Witness for the Prosecution (1957), by Billy Wilder, was just on TCM. At the start it says (quoting IMDB):
At the closing credits it says:
This might be where Hitchcock got the idea for the publicity about not giving away the ending; it could have been a Hitchcock film.
Even if you know Janet Leigh is going to be killed in the shower, it’s still a tense and exciting scene.
Hitchcock was great at that. The perfect example for me was in North by Northwest. I was visiting my aunt and stopped in a library to look around. There was a book about Hitchcock which had a shot-by-shot analysis of the crop duster scene. I figured I’d probably never see it (this was in the early 70s, before VCR), so I read the analysis and saw every shot in the scene. After I finished, I went back to my aunt’s house and turned on the TV.
Yup, they were showing North by Northwest. And, yup, I turned it on just as the crop dusting scene began. Even though I had seen a drawing of every shot in the scene, it was still gripping to watch.
Proof that spoilers can’t spoil a great film.
There’s no doubt there was a marketing hype angle – it’s Hollywood after all – but Hitch went to the effort of buying up all the loose copies of the novel he could find to limit that route of spoiling it.
When people would complaint to Robert Bloch (the novelist) about being leery of taking a shower after seeing the movie he’d just grin and tell them in the first draft, she was murdered on the toilet.
I saw it first-run as a kid so it was not spoiled. The two murders scared the bejeebus out of me, but the undercurrents of the Norman/mother thing went clear over my little head.
Yes.
I got interested in horror movies very young, after seeing the original King Kong when I was in second grade or so. But in those days, before VCRs and such, there was no easy way to see a particular movie when you wanted to–you had to rely on them being shown on TV or at a revival theater (of which there were none in my hometown).
So in lieu of seeing them, I read everything I could get my hands on about horror films. This was the 1970s, and there were a surprising number of books aimed at kids about horror and monster movies. None of them paid much attention to what we would call “spoilers” today, so they tended to give complete plot descriptions, complete with revealing the endings, of the films they were talking about. The result was that, not just for Psycho, but for almost all of the classic horror movies, I knew the plots, and often the significant cinematic moments, for years before I finally saw any of them.
I suspect that this accounts for my rather lackadaisical attitude about spoilers. I just don’t care that much about being “spoiled,” and never have. Oh, I don’t particularly seek out spoilers, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid them, either. As I’ve said before, I’ve always felt that if simply knowing the plot can truly spoil a movie, then it’s probably not much of a movie. The experience of seeing a film is (or should be) so much more than simply following the plotline from A to B to C. As RealityChuck says, even if you know what’s going to happen to Janet Leigh beforehand, the scene still works. That’s because Hitchcock was a great director, and was doing more than simply throwing a “shocking twist” at the audience.
I was born in 1965, and I didn’t see the movie (on TV) until the mid to late 70’s. My grandma spoiled the shower scene a little, so the murder was not a surprise. My grandma was actually merely trying to communicate the idea that this movie, for her, was scary because of it’s more gritty, realistic depiction of violence than she was used to seeing up to that point. Compared to Jaws, though (for me, a near contemporary in my personal viewing timeline), the idea of blood swirling around a drain strainer didn’t have the same impact for me.
But I was totally caught off guard by the Norman/mother plot twist, though! That was not spoiled. That little smirk Norman does into the camera at the end of the movie, is still a simple, yet effective scene, for some reason.
When I first saw it as a teenager on TV in the early Eighties, I’m 99% sure that I knew about the significance of the shower scene. That was surely what the film was largely famous for by that point: killing off the female lead so unexpectedly.
Abrogast’s death I didn’t know about. Yet while I think it’s brilliantly done, I don’t quite remember being shocked by it on that first viewing.
Nor did I know about the ending. I can say that with some confidence, because I figured out where the hints were leading to as I watched it. For, seeing it in the company of my brothers, neither of them (also seeing it for the first time) objected that that was just common knowledge when I suggested halfway through that “he’s taxidermied his mother”. That was as new a suggestion to them as it was to me.
Yeah, I saw it when I was only nine or ten and didn’t have a lot of foreknowledge about it. I do believe I’d heard that the guy was nutty about his mom, though.