Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho - What makes the score by Bernard Herrmann so iconic?

Source: BBC

Ask any cinephile about timeless horror thrillers, and at one point, you're bound to talk about Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece is known to have redefined the horror genre as the first slasher film, and this is due to a number of reasons. Today, we talk about one of them: its hair-raising score.

Recognized by the American Film Institute as the fourth greatest film score of all time, the film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann. As one of the greatest film composers of all time, he understood the significance of an excellent score to a movie's overall impact. As a reportedly stubborn, single-minded man, he knew what he wanted Psycho to sound like.

Let's take a closer look at both.

The thrilling sound of horror

Screenshots from the movie 'Psycho' from Getty Images

Film scoring, just like anything else that involves music, exists to "heighten a film’s emotion and to create an aural mood for each scene." According to renowned composer and Elmer Bernstein Awardee Nicholas Buc, it is "something that can carry up to fifty per cent of the emotional weight of the film."

"A film score is an immensely powerful tool in the filmmaking process," says Buc who will be conducting the Singapore Symphony Orchestra's upcoming concert, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho-Film with Live Orchestra. "It can say things that an actor can’t, or convey feelings that are too deep to put into words or images.

"Music means many things to different people, but the common ground is always that it evokes something. Just the simple act of introducing music into a scene can radically transform how we perceive the story. There is certainly some science behind why certain combinations of instruments evoke a particular feeling, but as humans, we are also conditioned to feel things based on our lived experiences."

This conditioning is what film scorers bank on when crafting a particular sound for movies in the horror-thriller genre: a sound that makes us think of unpredictability, fear, and tension.

"In musical terms, that often equates to music that is atonal, dissonant, and teetering on the fringes of the register. Think very high strings or low bass," Buc adds. "All the things that ground us in safety and comfort are thrown out, and that usually means hummable melodies and pleasant harmonies are a no-go zone. Instead, composers will seek to find uncomfortable sounds, using extended techniques to spook an audience and challenge their ears. It’s not music to enjoy per se, although there is often much craft in it to admire, rather it is music to alienate and unnerve."

Hearing Herrmann in ‘Psycho’

Source: Gramophone

With this in mind and possibly more, Herrmann made some bold choices in putting together the sound of this now-infamous flick. According to non-profit organisation Film Independent, he reportedly rejected Hitchcock's idea of using jazz and be-bop and opted for traditional orchestral sounds—a decision that paid off tremendously.

"Herrmann said that he wanted to mirror the black-and-white cinematography with an equally black-and-white score, so he chose to only score the film using strings. This fact, along with the direction that the strings play con sordini (muted) for the entire score except for the shower scene, makes for a truly unique sound that broods along with a constant sense of dread," explains Buc. "The single-tone colour of the score doesn’t mean that the music is boring, quite the opposite in fact. Herrmann injects rhythm and vitality into scenes that are visually long and quite static, Janet Leigh driving behind the wheel, for instance."

More than half a century has passed and yet Psycho has brought the heebie-jeebies to anyone who's had the privilege (or the misfortune, maybe) of watching it. Demanding and disturbing, the film is chock-full of unforgettable moments, all scored to mimic restrain, frustration, and fear in orchestral string perfection—a room full of stuffed bird carcasses, a detective falling to his death down the stairs, Norman Bates in police custody, smiling creepily.

And who could forget the shower scene?

“The masterstroke is surely the shower scene," Buc furthers. "Hitchcock originally wanted it to go unscored, but Herrmann knew better and wrote the now imitable screeching strings that changed cinema forever. Hitchcock agreed that the scene was vastly improved, and the rest is history."

Hitchcock recognising this improvement is immortalised by him declaring that “33 per cent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music.” On the other hand, the rest of the film industry recognised this when the score Herrmann made for the film—a "masterclass in emotional manipulation," Buc claims—became the very definition of the sound for slasher films.

"The real art [in film scoring] is finding a tone and a musical point of view that is wholly unique to the picture, drawing on original composing techniques that elicit just the right emotional response without being cliché," Buc says. "Ultimately, the greatest scores are the ones that serve the picture perfectly but are inseparable from their films. In my humble opinion, Psycho may just be the greatest example of that."


Originally written for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra for their concert, ‘Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho-Film with Live Orchestra,’ published on Bandwagon Asia on 5 September 2022