Psycho in the Shower - by Philip J Skerry (Paperback)

About the Book

This is a brilliant study of one scene in one movie: the shower scene from Psycho. Every other chapter is an extended interview with someone who worked on the original film, or on Gus van Sant's remake from a few years ago. The non-interview chapters take various approaches to film criticism, and refer often to the author and his writing of this book. It's lightly done, but compelling and often very entertaining.

Book Synopsis

"With this book, Philip Skerry makes an ambitious and largely successful effort to restore perspective to the debate that has swirled around Psycho since Hitchcock first ripped back the shower curtain of our expectations in 1960 and plunged his knife into the collective cinematic consciousness." - John Baxter, Film International
Psycho in the Shower is a multi-dimensional study of Psycho's astonishing shower scene. Philip J. Skerry shows how it may be the most significant and influential film scene of all and substantiates this claim by providing chapters on the evolution of the scene in Hitchcock's career, with particular focus on his methods for creating suspense and terror in the audience. In tracing the evolution of the shower scene, the author discusses and analyzes many films (both Hitchcockian and otherwise) that lead up to Psycho.

The book places the shower scene in the cultural and social contexts of American popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that it helped to create a revolution in both sensibility and cinematic style. Several unique dimensions help to set this study apart from other books on Psycho and Hitchcock: extensive and detailed interviews with people who worked on the film, including star Janet Leigh and screenwriter Joseph Stefano (the last significant interviews before their deaths); a close study of Hitchcock's employment of mise en scene and montage in the scenes leading up to the famous shower murder; a shot by shot analysis of the scene itself and a discussion of the numerous controversies surrounding it; and a provocative and insightful account of the writing of the book itself, which provides a unique look at the author's creative process. The book culminates with examples of how the shower scene has become embedded in the matrix of contemporary culture and the remarkable ways in which the scene affected people on first viewing.

Review Quotes

"Skerry's recent volume "Psycho in the Shower" is, to my knowledge, unique in the annals of film criticism: 300-plus pages on a single 4-minute scene in one film....With its attention to detail and painstaking analysis, it may not be the ideal introduction to Hitchcock's classic; but for die-hard fans, it's indispensable....Indeed, Skerry's interviews - informed, informal, and informative - seem to be the last major interviews conducted with these key players in Hitchcock's classic; this along would make the book worth buying - but there's more....But what I appreciate most is the meticulous analysis of the actual murder, including Skerry's nifty chart giving a shot-by-shot breakdown of the stabbing. A long-time shower scene aficionado, I was glued to every one of these 42 pages." - SunGazette.com--Sanford Lakoff

"Wearing its scholarship lightly and revealing unashamedly the author's enthusiasm, even affection, for his subject, this book illuminates and refreshes what had risked becoming a stale debate."--Sanford Lakoff

"With this book, Philip Skerry makes an ambitious and largely successful effort to restore perspective to the debate that has swirled around Psycho since Hitchcock first ripped back the shower curtain of our expectations in 1960 and plunged his knife into the collective cinematic consciusness."--Sanford Lakoff

"[Skerry] offers a literal shot by shot description of [the scene], along with some more general familiar references to patterns of doubling and mirrors in this and other Hitchcock movies. And he puts his foot down firmly here and there about some pretty trainspotting points." London Review of Books, January 2010

Professor Skerry has written something unique: a multi-layered and multi-textured study of Psycho. No other book on this film includes extensive interviews with those who worked on the original film film and on the remake, a first-person narration that deals with the writing of the book itself, lengthy chapters on Hitchcock's employment of the key elements of his 'pure cinema', a shot-by-shot analysis of the shower scene, a study of the cultural influence of the scene, and an entertaining series of first-hand accounts of the viewing of the scene.
Steven Jay Schneider, editor of New Hollywood Violence

"If there is one thing Hitchcock fans know about the master's work, it is it always has new rewards to offer. All it takes is additional viewings and writers with new perspectives. In film professor Philip J. Skerry, the shower scene has found such a writer, a scholar with passion and erudition who somehow manages to find nearly 300 pages worth of new things to say about Psycho. Profoundly intelligent, yet accessible even to non-academic film buffs, Psycho in the Shower is as good a book on Hitchcock as has ever been written no small achievement given more than 100 such tomes have seen publication since Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol's Hitchcock's Films was released in 1957."-American Cinematographer

About the Author

Dr. Philip J. Skerry is Professor Emeritus at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, where he has taught English and film courses for thirty-five years. Dr. Skerry has written numerous articles on film for scholarly journals and for anthologies. His major interests, in addition to Hitchcock's films, include film noir, the Western, and screwball comedy. This book grew out of a Hitchcock course that Dr. Skerry has taught for fifteen years. He lives with his wife Amy, a therapist, in Beachwood, Ohio.