The slasher flick is an essay about the greatest infrastructure project in modern times.
Psycho is the indispensable American horror flick. From the creeping pace to the shrieking violins to the sensational twist, the movie set the template for everything that followed. Even the title resonates: psy•cho, a jarring, slashing gesture of a word that summons a nightmare.
It’s fitting that such a classic pulses with an anxiety that’s essential to the American character—not the Freudian rot of Norman Bates’s mother-love, but a quieter dread. Released in 1960, the movie takes place in the shadow of the highway, in a place that progress left behind, at a time when the country was seized by the urgency of the future.
Psycho1 came out just a few years into the rapid expansion of America’s highways authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower. The Interstate Highway System unleashed the American economy, giving freedom to people who might not otherwise easily travel from, say, Phoenix to Los Angeles, and expanding the market for automobile manufacturers. Interstate highways also transformed the geography of the built environment. The new infrastructure moved markets from Main Street to highway interchanges. According to Interpreting the Interstates: How Highways Changed Rural America's Sense of Place, a documentary project from the University of Vermont, the effects were just as pronounced in the places the highways didn’t go:
Most significantly, the coming of the Interstate Highway dramatically affected older, general-access roads. . . . Traveled at lower speeds and lined by businesses with direct access to the roadway, such roads were characterized by distinct vernacular architecture (think roadside cottage colonies) that connected travelers to the communities through which they passed. The construction of Interstate Highways fundamentally altered this pattern of commercial development as long-distance travelers abandoned those former routes, leaving once-vibrant towns fading into obscurity and busy roadside stores and restaurants struggling to make ends meet.
“We have 12 vacancies,” Norman Bates tells Marion upon her arrival. “Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies. They moved away the highway.”
“I thought I’d gotten off the main road,” Marion says.
“I knew you must have. Nobody ever stops here anymore unless they’ve done that.”
- 1. This month, CityLab will be rounding up essential scary movies about cities—films that speak to the anxieties of urban life, showcase urban settings to terrifying effect, or forever change the way you see the cities they depict.