Psycho is one of the most famous thrillers in motion-picture history. Alfred Hitchcock directed the movie, which was released in 1960. The film has gained praise for its sustained tension and its skill at manipulating the audience’s emotions. Psycho is best known for a scene in which a woman is stabbed to death while taking a shower. That scene and another unexpected on-screen murder have given Psycho the reputation of being a violent film. However, most of the film is devoted to the subtle build-up of tension.
At the beginning of the film, a secretary named Marion Crane steals $40,000 from her office in Phoenix, Arizona. She buys a car and drives toward San Francisco to meet Sam Loomis, a man she wants to marry. She gets lost on the road during a nighttime rainstorm and checks in at the Bates Motel, operated by young Norman Bates. While taking a shower in her room, Marion is killed by a person the audience is led to believe is Bates’s elderly mother. Bates discovers Marion’s body, puts it in a car trunk, and pushes the car into quicksand behind the motel.
A private detective working for Marion’s boss traces the woman to the motel, where he is stabbed to death, also presumably by Mrs. Bates. In the film’s surprise ending, the real killer is unmasked.
Janet Leigh played Marion. It became her most famous role even though her character died a third of the way into the movie. Anthony Perkins played the mentally unstable Norman Bates with creepy realism. Martin Balsam was the private detective. Vera Miles played Marion’s sister, and John Gavin was Sam Loomis.
Hitchcock filmed Psycho in black and white because he feared color photography would make the murder scenes too gory. The film cost a modest $800,000 to make but became Hitchcock’s biggest commercial hit. Its two violent scenes influenced many Hollywood “slasher” films. The slasher films, however, emphasized bloody assaults rather than the understatement that made Psycho so nerve-wracking for millions of viewers.
In 1998, American director Gus Van Sant remade Psycho using the same script and duplicating almost every shot in Hitchcock’s original film. Van Sant’s version used color photography.
