Herm and Hitch

Hitchcock is maybe the most famous English-language director ever to pick up a movie camera and film someone being horribly murdered.

And Bernard Hermann was (during his heyday) the most famous composer in Western film. Together they were doubly famous, and their most doubly-doubly famous work was done together—in their collaboration on Psycho.

Even before he got to Psycho, though, Hermann was a big deal. He'd worked on lots of big, big films, including Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) for which he won an Academy Award. He also scored radio dramas and TV programs like The Twilight Zone.

Later on, his score for Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) became a major influence on the Beatle's hit song Eleanor Rigby.

You know you're a big deal when you influence the Beatles.

Screech! Screech! Screech!

But even taking the Beatles and Orson Welles into account, Psycho is the pinnacle of Hermann's career. He'd already worked with Hitchcock on numerous films, including Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959). Psycho, though, presented special challenges. Hitchcock had had to self-finance the film, so less money was available for an orchestra. Hermann had to figure out how to create a unique score on a budget.

His solution was to record with only strings.

Listen to the score carefully in the film; there's no percussion, no drums. There are no horns, either, and no piano or organ. The whole score is played by strings—and odd-sounding strings at that. Hermann muted the instruments, so they don't sound like a usual rich, romantic Hollywood string section. Instead, the sound is cold and abrasive and ominous.

The most famous section of the score is the shower scene. Without any drums, Hermann has the strings serve as percussion, scraping repetitively. The sound is a screech! screech! screech! The strings seem to be mimicking, or punctuating, the thrust of the knife as Marion is stabbed to death.

Just as Psycho itself has been much imitated, so Hermann's score, and the scraping string sound, has become a staple of horror and slasher films—so much so that the original score can seem a little clichéd.

But think how unsettling and weird it would be to hear that sawing for the first time. You can almost imagine that Marion is screaming because the music has freaked her out. (Though, obviously, the whole being-attacked-with-a-knife-thing is probably the more immediate cause of her distress.)