'It's a reference whenever you want to build tension': How Psycho's terrifying music changed film forever

BBC News

24-07-2025

Alfred Hitchcock's grisly horror, which turns 65 this month, might not have become known as an-all time classic without the crucial addition of Bernard Herrmann's disturbing score.
Screaming violas that sound like they're coming out of an abattoir. Thumping bass notes, which slowly decrease in speed and seem to imitate a victim's faltering heartbeat. Take away composer Bernard Herrmann's score for director Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which turns 65 this month, and it's fair to say this 1960 horror film wouldn't have the same nerve-shredding impact.
Particularly key is the knives-edge music that plays when blonde bombshell Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), not long after checking in to the Bates Motel, is attacked through a shower curtain by a shadowy killer, who later turns out to be the motel's owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), dressed up as his dead mother. "That music is everything," says Rachel Zeffira, a film composer and one half of art-folk duo Cat's Eyes. "It's the birds, it's the bees, and it's the voices in the back of your head."
The project had seemed ill-starred from the start, with executives at Paramount (who had produced Hitchcock's previous five films) showing little interest, not allowing him to film it on their lot, and only distributing it rather than producing it themselves. But despite a paltry budget, Hitchcock proved everybody wrong, and for that he could partly thank Herrmann and his knack for crafting compositions that lifted scenes to new heights.
"Psycho was certainly not a bad film before it was scored, but it lacked tension," explains Steve C Smith, the author of a new book, Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema. Herrmann proceeded to give the film a much-needed jolt by writing music for an all-string 50-person orchestra that marked a "return to pure ice water", as the composer described it to Sight and Sound.
In the case of the most famous scene, this resulted in a chorus of psychologically jarring, high-pitched squeals that meant terrified audiences no longer saw the shower as a safe space. "Before the shower scene many of the musical cues have a depressive quality and they're not really that loud," Smith says. "But suddenly with the shower scene, the mutes are off the strings, and they screech animalistically. This creates a clever link with Norman Bates, the taxidermist of birds."
Herrmann forced an initially dismissive Hitchcock to watch the shower sequence both with and without his jump-scare music. "Oh yes, we must use it!" Hitchcock concurred. "But I thought you didn't want my music here?" Herrmann sarcastically replied, before the director scoffed: "My boy, improper suggestion."
It's an anecdote that reflects the pair's fiery partnership. Their creative union consistently resulted in film scores that make the viewer feel like they are caught up in a character's murky inner dialogue, privy to both their most romantic dreams and most hopeless nightmares (see Vertigo). Zeffira describes the music that plays whenever Norman Bates is on screen as being "dejected and anxious", which she says "makes you feel sorrow for a killer. I know before writing film music, Hermann would always read the novel a movie was based on and study the literature, so his score was more empathetic. Every note Herrmann played had meaning".
The origins of Herrmann's genius
An avid childhood reader, Herrmann (or Benny as he was called by friends) spent most of his downtime passionately debating whether literature or music was the greatest art form. Music ultimately won out, and Herrmann was winning classical competitions by the age of 13. Having studied at New York University under the legendary composer Percy Grainger, one of Herrmann's first professional roles as a studio musician was for CBS Radio.
At CBS he worked with Orson Welles, winning his trust with 1938's radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, which was so realistic that some listeners believed it signalled a real unfolding alien invasion. He then became the obvious choice for scoring Welles' 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Working on hundreds of radio plays taught Herrmann how to create compositions that conjured up imagery, and also taught him the power of long pauses: he used silence as another instrument to build suspense.
Professionally, Herrmann was known for having a fiery temper and, as his daughter Dorothy told the New York Times, he "didn't suffer fools gladly". Yet Smith is keen to stress that the musician was less moody than his reputation suggests, and tended to go out of his way to recommended younger composers for jobs. "He was misunderstood," Smith says. "Given his reputation for irascibility, I think people would be surprised at how gentle Bernard could be, especially with animals. He was suspicious of arrogant humans, but he gave unconditional love to his cats."
Brandon Brown is a South Carolina-based film-maker who is working on an untitled documentary on Herrmann's life. One thing Brown believes often gets left out the story is the horrors of the era in which Herrmann came of age. Although he was born in New York City in 1911, Herrmann's family had been Russian-Jews who fled Eastern Europe for a better life. They would almost certainly have abruptly left friends behind in Ukraine, who would later either be displaced or massacred by invading Nazi armies.
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"You can hear in Herrmann's radio and film work, especially the stuff created through WW2, that he was deeply affected by what's happening," says Brown, citing the music he produced for 1947's supernatural drama, The Ghost and Mrs Muir. For the film's The Spring Sea arrangement, there's a blossoming flute harmony, representing revitalising morning bird song. However, the sunny tones are tinged with sadness due to pensive, descending strings that sound more like a mother's cries.
"Herrmann considered The Ghost and Mrs Muir his best work," says Brown. "It's easy to see why. It's so gorgeous and melancholic at the same time. It captures how the world felt in the 1940s, a time where even a sunny day was haunted by ghosts. This was a downcast tone he'd hang onto for Psycho."
By 1960, Herrmann was a giant in the film business; what's more, he and Hitchcock had already made five landmark films together (The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North By Northwest) and developed a seamless chemistry. Still, Smith believes Psycho was a production where Herrmann re-energised a weary director. "Hitch feared that he had made a mistake filming such gruesome material – something many advised him not to do," explains Smith. "But Herrmann made Hitchcock fall in love with the project once again. Herrmann later said he wrote Psycho's score for an all-strings orchestra to create 'a black-and-white sound' to complement the black-and-white photography."
Aside from helping turn Psycho into a massive hit for Hitchcock (grossing $32m against a budget of $800k), Herrmann saw his score create ripples throughout popular culture in many other unexpected ways. Producer George Martin based his wounded 1966 string arrangement for The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby on Herrmann's Psycho music. "George wanted to bring some of that drama into the arrangement," Paul McCartney once explained to the BBC.
The score's varied legacy
The film's central theme would also go on to be sampled by dozens of other artists. Perhaps the most exhilarating example is rapper Busta Rhymes' 1998 single Gimme Some More. According to the hip hop producer and contemporary classical composer Michael Vincent Waller, Herrmann's Psycho score is beloved by rap artists. "Herrmann knew how to loop these little nihilistic fragments and become this master of repetition. In many ways, the way he was conducting film music was a lot like how rap producers chop up beats."
Waller says that Psycho didn't just change horror, but wider cinematic storytelling: "The Psycho music is a reference whenever you want to build tension and it's clear John Williams was inspired by Psycho for his stalker-ish bass notes for Jaws. Whenever you hear creepy violins in a horror movie, or feel like a film score has become its own character, then that can all be traced back to Psycho."
The creative relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann ended on 1966's Torn Curtain. The former was incensed that the latter stubbornly refused his orders to make a stripped back pop score, insisting instead on using 12 flutes, 16 horns, nine trombones, two tubas, eight cellos, eight basses and two sets of timpani. Herrmann was fired, but it didn't derail his career, and right until his death from a heart attack in 1975 the composer remained an innovative force.
In particular, a late collaboration with a young Martin Scorsese on 1976's Taxi Driver secured Herrmann's musical legacy. Working prominently with a saxophonist (musician Ronnie Lang), he composed smoky, airborne jazz notes which are so vivid you can picture pollution smog rising through the cracks of Manhattan's sewers.
Scorsese's film also offers a truly full-circle moment with Psycho: at the very end of Taxi Driver, Herrmann quotes the earlier film's three-note theme The Madhouse. "He told his wife Norma that he did it because he wanted to say to the audience that Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle is going to commit violence again," explains Smith.
Among Hermann's exceptional work, the Psycho score and its clawing, scraped-out violin arrangements remain an obvious highlight. It's one of the only scores Herrmann re-recorded, a clear sign of pride, and it remains a perfect example of how music can elevate a film. Or, as a sharp-tongued Herrmann put it himself in one of his final interviews: "A composer writes a score for a picture, and he gives it life. Like a fellow goes to a doctor, says, 'I'm dying,' and the doctor cures him."
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