The shower scene from the Hitchcock thriller psycho is one of the most notable scenes of cinema in the history of film. I intend to look at the nineteen ninety eight version as it gets a lot right and yet falls when compared to the original.

first opening shot sets the scene as a perfectly normal visit to a hotel as one woman sits alone at a desk. Judging from her costume and expression she is perfectly relaxed but tense about something that is not revealed if you have only watched this one scene. She does not expect anything to happen which helps establish the “this could happen to you” setting most thrillers choose to sit within. Looking only at what is provided we see that she is set up in a cosy well lit room which judging from the lamp attached to the wall(not a fixture in an ordinary room) is a form of rented accommodation. A hotel of course is always creepy as it is a home away from home, in other words a place that attempts to imitate a home but is dissimilar in the smallest way in order to upset the human mind.

The problem with much of the actual shower scene is how you get the camera close to the action without it getting wet and breaking the fourth wall. In this scene the camera also needs to pan left to reveal the killer stepping in the door this would have been solved by removing the aback wall of the shower so the camera could see right into the room uncompromised. This shot roughly follows the rule of thirds starting with the girls head just off the centre and then gradually moving it right as the camera pans left along the shower curtain.

Something I would like to say hear is that this single shot holds an advantage over the original in that the killer is more easily distinguishable as a woman by the hair frankly the original could be anyone. Again however one is faced with the problem that water must not get on the camera this would be solved in this scenario by angling the camera downwards and placing a cover over the top to ensure water only falls in front of the camera and not at all onto the lens. An area where this shot is very well compared to the original is the use of lighting to mask the killers identity, of course in the original the lighting was used to completely obscure the killer but in the original the light is used not only to shield the face but to brighten the white in the hair and occasional glint in the knife. Natural light is used in almost every shot in the sequence in this instance coming from the lighting of the hotel bathroom itself via the lamps on the wall and the one the girl left on in her room.                                                         

In this shot of the dead girl’s body we have a zoom out from the eye which rotates from the point of origin to resemble the plughole from which this scene fades in from. Given the girls proximity to the floor and the smoothness of rotation this would have been nearly impossible to create manually. Most likely this shot was achieved by zooming an extra wide camera lens out from a fixed position close to the body and then rotating it in the edit within the screen being careful not to exclude anything.