The view from the rear window

the fiction of Cornell Woolrich

pp. 174-188

in: Clive Bloom (ed), Twentieth-century suspense, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

Horror-movie fans counted 1960 as quite one of their best years. Norman Bates put in his appearance. Screens everywhere seemed full of Anthony Perkins's performance, his every facial twitch and leer the promise of trouble to come. Repeated late-night TV showings may have taken down much of the initial shock of Hitchcock's Psycho, but what film more stunned its audiences or more served as the by-word for dnematic menace? Contemporary full-colour contenders like The Exorcist or The Shining or Alien look if not exactly mild then elementary by comparison. Hitchcock himself spoke of his film as something of a dark comedy, a jokily done nightmare, which did nothing to assuage critics who discerned in Psycho a worrying inclination towards sexual nastiness and violence. But it hardly came across to aficionados that way. Here was definitive horror, a perfect sum of its parts, in sequence the sinister Bates Motel, the peep-hole voyeurism through a wall hung with stuffed birds, the great vertical stairway and hall shots, the off-camera "double" voices, Janet Leigh's shower-curtain knifing, the shriek-like music, and the final glimpses first of the mummified Mrs Bates and then a regressed and wouldn't-hurt-a-fly Norman. But why, in an account of the fiction of Cornell Woolrich (1903–68), begin here?