What do you think of this fact?
Few movie scenes have made more people nervous about showering than the one in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” from 1960. Yet nothing scarier than chocolate syrup was flowing down that drain.
Why chocolate, of all things?
“Psycho” was shot in black and white. According to Popular Science, that was partly to save money and partly because Hitchcock thought blood in color would be too gory. On black-and-white film, though, what matters isn’t the color but how dark something looks and how it flows.
That’s where chocolate syrup wins. Its dark brown looked darker and more real on film than bright stage blood. It also has a similarly thick consistency. Hitchcock’s team applied it with a plastic squeeze bottle, a fairly new invention back then.
Which brand it was is disputed, though. Bosco is often named. But Marli Renfro, the body double for star Janet Leigh, remembered watered-down Hershey’s syrup, according to the BFI.
78 setups, 52 cuts
Filming the scene took about a week, roughly a third of the entire shooting schedule. The result: 78 camera setups and 52 cuts. A whole documentary is named after those numbers: “78/52” from 2017.
The trick: thanks to all those rapid cuts, the audience thinks it sees more than is actually shown. Your mind fills in the rest. Then there are the shrieking violins by composer Bernard Herrmann. Hitchcock originally wanted the scene without any music, but Herrmann talked him into it.
For the scene’s sound, the sound team tested different melons and finally picked a casaba melon because it sounded denser.
Small ingredient, huge impact
Hitchcock even banned latecomers from entering the theater. Anyone who missed the first minutes wasn’t supposed to miss the surprise.
More than six decades later, the scene still works. Not bad for a bottle of chocolate syrup.