Horror Films

Knives

1. Describe
In the horror films Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Scream directed by Wes Craven knives is a convention used by these directors.
In the movie Psycho made in 1960 the weapon that was used to kill Marion and Detective Arbogast was a knife. Psycho is probably most known for its famous stabbing scene in the shower where the main character Marion gets killed. In the scene, Marion is taking a shower at the Bates Motel  after deciding that she will return home with the money that she stole (she is metaphorically cleansing away her sins) this is soon interrupted by an intense stabbing scene. Since this movie was made in the 60s, you never see the knife really stabbing her, all you see is very short cut shots going from the knife to Marion and all at extreme close ups, which gives you a sense of what is happening.
The movie Scream from 1996 also uses the convention of a knife. In this movie there is a masked killer/s who carries a large knife to kill people. Right from the start of this movie we see the knife being used as a weapon of murder with the deaths of Casey and her boyfriend. In this scene the boyfriend (Steve) is strapped to a chair outside and his body is sliced open from ribcage to pelvis with their guts rolling from the wound. This also happens to Casey. As this movie was made much later, we could see the knife slicing the characters open, this is much different to Psycho because you never saw Marion actually get stabbed.

2. Explain
In the shower stabbing scene in Psycho you never see the knife stabbing Marion because in the 60s that would have been too scary and real for the audiences back then. Also this was one of the first films to show a stabbing scene so this scene was pushing boundaries back then and was "gory" for their time. This movie changed traditions to films because after it was released many more "gory" films were made. Alfred Hitchcock said that he used very short cut shots in this scene to "transfer the menace from the screen into the minds of the audience". The use of having knives to kill people brings up the idea that you will get punished for sleeping around when not married (as Marion did with Sam Loomis) as this was starting to happen in these times. This scene has also been read as "a symbolic rape by the penetrative knife, which is seen as a phallus for the sexually deviant Norman". We know this because at the end of the movie, the psychiatrist who spoke with Norman tells us that Norman didn't kill for money, instead his interaction with Marion sexually aroused him. He knew that his mother would not approve of this so his repressed sexual arousal comes in the form of the knife penetrating Marion.
The idea of the knife being a phallic symbol is also shown in Scream. In the end scene the two masked killers, Billy and Stu, are penetrating each other with the knife possibly revealing their true sexual orientations. Unlike Psycho, Scream showed people getting sliced and stabbed by the knife this is most likely because things had changed a lot in the years between these films. By the 90s it was very normal to see very gory parts in horror movies as movies such as Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th came with all their gory. Although there was arguments about which rating to give the movie it was decided that it was fine to give it an R rating. Audiences described the movie with all these knife scenes as  "scary and gruesome" but this was the way that movies were heading from then on.


3. Analyse
I think that without the convention of the knife in both Psycho and Scream, the movies would have been nowhere near as good and successful as they were. Psycho's shower stabbing scene is one of the most famous scenes in movie history with people knowing the music involved in the scene without even having watched the movie. Without the knife in this scene it would have changed the movie completely. In Scream without the knife, it would have made the masked killer much less scary and rather more funny as it would have just been someone dressed in a costume.
The convention of the knife changed from Psycho to Scream as in Psycho you really only see the knife being used twice and you never really see it actually stabbing the people as it was too gruesome in those days, but in Scream, whenever you see the masked killer you will see the massive knife in his hand and you will see people get stabbed or sliced by it.