physical horror into it because I was leaving that in the mind of the audience and, as the film went on, there was less and less violence but the tension, in the mind of the viewer, was increased considerably. I was transferring it from the film into their minds. So, towards the end, I had no violence at all. But the audience by this time was screaming in agony… thank goodness!
You gotta admit, the guy knew (and loved) his work. (And he must’ve been the only person, back then, to describe “Psycho” in words like “rather tongue-in-cheek” and “big joke.”)
Part 1 (6:54):
Part 2 (7:14):
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