"Psycho' Heads List of Top 100 Thrillers
June 13 -- With apologies to Michael Jackson, the real thriller in show business is Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock loomed large Tuesday, when the American Film Institute released its list of top 100 thrillers. Psycho, North by Northwest and The Birds landed in the top 10, and six of his other films made the list.
Jaws and The Exorcist round out the top three. Steven Spielberg, with six films, followed Hitchcock as the director with the most films in the running.
Oz a Thriller?
While most of the titles are familiar to moviegoers — the list boasts such titles as The Maltese Falcon and The Godfather — some of the films don't seem to fit very well in the thriller category.
There's no argument that The Wizard of Oz and E.T. the Extraterrestrial are classics. But are these family-fun flicks really thrillers? The institute endeavored to keep the pool of candidates broad so that the final list could include a diverse selection, including the science-fiction classic Planet of the Apes and the courtroom drama 12 Angry Men.
What makes Psycho worthy of the top spot? Janet Leigh, the actress slashed to death in the famous shower scene, says it's "brilliant editing, and the score and how his [Hitchcock's] camera brought the knife to the body. You'd swear it went in, and of course, it never could, because we couldn't show that."
In that scene, Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, dons his dead mother's clothes to kill Leigh's character.
And how did Hitchcock achieve that eerie crunching sound when the knife rips through human flesh? He used melons.
"He brought a watermelon, a casaba, a cantaloupe," Leigh says. "At the end, Mr. Hitchcock said without hesitation, 'The casaba.'"
Harrison Ford and the late Claude Rains each appeared in four of the top 100 thrillers, more than any other actors.
The oldest film on the list was the 1923 silent release Safety Last, while the newest offerings were 1999's The Matrix and The Sixth Sense
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