Arguably Alfred Hitchcock's most famous film in a career that's not exactly short on cinematic classics which single-handedly created the slasher subgenre of horror films, Psycho nonetheless had a lot of trouble getting made. To the point that it very nearly didn't get made since, whilst Hitchock was one of the most bankable directors during the Golden Age of Hollywood, he wanted to make a film which would feature implied incest, voyeurism, buckets of blood, a shower scene and (worst of all) an unmarried couple sharing a bad together in their underwear! This was, like, 1959. The most egregious scene for the execs was the shower bit, which ended up becoming one of the most iconic scenes in the history of films, which just goes to show you what your average Hollywood suit knows. It's still a terrifying, exhilarating three minutes to watch today, but the story of how it was made is even crazier. Utilising fifty cuts in that short sequence, to heighten the horror and cover up any censor-unfriendly nudity or gore, Hitchcock basically also invented the MTV style of editing scen in Requiem For A Dream and every Michael Bay film. For such a short scene to have that many cuts, however, meant shooting a lot of footage. The scene took something like two weeks to film, shot from December 17 to December 23, 1959, and features 77 different camera angles. It also used Bosco chocolate syrup for the blood, because it showed up better on the black-and-white film stock they were using. So that's how one of the most famous movie scenes ever was filmed over the course of a very long time, with chocolate sauce.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
