THIS ARTICLE contains significant spoilers for a sixty-year-old film that you should have seen already.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror classic, Psycho, celebrates its 60th Anniversary this week.
The anniversary of this masterwork of horror and suspense would be worth celebrating normally but the context is important. Amid the chaos in which we currently find ourselves, we also find an emboldened cancel culture that sees people going back and going on offence archaeology expeditions and uncovering cultural artifacts from years ago that do not chime with modern sensibilities.
My own take on this is not as cut and dry as you might expect. On one hand, I don’t see the need to have comedies with blackface or racist slurs, like Little Britain, Come Fly With Me, or Love Thy Neighbour, on TV anymore whilst on the other I think that Gone With The Wind is an essential piece of cinema history and should be preserved as such. My argument may rely on subjective taste but, when dealing with the arts and creative media, what doesn’t?