Big screen, big chills: Join Seattle Symphony for 'Psycho'

What's the scariest thing about "Psycho?" The infamous shower scene? A private detective's ill-advised investigation of a motel proprietor's house? An even more ill-advised visit to that house's cellar by a missing woman's sister?

You can take your pick during an unusual opportunity this week to see and hear "Psycho" as never before: projected on a large screen at Benaroya Hall while the Seattle Symphony Orchestra performs composer Bernard Herrmann's famously anxious score for strings.

SSO's nightmarish treat debuts Thursday and ends, appropriately, Saturday, Halloween night. Leading the orchestra will be Adam Stern, the symphony's former assistant conductor and associate conductor — and a self-described "film nut" and Herrmann enthusiast. A recorded introduction by Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne precedes the screenings.

Ultimately, the most unnerving thing about "Psycho" is how the film's director, Alfred Hitchcock — a natural storyteller — repeatedly subverts an audience's familiarity with story conventions.

Hitchcock's landmark 1960 thriller begins as a sordid, noirish tale of illicit love and embezzlement. The central character, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), takes flight from her job and life with a stolen bundle of cash, ending up at a failing motel run by an affable if erratic Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).

Without spoiling the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it, it's safe to say events involving Crane come to an unexpected and shocking halt about halfway through "Psycho." Enter a gumshoe (Martin Balsam), and the film takes on the procedural rhythms of a sleuth's quest for the truth — until, that is, that brief plot disappears, too.

Hitchcock goes on that way, introducing and dispensing with elements that finally can't contain the film's depth of horror.

Even a last-minute speech by a psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) is a baldly prosaic attempt to explain, scientifically, the madness we've witnessed. Hitch undercuts that, too, with disturbing final images.

A major part of the emotional glue that binds the experience of "Psycho" is Herrmann's music.

"I remember once watching the scene where Marion Crane is driving away from an encounter with a state trooper," says Stern, "and I had the sound off. Without the music, there wasn't anything to the scene. With the music, it's quite tense."

Conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, Herrmann also wrote, arranged and conducted scores for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre radio broadcasts. He broke into films writing the sometimes forbidding music for Welles' 1941 "Citizen Kane."

Among his more than 70 scores for movies and television, Herrmann collaborated nine times with Hitchcock, including "Vertigo," "North by Northwest" and "The Birds" (which Herrmann scored only with synthesized simulations of bird cries).

They last worked together on "Marnie" (1964), and ended things after falling out over Herrmann's score for "Torn Curtain."

"Hitch and Herrmann were both ferociously intelligent, outcasts since childhood," says Stern. "They were characters at odds with the world. But Herrmann was sensitive to the psychological character of film. The music in 'Psycho' connects what the characters are feeling and what audiences should be feeling."

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com