Representation of Horror and Victimization of a Spectator in Hitchcock’s Films "Spellbound" and "Psycho"

And, vice versa, a male spectator led into the shower together with a female character cannot identify logically with her to such extent so as to feel killed along with her. Jackie Stacey puts it as “spectators being different subjectivities to the film according to sexual difference, and therefore respond differently to the visual pleasure offered in the text” (ibid.). But, in any case, a spectator – male or female – is victimized by the sense of the proximity of danger, when the spectator starts to identify him/herself with one or another character. There are no winners here. They are all victims of their own faults so human for anybody such as desire to have money and, thus, power, or to protect one’s mother, even if she is overprotective.
The main conclusion: in order to victimize the spectator, Hitchcock takes deep-seated human desires present in the subconscious of any person and brings them in the forefront of the narrative. In order to perform this, he takes such technical means of narrative as repetitive images associated to certain human sin and relates them gradually to specific camera angles in order to associate the particular vice to the spectator’s perspective, thus sustaining the spectator’s identification with the victim and, finally, leaving him/her in front of threat, not shown directly. It is enough by the previous elements building the identification to make the spectator to imagine the rest of the story.
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