Psycho
- Vintage black and white ident, original score; dramatic strings
- Wavering, fuzzy picture
- Very simple and bold opening credits – black and white, plain text with no imagery and a simplistic font, quite nice graphically
- Establishing shots of a visually rich cityscape, shaking, slightly stop-start pans across the array of buildings – all of it very photographic, uniform, industrially beautiful. The shot zooms fairly rapidly, honing in on a specific building, the changes are cut faster – we fade closer into the building, moving to a close up of a specific window, cut closer still – the bottom of the window (left ajar) can now be seen, and details such as the straight lines of the blind and the rows of bricks
- We move into the blackness of the gap between window and sill, still with the shaky, stop-start filming (this may or may not be deliberate, I am unsure. However, it is effective)
- The location (Phoenix, Arizona), the date (Friday, December the eleventh), the time (two forty-three PM) are all established through separate titles, ascending in meticulousness with the nature of the shots – everything is very specific and therefore regarded by the audience as highly significant. The lack of digits in the date and time is unusual, drawing further attention to them
- Much of the time, the man’s face is hidden (by the cut off point of the shot, by the girls head) or in shadow, he is a figure in the background or seen from behind but the mystery this creates around him actually draws the focus onto him rather than the women, simply through the audience’s curiosity to explore what they do not understand
- The soundtrack is now more gentle and mournful
- Of course, the title is a giveaway and as a viewer, one is eager to work out who the psycho is – at first assuming it is this man that we are originally introduced to but with the change in music, the tone of the dialogue, the languid camera work, the overall feel is a calming one and so the audience begin to question their original assumption, recomposing the air of mystery
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