Frenzy Vs Hitchcock

At the time of its release, the 1960 masterpiece film by Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho, with its psychopathic killer and iconic shower scene, was initially given a rating of what is now a considered a PG rating under the Motion Picture Production Code (MPP code), a code that reigned in Hollywood for much of Hitchcock’s career. Made twelve years later in 1972, the Hitchcock film Frenzy was the first film by Hitchcock to be given an R rating from the start and was noticeably not held under the MPP code as it went on to feature disturbing scenes of gruesome corpses and barefaced nudity. These two Hitchcock films displayed vast differences in the level of violence and nudity in narratives that contain psychopathic murderers of women. The twelve years in-between these two films witnessed the eventual collapse of the repetitively revised MPP code, a code, like

In other words, the MPP code deterred showing explicit levels of violence and nudity in Hitchcock’s earlier films such as the 1929 Hitchcock film Blackmail but Modleski goes further than simply allowing the blame of a film like Frenzy to lay with the disappearance of the MPP code. In her article, Modleski highlights the significance of Hitchcock’s later work Frenzy and its relation to the MPP code’s demise by comparing the earlier film Psycho. Using both films, Modleski argues that Hitchcock defiles the female body by their sin, and the violence that later makes them corpses, is in part, a ritual. Taking into account the loosening censorship and the later elimination from the MPP code, Modleski concludes her article by stating Hitchcock’s female characters were defiled, but are not to be considered by audiences altogether unsympathetic and