I once had the pleasure of spending fifteen minutes at a bar with the late, great
Robert Bloch talking about
movies,
fiction, and peoples'
misconceptions about what they both
see and
read.
Bloch told me -- as he did many other fans over the decades -- that he still had people come up to him and
complain about how
bloody and
violent they found the shower scene in Hitchcock's film version of Bloch's novel
Psycho. ("Thank God I didn't have her sitting on the
toilet," Bloch always said.)
People complained about
Janet Leigh's nudity and complained that seeing her
naughty bits so offended their sensibilities; they complained about the excessive amounts of
blood; and they complained, consistently, about the
violence of
seeing the knife plunge into Ms. Leigh's body over and over.
Go back and watch
Psycho and pay particular attention to the shower sequence. Hitchcock -- aided greatly by the work of the brilliant film editor
George Tomasini -- pulled off a dark magic trick that to my mind has yet to be equaled in American film: they made you believe you were
seeing things that weren't actually depicted.
You
do not see
Janet Leigh's naughty bits. You
do not see
blood splattering all over everything. And you most definitely
do not ever, even once, see the
knife plunge into Ms. Leigh's body. But the sequence is so brilliantly
filmed and edited that viewers were -- and some
still are -- left with the impression that, dammit, they
saw all of that.