A Nightmare On Elm Street

I believe that the reason why Hitchcock chose to shoot Psycho in black and white was partly because it helped keep the film within the budget, and it was a way to mute the gore, but also, I think, to lull the audience into the comfort of watching a 1950s TV in order to help shock them. In the movie Leigh dies early, and that was shocking because in most movies the main character dies towards the end. So when Hitchcock kills her, it has the ability to take your breath away, but the way Hitchcock films it - with quick cuts and lots of screaming - creates one of the most horrifying scenes ever made. It is such a vivid scene that many audience members swore they saw red blood washing down the drain, when in fact the film is done entirely in black and white. Obviously, this could not be true, not just for the fact of the black and white film, but the blood was actually chocolate syrup. Although feature films were produced in color at the time, newsreels were shown in black and white. Filming the movie in black and white might have made it seem less gory, but it also might have seemed more real to viewers at the time who were used to seeing the news in black and white. In 1960, seeing a nude women being murdered in a shower was something that no-one had experienced yet, and was quite shocking. The film makers knew that motion pictures present the viewer with impressions, not literal presentations of the real world. Black and white and the various shades of gray create illusions that color in its literalness cannot duplicate.

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