Psycho (1960)
Review by Siko Mike
Marion Crane is a trusted business woman and agrees to take her employer’s client’s $40,000 to the bank for him. After she leaves her office, she decides to leave town and use the cash all for herself. Marion begins to get paranoid since a cop is on to her and her employer spots her in her car. She heads down the interstate and buys a new car for her escape to her lover’s house. She mistakenly gets off the main road when it begins raining really hard, so she stops at the Bates Motel to get some rest and is greeted by the friendly co-owner of the motel named Norman Bates.
Norman invites her to have dinner with him and seems like a loner who is taking care of his sick mother. Later that night while taking a shower, Marion is brutally stabbed to death by Norman’s deranged mother. Marion’s sister Lila is worried that her sister hasn’t contacted her and seeks the help of a detective and her sister’s lover Sam. What they uncover is the most shocking evidence imaginable.
Before the 1960s, horror movies were all about monsters. We had vampires, werewolves, and creatures from beyond our world. Psycho broke down the door of horror movies and showed that people were the true monsters of society. Alfred Hitchcock broke the horror genre mold with Psycho that was so original and left audiences terrified of what they witnessed on the screen. Why is Psycho such a scary film? Well I’m going to tell you why this film is such a classic in our horror movie culture.
This film paved the way for films like John Carpenter’s Halloween and many others in the horror genre. It featured a terrific musical score, plenty of suspense, grisly murders, and ghastly setting. The film makes a simple stay at an off the highway motel very uneasy. It may also made people paranoid while taking showers too. After seeing this movie, I was scared to take a shower because I kept hearing noises coming from the other side of the curtain. This is the movie that will never leave your mind and will definitely keep you on the edge of your seat. The story is incredible and keeps you hooked all of the way through.
Color in film had been widely used by the time this movie was being made, but Hitchcock decided to film it in black and white (mainly to keep production costs down, but he also didn’t want it to be overly gory). To be perfectly honest, the black and white coloring actually made the film scarier than if it was just filmed in color. The acting was very believable by everyone involved, but especially by Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins (Janet Leigh is Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother. Why do you think that Jamie Lee Curtis was perfectly cast in Halloween? I guess that Scream Queens really do run in the family). Anthony Perkins was the most likeable, yet frightening character out of the entire movie. Norman is the guy that the story centers around and Perkins turns him from the boy next door to a true monster.
Don’t waste your time with the remake because Vince Vaughn has nothing on Perkins. Perkins will always be the true Psycho of the horror genre. The script by Joseph Stefano holds strong and believable. Hitchcock’s direction is absolutely brilliant with his visuals of the Bates Motel and Norman’s childhood home. There was hardly any blood in this film, yet we do get a little bit in the shower stabbing and the guy who gets stabbed in Norman’s house that falls down the stairs. The musical score, by Bernard Herrmann, is perfect and definitely freaks me out every time I hear it. Psycho is based on the novel of the same title by Robert Bloch (who also penned The Exorcist). Bloch got his inspiration for the character of Norman Bates from the true life of Plainfield psychopath Ed Gein. This alone makes the film have an even larger impact on me as a horror fan.
Overall, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is among the very best horror movies out there. If you haven’t seen this horror classic that set the benchmark for all other horror films that followed, you MUST check it out now! Psycho will always be a horror classic and is certainly one of Hitchcock’s best films. It has the power to creep you out, keep you on edge, startle you with its incredible music and put a twisted grin or shriek to your face.
We all go a little mad sometimes, but a boy’s best friend will always be his mother!
Psycho Trailer, featuring Alfred Hitchcock giving a tour of the Psycho house and more:
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