Why PSYCHO Still Kills

The Data Points

• Year Released: 1960

• Runtime: 109 Minutes

• Directed: Alfred Hitchcock

• Produced: Alfred Hitchcock

• Starring: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam

• Oscars:

  • Won: None

  • Nominated: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Leigh), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction/Set Decoration

• IMDb Plot Summary: A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer’s client, goes on the run and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the dominion of his mother.

Why Psycho is Great

Entertaining Thrills. Is Hitchcock the most entertaining and important filmmaker of all time? With a filmography spanning nearly 70 titles and six decades (and no true duds among them), the case is quite strong. His career and the mainstream movie industry began at the same time, and so by default he is among the great founding fathers of this entertainment vehicle; however, even as late as the 1960’s, Hitch was inventing genres, how to film them, and new ways to keep audiences on the hook. Not only is Psycho no exception, but it almost singlehandedly proves the rule. With this film, he essentially invents the slasher genre, introduced audiences to complex psychological concepts, and blew their minds with some historic plot twists.

Despite its clear horror label, most of the film functions as a seedy film noir powered by Hitchcock’s always-perfect ability to create suspense and tension. However, the plot changes over several times, which would be exciting enough on its own:

1. In its first 30 minutes, it’s the story of Marion Crane stealing $40,000 and attempting to evade authorities.

2. In the next 15 minutes, Marion has an extended, awkward, creepy conversation with Norman Bates before being brutally killed and her murder thoroughly cleaned up.

3. In the next 15 minutes, a private investigator right out of the 1940’s investigates her disappearance before he, too, meets a stabby end.

4. The final 30-40 minutes involve an escalation of the mystery around the Bates motel, before a series of shocking reveals as to what’s really going on.

Movies almost never try to do this because it’s so very hard to pull off. In Hitchcock’s capable hands, however, the resulting twisty narrative moves like a runaway train that rarely gives the viewer any time to breathe. Beyond simply containing scares, Psycho is designed to be a unique thrill ride from the bottom up.

That’s not to say that its horror aspects don’t work. The infamous “shower scene” remains an assault on the viewer’s senses akin to the physical assault that Marion is experiencing – including its protracted nature in combination with its speed and intensity. But before we even get to that great shock, Bernard Hermann’s score has been cooking up dread with a tinge of tragedy for the better part of 40 minutes; our pulse has been pounding, and we’re not sure why, but doom is in the air. On rewatch, the viewer is almost impatient to get to the big shower scene, and so every minute and second that passes beforehand passes quite slowly. The movie doesn’t even peak in intensity with the shower scene, as there are several later sequences that contain suffocating amounts of tension, suspense, and dread. The resulting film is one that, despite a very small body count, is as propulsive and thrilling to experience as any of today’s mainstream offerings. In fact, it’s only when the audience gets a chance to catch their breath when they are more deeply introduced to the ideas of the film, which bring about their own terrific shocks and scares.

Assaulting American Values. In 1960, the country was moving from Eisenhower to Kennedy, and a squeaky-clean image of American life was treated as an achievable ideal in society in stark contrast to the evils of Communism. What a shock, then, to sit down for this film and experience its climax featuring a man dressed like a woman wielding the knife. I tip my cap to those who don’t think Psycho’s final scene featuring a psychologist explaining Norman’s condition after his arrest is bad. Even I must admit that the actor playing the psychologist is feasting on the scenery for his limited screentime. However, in its final minutes, the ideas that the film lays bare take the audience from shocked to genuinely troubled: Norman Bates isn’t a transvestite, but instead suffers from split personalities, one of which is him and one of which is a recreation of his mother. “Mother”, at the sight of young women that Norman is attracted to, grows jealous enough to kill.

For everything the psychologist says, there is much more that is intimated, and soon the mind wanders into deep waters of Oedipean psychosexual weirdness. Why would the mother personality, which Norman adopted because he couldn’t accept that he killed her, get jealous of women who attracted him sexually? Just how close were they? The film doesn’t address these notions, but the film is all the better for allowing the audience to raise them. The psychologist laying out the “facts of the case” doesn’t just deepen the audience’s feelings about everything they previously saw but is a huge part of why this movie stays with them when it’s over. The evil at the heart of this movie is now tangible, and when married with the film’s setting conveys the idea that this evil could be anywhere. There are plenty of small towns with run-down motels in America; how many of them contain evil like Norman Bates? With this idea, Hitchcock located the Cold War paranoia that lay underneath the facade of All-American suburban life at this time, but he argues that there is a far more insidious evil within small-town America than that of communism.

Psycho at 62. This film’s reputation precedes it; you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t aware of the shower scene’s piercing violins, Janet Leigh’s piercing screams, and shots of a stabbing knife. Most people you might ask are aware of the film’s reputation, those who’ve seen it remain overwhelmed by its excellence. On IMdB, where the truth of movies is *obviously* parsed out, it’s Hitchcock’s highest-rated film, which is a real statement for a filmmaker who can lay claim to at least 10 masterpieces. The power of its ingenious twists and turns, by modern standards restrained staging of violence, and underlying psychological themes haven’t dulled with time. After this film invented the slasher genre, including a sensational mix of sex and violence, the only way to improve on what Hitchcock pulled off was to go more graphic in both categories once the censors allowed it. In that way, every slasher film featuring sex or the pursuit of it as a plot point (so many of them) is chasing Psycho’s shadow whether they intend to or not. While Hitch was aware of what he couldn’t show due to production codes at the time, he fully leaned into the idea that the unseen, and half-explained, could often be more terrifying to an audience that what is fully seen or understood. It’s a quality that his best movies share, but Psycho best uses this approach to get under audiences’ skin. The famous shower scene is still a shocking technical achievement, but the entire film is a tight and tense thrill ride from beginning to end. The fact that the movie was shot in black and white adds another layer of unfamiliarity, and with it discomfort at the very outset of the story, to modern audiences. And though we’ve rightfully grown more tolerant and accepting as a society of cross-dressing such that the sight of Norman Bates in his mother’s clothes isn’t as strong a shock as it was 62 years ago, the true nature of his condition remains disturbing.

This film is a must-see for any horror fan, or any serious movie fan. It’s on the shortlist of horror movies that I recommend to people who generally don’t like horror movies (like me), because it’s thrills are so pure. Psycho hardly feels constrained by any single genre thanks to its unique design, so anyone who think they’re sitting down for some slasher movie as we know them, even a good one, are in for a real treat. If you’ve seen it, I’d recommend showing it to someone who hasn’t because you’ll get to experience this film anew with them, but at the same time you’ll be surprised at how thoroughly gripped you are. And once the movie is over, it lingers; the movie’s greatest scares are still supplied by the audience, with the master himself pointing the way.