One of the all time greats IMHO




Janet Leigh plays "Marion Crane" a secretary having an affair with sam loomis

Crane wants more from the relationship, she returns to her job at a real estate office and encounters a cowboy buying a home for his soon-to-be-wed daughter.

She pockets the $40,000 used for this transaction and leaves with it to marry loomis, but her boss notices her at a traffic light in the city after she asked for the afternoon off due to a headache, she gets paranoid and  flees to california.


She is stopped by a police officer that suspects something unusual about her she  exchanges her car at a used car lot and settles for the evening in the  Bates Hotel where she encounters  norman bates played by anthony perkins

She is murdered halfway through the film in  the most well know scene in film history.... the "shower scene."

An investigation after crane's death is conducted by detective milton arbogast who is hired by her former boss to retrieve the $40,000, the detective is murdered as well.

The creation of Norman Bates, a kind, reserved, mama's boy-like man who seemingly couldn't hurt a fly was a new monster.

Psycho laid the groundwork for  modern slasher films, it established the victim as a daring, sexy female who  threatens the patriarchal status quo.

Crane sleeps with a married man, steals from a real estate company, escapes the police and comforts a creepy male loner.

Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees are direct descendants of Norman Bates.

There is so much about this film that the casual viewer misses, too! I'm a huge Hitch fan.

The character of Norman was based, of course, on Ed Gein (think there may be a thread about him in the Serial Killers section...)

Very few people today realise just how this movie made possible the type of movies we see today... Censorship had been pretty tight up until this film came along. It was the first to depict sexuality and violence in a graphic manner and although the "youth" market was ready for such a change, the older audience resisted it. For this reason, "Psycho" was initially received by many with anger and critical rejection; funny how it is now considered Hitch's greatest film by most (me? I like "The Rear Window"...)

"Psycho" also included the very first love scene in American popular cinema ever to feature a pair of lovers lying half-naked on a bed    And not only did Psycho depict two brutal murders, but the first occurred in the "intimacy" of the shower. As a result, Hitch had to fight to make the film as close to his vision as possible and find ways to work around censorship laws. When the censors demanded he re-edit the shower scene on account of a fleeting glimpse of Janet Leigh's breast  , Hitch simply sent back the original cut on the (correct) assumption that they either would not re-screen it or would fail to see the barely noticeable nudity the second time around! As well, Hitch reportedly shot the film in black and white only because he knew the censors would never approve the very bloody shower scene in color. As he put it: "Our big problem...is trying to make the censors understand that the young people are much more sophisticated than they used to be".

Hitch used ink to create the "blood" spiralling down the drain in the shower scene, incidentally.


The complete Psycho screenplay
Ed Gein thread in Serial Killers

~ Viper ~