Cliffhangers and red herrings in 'Psycho' 1960

  Film Background; A young Lady named Marion Crane stole £40,000 from the bank that she works at for her boyfriend and herself. She planned to head off to California where her boyfriend works but realises she has made the wrong decision and decides to return back to phoenix. Whilst returning home she gets caught in a rainstorm which leads to her staying in an old motel at the side of the old highway, the hotel is rough looking which indicates to the audience that there is something that will happen in the hotel. this later leads to Crane getting murdered in the shower. Its up to Cranes sister and Cranes boyfriend to find out what had happened to her. The film ends with an unexpected twist. 

Miss-en-scene red herrings; In Psycho, Hitchcock makes use of red herrings in order to purposely distract the audience from the actual psycho of the film. One of the main red herrings in the film was the use of the violins, there were a number of occasions in the film when violins would begin to play. By doing this it would build suspense and imply to the audience that something was going to happen but in most cases nothing ever did. An example of this would be when Norman had just murdered Marion and whilst he is cleaning the evidence, violins would begin to play making the audience believe he was going to get caught or something along those lines. Hitchcock purposely this music to distract the audience so he could add suspense to the movie. The red herrings would make the audience question what is going to happen next. Another obvious red herring is Normans mother, the audience are most likely going to believe that the psycho is Normans mother as she is always sitting at the window never to move a muscle and shouting at him and treating him like a little kid. Norman says "we all go a little mad sometimes" which indicates that his personality disorder can get the best of him sometimes and cause him to do crazy things. Due to Hitchcock using red herrings, the ending of the film was completely unexpected which therefore made it exciting. Psycho can be classed as a scary film because of the red herrings, this is accomplished because the audience did not know a lot about the film. As there was a lot of confusion about the plot, suspense and not actually knowing who the psycho was, this left the audience asking a number of questions and left them feeling unsafe as they did not know what was going to happen in the film. 

cliffhangers; The main cliffhanger in Psycho is at the end when Norman bates has just been arrested and he is sitting in the room talking to himself, the camera then slowly starts to close up on his face to really emphasise the evil expression on his face which implies he has something planned but we will never know. There is then a cross fade to the flooded car. This leaves the audience wondering what is going to happen next, will Norman get sentenced? Does he try and escape? will the family go after him? etc. This is a very simple yet effective cliffhanger, it creates a sympathetic atmosphere as we know that Marion is in the back of the car, this makes us feel bad for her family and how they are about to find out that she is dead.