A film Paramount did not want to make
Psycho arrived in 1960 after Paramount rejected Alfred Hitchcock’s usual budget for a story it considered too sordid, so he financed it himself through his own company, shot it fast and cheap in black and white with the crew from his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and took a percentage of the negative instead of his usual fee. Joseph Stefano adapted Robert Bloch’s novel, itself drawing loosely on the crimes of Wisconsin’s Ed Gein, into a tighter, stranger shape: Norman Bates loses the alcoholism and the pornography collection of the book and gains sympathy instead. The result was a low-budget genre picture that Hitchcock built to unsettle rather than reassure, arriving a year after the wide-screen globe-trotting of North by Northwest with something meaner and far closer to home.
Marion Crane’s story ends at the motel
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals forty thousand dollars from her employer and drives toward her lover, stopping for the night at the isolated Bates Motel, run by the awkward, watchful Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) under the thumb of a mother heard but never seen. She is killed in the shower roughly forty minutes in, and the film transfers its attention to a private investigator, Arbogast (Martin Balsam), then to her sister and her lover as they try to work out what happened to her. John L. Russell’s black-and-white photography keeps the motel office and the house on the hill in stark, high-contrast shadow; Bernard Herrmann’s score for strings alone shrieks over the killing; George Tomasini cut the shower sequence from dozens of separate short takes into something that reads as far more graphic than anything it actually shows.
What the shower scene actually does
What still lands is the structural nerve of killing off the woman the plot has spent half its running time following, with no warning and no one left who knew where she was. Perkins plays Norman as fidgety and solicitous rather than sinister, which is why the parlour scene with Marion works before it curdles in hindsight. Herrmann’s score does enormous work with almost nothing, strings only and no other instrumentation, and the shower killing remains a model of suggestion over display: the knife barely appears to touch skin, and the horror is assembled in the cutting rather than shown outright. A Golden Globe went to Leigh’s supporting turn, not to the director, and the film’s fingerprints are still on every slasher that followed it.
The lecture at the end
The closing scene, in which a psychiatrist stands in a police station and explains Norman’s condition to the room in one unbroken lecture, drains the tension the rest of the film worked to build; it was Stefano’s way of making the twist legible to a 1960 audience, but it now plays as the film’s one real lapse into over-explanation. The romance between Sam and Lila, largely invented for the screenplay, is thin next to everything around it. And Norman’s transformation from shy motel keeper to killer, however carefully Perkins signals it early on, still asks the audience to accept a great deal of psychiatric shorthand delivered in a very few compressed minutes near the end.
A fractured identity, not a monster
Psycho’s subject is the unreliability of appearances: a heroine established as the person to root for is disposed of at the midpoint, and a murderer is introduced as the person most likely to help. Norman’s bedroom, his taxidermy, and his devotion to a mother he keeps behind a locked door all point toward a study of a fractured identity rather than a monster in any traditional sense. Hitchcock shot it on television-grade equipment and stock precisely so it would feel cheaper and closer than his glossier pictures, and that cheapness now reads as a deliberate erosion of the safety a big Paramount production usually promised its audience. Fear here comes from the ordinary, a motel, a shower, a house on a hill, not from anything exotic.
Who it is built for
This suits anyone curious about where the modern horror film’s grammar came from, or anyone who wants to see Anthony Perkins before the role swallowed the rest of his career. It rewards viewers willing to sit with black-and-white photography and a deliberately unglamorous production rather than expecting the polish of Hitchcock’s colour pictures from the same decade. It is not for anyone looking for graphic violence, since by contemporary standards the shower scene is almost coy, nor for viewers who will be irritated by a plot that abandons its lead character and then stops dead for a clinical explanation near the end. Patience with an older register of horror is required.
Whether to spend the evening on it
At 109 minutes, on an outlay of $800,000 that returned around fifty times itself at the box office, Psycho is short, cheap by Hollywood standards even then, and still unnerving in ways that have nothing to do with the technology available to it. The reputation is not inflated: the mid-film murder, Herrmann’s score, and Perkins’s performance hold up scene for scene rather than trading on their history. It asks for one evening and repays it with a film that changed what audiences expected a thriller to do to them, which is worth the two hours whether or not you already know what happens in the shower.
