How Alfred Hitchcock Distanced Robert Bloch. Psycho once again (on the sixtieth anniversary of the famous film adaptation of the novel)
In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock appears to have explored the entire potential of Robert Bloch’s novel, employing a variety of solutions allowed by the polysemiotic audiovisual medium. Hitchcock made signifi cant compositional changes in comparison with the original (including the „false end” effect) and introduced new motifs, thus thoroughly modifying the symbolic implications of the story (e.g. the ornithological motifs). Another issue addressed in the article is the depiction of death, framed through references to the work of Gérard Lenne, who argues that in artistic exposures of the body, death undermines the illusion of the spectacle. The famous shower scene in Psycho solves this problem through stylistic solutions (e.g. the use of visual metaphors).