24 Hour Psycho

It is an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 psychological thriller film Psycho, slowed down to approximately two frames per second from its original 24.

[8] The Guardian writes that as Gordon's first film, 24 Hour Psycho introduced several important themes in his future work: "recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.

[2] For its Berlin screening, the film was shown via a VCR equipped with a shuttle control that allowed it to play in extreme slow motion.

"[12] Brian Price, writing for Oxford University Press, bemoaned in 2010 that the select showings of 24 Hour Psycho made it a privilege to see rather than an amazement, calling it "limited-access cinema".

"[6] The 2010 short novel Point Omega by American author Don DeLillo heavily references 24 Hour Psycho, and uses it as a framing device.

[17] Ross writes that, by replicating Psycho in extreme slow motion and removing the audio, 24 Hour Psycho changes the original narrative of the film so much that one's "memory and perception clash over the reconstruction of the film" as "the viewer fails to recreate the original story.

"[19] However, the slow motion makes Psycho difficult to recall, as it amplifies more details and editing techniques for the audience to perceive, yet it simultaneously dissolves the original film's narrative structure to the point where "more often than not, there is nothing to see.

[21] 24 Hour Psycho instead subjects the characters of Hitchcock's film to a "celluloid prison where they are condemned to attend their fate in a slow-motion trap.

By muting the sound, Gordon accomplishes in 24 hour Psycho what "Hitchcock perhaps intended as a cinematic trope: to show Norman's madness by sight" alone.

[23] Klaus Pieter Biesenbach writes that "duration is immeasurable" and has its own "inner rhythm", saying that the more detailed a memory of a certain period, the longer it seems to have been.

[24] Biesenbach also adds that viewers of 24 Hour Psycho would attempt to compare their memories of the original film to Gordon's artwork, which "so explicitly alludes to the idea of life as a storyboard, containing suspense and unexpected turns that occur according to the commonly understood logic of the psychoanalysed human being.