Psycho
- This article is about the novel and the movies based on it. "Psycho" is usually a slang abbreviation of "psychopath". Psycho is also a song made by System of a Down.
Robert Bloch's pulp novel Psycho, partly inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein, was made into a black-and-white feature film in 1960 by Alfred Hitchcock. The affecting, subtly humorous screenplay was written by Joseph Stefano, who later went on to be the producer of (and frequent episode writer for) the pioneering mid-1960s science fiction television series The Outer Limits.
The book had Mary Crane from
Dallas, Texas as the leading lady. Since a real Mary Crane exists, Alfred Hitchcock changed her into Marion Crane from
Phoenix, Arizona. The first movie starred
Janet Leigh,
Anthony Perkins,
Martin Balsam, John Gavin,
Vera Miles, and
Spoiler warning:
Plot or ending details follow.
The first scene, risque in its day, takes place in a cheap hotel room and shows Marion Crane (Leigh) and her boyfriend Sam Loomis (Gavin) in their undergarments after a Friday afternoon tryst. Marion returns to work and receives $40,000 in cash from her boss to deposit at the bank. Instead of depositing the money she leaves town with it with the intention of asking Sam to marry her. Just across the state line in California, she trades her car and some cash and a new car because she believes she is being followed; on the way back to Tucson she misses a turnoff and eventually ends up on a nearly-deserted road. This road was originally the main route, so it has an old motel on it. She stops in at the Bates motel, run by Norman Bates (Perkins) because it is raining and she keeps drowsing off.
Although the motel receives few visitors, Norman keeps it open to give him some relief from taking care of his ill mother. Norman's other hobby is taxidermy: birds are his favorite species.
It turns out that Bates' mother is not ill physically, but mentally. She stabs Marion to death in the famous shower scene (with its now trademark score by Bernard Herrmann, featuring the screeching violins). Unlike Mary from the novel, Marion is not decapitated in the scene. Bates is horrified when he finds the corpse, but cleans up as if he has done this several times before.
The rest of the film deals with the search for Marion. Marion's sister Lila (Miles) and boyfriend hire a private detective, Milton Arbogast (Balsam), to find her. Arbogast traces her to the Bates Motel and eventually meets the same fate as Marion. Lila and Sam next go to the motel to follow up when the private detective disappears. Lila goes up to the basement of the Bates' adjacent home only to find the corpse of Bates' mother. Only at that moment is the killer revealed to be Norman Bates himself (cross-dressed in his mother's clothing, complete with wig).
At the end of the film a forensic psychiatrist (Oakland) explains to the police, Lila and Sam that Bates' mother is really dead and that Bates periodically assumes her personality; the dominant half of his personality is his re-imagining of his mother. The Bates personality has no idea that his mother is dead, so has no knowledge of "her" crimes. The last scene shows Bates totally taken over by his "mother."
Trivia
Psycho was the first film to introduce a single main character and then kill her halfway into the film--a rather shocking turn of events in 1960, with no apparent indication of where the story might go afterwards.
Although there is technically no visible gore portrayed on the screen, the cinematic effect and masterful directing manage to keep the infamous "shower scene" in a very short list of truly frightening and spell binding milestones of cinema.
Chocolate sauce, which showed up better than stage blood on black-and-white film, was used as the blood for the infamous shower scene. A knife, wielded by Hitchcock himself, plunging into a melon was the source of the sound effect.
Psycho is consistently in the top 25 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #18 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies and #1 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The film spawned four sequels (Psycho II, Psycho III, Psycho IV and Bates Motel - the last a TV movie). The original was remade nearly shot for shot, but in color, in 1998 by Gus Van Sant with Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn, William H. Macy, Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, and Robert Forster.
See also
