In some prints, however, there is a third shot added to the mix: the corpse of Bates’s mother, her face superimposed over his. The key shot is the very last one, in which a shot of a maniacally-grinning Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates fades to a shot of Marion Crane’s car being winched out of the muck. There are actually two different cuts of Psycho out there, although you’ll have to look very closely to tell the difference. Both films employ single-frame images lasting 1/24 of a second these images tended to be of a broad, archetypal sort tied in with the desired emotion, such as two hearts to invoke love, the word "BLOOD" to invoke fear, and so on. Becker which uses subliminal images to enhance and help mold the viewer’s emotional response. Two horror films released in "Psychorama," a development by psychologist Robert Corrigan and engineer Hal C. Also, a quick porn snippet has been rather garishly cut into the last shot, a parallel to one of Durden’s favorite bits of mischief. Of the six fleeting earlier glimpses, two are visible if you know where to look (once on an airport conveyor, and once on the hotel “Welcome!” video) the other four, however, consist of one-frame superimpositions of Pitt’s image against the regular scene: (1) next to a photocopier (2) standing behind his doctor (3) beside the group leader at the testicular cancer support meeting, one arm draped across his shoulder and (4) in the alley Marla disappears down. Director William Friedkin denied such images existed for quite some time, until home video releases exposed such denials as fraudulent.īrad Pitt, as Tyler Durden, is formally introduced to the plot several minutes into the film, but but this introduction is in fact his seventh appearance in the film. Probably the most famous classic use of subliminal imagery, The Exorcist includes several two- and three-frame cutaways to disturbing images, most notably several shots of a horrifying pale face (that of a heavily made-up Eileen Dietz) with bulging eyes and sharp teeth, identified by fans of the film as "Captain Howdy" after the name Regan gives her imaginary friend early in the film. However, the two butted heads over Harris’s corner-cutting, leading to the message’s eventual inclusion in the final picture. Harris, a producer who paid for Carpenter to expand his film from 45 minutes to nearly an hour and a half, convert the picture from 16mm to 35mm and get the film distributed. In this mystery set in the gay nightclubs of New York City, director William Friedkin spliced in a few blink-and-you-miss-them frames from a hardcore gay porn flick during one of the film’s murder scenes.Īt one point in this early low-budget scifi offering from John Carpenter, one of the spaceship’s computer monitors flashes a message for a fraction of a second: "FUCK YOU HARRIS." The "Harris" in question is Jack H.
10 Examples of Subliminal Images in Movies