“Did he smile his work to see?”—Gothicism, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the art of taxidermy

AbstractThis article attempts to read Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as a film that belongs to the genre of the corporeal Gothic. It attempts to study the fluidity of human anatomy, as shown in Psycho, through the lens of taxidermy. In Psycho, Norman Bates practises taxidermy to “fill” his “empty” time. But taxidermy is not used in the film merely as a marginal art practised by a marginalized character. It is a major motif that contributes significantly in adding to the Gothic atmosphere of the film. Highlighting the materiality of the human body through “grotesque preservation” and thereby creating a discourse on the preservation/destruction duality, that is central to taxidermy, is the point through which the paper seeks entry into the zone of the Gothic and into the world of Psycho. The decaying body of Mrs Bates, the deranged body of Norman Bates, and the tortured body of Marion Crane are studied as “taxidermic recreations” that not only reflect a taxidermist’s urge to construct compliant bodies but become sites of the creator’s and the viewer’s desire, much in the vein of a Gothic creation. The paper thus tries to understand whether the art of taxidermy, in general, and, its use in Psycho in particular, contributes to the genre of the Gothic. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror.