Alfred Hitchcock made his movies with the primary intention of making his audiences jump. When he was filming Psycho, he thought about what he could put in the movie that would scare as many people as possible, regardless of their race, culture, etc. He finally narrowed it down to the one thing he was profoundly afraid of himself…the police.
That’s why he had that one short scene of the policeman staring at Janet Leigh’s character with his black sunglasses as he was asking her why she was asleep in her car. The menacing look of authority, just waiting to pounce on you for doing something wrong.
One thing I’ve noticed is the profound difference between American and British horror. American horror is more sensational, whereas British horror is just quaint and springs the thing that makes you really uncomfortable, possibly for the rest of your life.
For instance, American horror has a woman walking down an alleyway, then the audience sees the shadow behind her, stalking her. She starts to hear an extra set of steps, quickens her pace, runs around the corner, looks back, sees nothing, turns around, and the killer has somehow gotten in FRONT of her and starts stabbing away. Blood flies everywhere, and in the final scene, we see her lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood as the anonymous killer runs away.
In British horror, we see common life as the eccentric old lady of the tenement walks her lap dog every day and annoys the nieghbors occasionally with her harping. This goes on for weeks, until the neighbors notice she didn’t walk her dog today, and breathe a sigh of relief. Then a week goes by. She still hasn’t been out. She hasn’t told anybody she was going anywhere, and the formerly annoyed neighbors are now starting to worry.
They get together, knock on her door, hear no answer, but do hear her dog yapping. They finally decide to break open her door. They come in, calling her name, but still no answer. Finally one of the neighbors enters her bedroom. He finds the old woman on her bed. Apparently she died in her sleep, but there’s bloody patches of red around her eyes. The neighbor takes a closer look and sees that her eyes have been eaten out of their sockets! After the woman died, there was no one around to feed the dog, so the dog got so hungry, he ate her eyeballs.
stuff like that.
