Psycho

If America’s greatest art form is film, then Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is the Mona Lisa of horror. Arguably Hitchcock’s most watched work by contemporary audiences, Psycho connects with viewers on a visceral level seldom achieved by any film. The plot is deceptively simple. A woman (Janet Leigh) steals money from her work, goes on the lam and stops for the night at the Bates Motel for some sleep and a relaxing shower. But things don’t work out the way she imagines.

The very name of the film evokes an immediate reaction and recalls an unforgettable series of images: the shower curtain, the screeching, the scream, the knife, the spiraling blood down the drain, the dead eye looking back at us. The movie is subsumed into this singular slice of the film: the shower scene. The best art redefines the way we perceive the world and the objects in it. Psycho does just that by forever altering a sacred space. Before Psycho, the shower was a place of vulnerability and isolation; it was one of the only places where you could truly be alone. After Psycho, nothing is sacred. You are never truly alone. From behind a curtain or from darkened spaces, someone is watching you. Someone is always watching you. Sigmund Freud calls it the Superego (later expanded by psychoanalytic film theorist Laura Mulvey who makes Hitchcock the basis of her theories), but the rest of us call it totally terrifying.

The shower scene is the pivotal lynchpin holding together the two parts of the film: the getaway and the investigation. Like great works of art, Hitchcock’s masterful direction obfuscates the lines of genre. Is it a heist film? A mystery? Detective flick? Or perhaps a pulp fiction fetish film? Psycho is all of these and more. Wrought with voyeurism, perversion, and bloodlust, the 48-year-old film reveals more twisted layers with each viewing.

Now with the Special Edition Universal Legacy Series DVD, the film lifts Psycho's hood to uncover the engine driving it. The DVD includes storyboards of the shower scene by the highly imitated graphic designer Saul Bass, who also created many of Hitchcock’s movie posters and title sequences. These storyboards reveal how the tightly constructed narrative leads us effortlessly through the buildup, the tension, and the climax. In addition, newsreel footage of Psycho and behind the scenes featurettes illuminate the making of the historic film and Hitchcock’s legacy. After all, Psycho is not just a movie; it is a cultural phenomenon, a part of the filmic canon, and an extremely enjoyable traumatic experience.

—Drew Tewksbury
10.09.08

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was already famous as the screen's master of suspense (and perhaps the best-known film director in the world) when he released Psycho and forever changed the shape and tone of the screen thriller. From its first scene, in which an unmarried couple balances pleasure and guilt in a lunchtime liaison in a cheap hotel (hardly a common moment in a major studio film in 1960), Psycho announced that it was taking the audience to places it had never been before, and on that score what followed would hardly disappoint. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is unhappy in her job at a Phoenix, Arizona real estate office and frustrated in her romance with hardware store manager Sam Loomis (John Gavin). One afternoon, Marion is given $40,000 in cash to be deposited in the bank. Minutes later, impulse has taken over and Marion takes off with the cash, hoping to leave Phoenix for good and start a new life with her purloined nest egg. 36 hours later, paranoia and exhaustion have started to set in, and Marion decides to stop for the night at the Bates Motel, where nervous but personable innkeeper Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cheerfully mentions that she's the first guest in weeks, before he regales her with curious stories about his mother. There's hardly a film fan alive who doesn't know what happens next, but while the shower scene is justifiably the film's most famous sequence, there are dozens of memorable bits throughout this film. The first of a handful of sequels followed in 1983, while Gus Van Sant's controversial remake, starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, appeared in 1998. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi