The Thinking Machine 34

In both Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), characters compulsively journey to the lower depths, to an underworld. But their compulsion is pre-programmed; they are possessed by parental figures of high authority, mother or father. Extremes of high and low structure everything in these two films: places, gestures, voices. Two films on the creative margins of the slasher/serial killer genre.