Psycho (1960)

Official trailer

Psycho is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 American horror-thriller adapted from Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, depicting a Phoenix real-estate secretary who steals forty thousand dollars from her employer and stops at the wrong roadside motel during her getaway. Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates. Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane. Vera Miles plays Lila Crane. John Gavin plays Sam Loomis. Martin Balsam plays Milton Arbogast. Joseph Stefano wrote the screenplay. Paramount Pictures distributed the film, which Hitchcock financed independently through his Shamley Productions after Paramount refused to fund the project.

Psycho was released in June 1960 with Hitchcock’s famous policy requiring audiences to enter theaters only at the start of each screening. Psycho feels dangerous to me in a way few old films do. Hitchcock takes the woman I’ve been following for forty-five minutes and throws her away, and I admire the nerve of that more than almost anything in the genre. It’s cruel and it’s perfect, and everything about it deserves the 10.

Psycho is a hugely consequential film in cinema history and the single most influential horror production ever made.

The film set the modern slasher template forty years before the genre’s eventual commercial dominance. It built the protagonist-killed-at-midpoint structural reversal that later thrillers have repeatedly attempted to replicate. The film created the psychological-horror approach that the genre had previously treated as secondary to gothic or supernatural material.

The film also broke the Production Code’s prohibitions on toilet flushing on screen, naked female bodies in showers, and the depiction of murder with a knife in fluid violence. Each violation registered as audience shock in 1960 and each became standard practice later.

The Mid-Film Protagonist Death

The shower-murder sequence forty-five minutes into the film remains the most influential single scene in horror history. Marion Crane has been established as the protagonist for the preceding forty-five minutes through her employer-theft, her highway drive, her decision-making about her stolen money, and her arrival at the Bates Motel. Audiences in 1960 had no reason to expect the film’s central character would die at the midpoint.

Hitchcock’s structural decision broke a foundational rule of commercial narrative. The audience had been trained to invest in Marion’s story, with the screenplay reinforcing her position through extended close-ups and sustained interior monologue.

The decision to kill her in the shower violated every available commercial-narrative expectation. The film consequently produced an audience response that later thrillers have spent six decades trying to replicate.

I think the smartest thing Hitchcock does is make me care about the money. I’m fretting over forty thousand stolen dollars right up to the moment the film makes them meaningless, and that switch is crueler than the knife.

Anthony Perkins as Norman

Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates is among the most carefully calibrated character performances in cinema. The character must be initially charming, gradually unsettling, sympathetic enough to maintain audience interest after Marion’s death, and revealed as the actual killer in the closing-act exposition. Perkins plays each tone with sustained craft.

Perkins’s specific bird-like physical mannerisms, the careful taxidermy hobby, the long pauses between sentences, the way Norman stutters when his mother is mentioned: every detail builds toward the closing revelation without giving the audience permission to identify Norman as dangerous before Hitchcock allows. The performance carries the entire post-shower portion of the film on a single actor’s craft.

Perkins is my favorite performance in any Hitchcock film. I like Norman for most of the second half, and by the end I feel a little conned for it. That’s the performance working exactly as it should.

Bernard Herrmann’s Score

Bernard Herrmann’s all-strings score is a hugely consequential film score. The shower-sequence violin shrieks have become a horror-music universal reference, with every later stabbing-scene musical cue working in dialogue with Herrmann’s original. The decision to write the entire score using only strings gives Psycho its distinct sonic identity.

Herrmann reportedly composed the shower-sequence cue independently when Hitchcock had been considering scoring the scene without music. Hitchcock accepted the cue after hearing it and credited Herrmann with making the sequence functional. The collaboration produced a very efficient demonstration of how music shapes audience response to violent screen content. Those strings are the reason the shower scene still cuts. Hitchcock nearly left it without music, and I think that would have been the one real mistake of his career.

Does Psycho still hold up?

It’s a 10 because I can’t find a wasted frame. The shower sequence has shaped horror filmmaking for sixty years, Perkins makes a killer likable enough to hurt, and Herrmann’s strings do half the stabbing. Hitchcock broke the rule the audience trusted most and did it with money he put up himself. I’d put it at the top of any horror list I ever made.

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