Psycho
HORROR-THON 2025 • BAD BLOOD
10/10
DIRECTOR: Alfred Hitchcock
STARRING: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles
RELEASED: 1960
RUNTIME: 1 hr, 49 minutes
WATCH ON: Netflix, Peacock, Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home
SCARE LEVEL: Medium to high
MOTEL SHOWERS: Never again
Psycho opens in Phoenix. A hotel room downtown, on a Friday afternoon in December, with a woman in a white slip who’s about to make a very bad decision. As someone who lives here, I can confirm that this city makes people do things.
Marion Crane is a secretary in Phoenix, stuck in a dead-end affair with a man who can’t afford to marry her. When her boss hands her $40,000 in cash to deposit. She takes it and drives toward California instead.
A rainstorm forces her off the highway and into the Bates Motel: twelve cabins, twelve vacancies, and a polite, nervous young man named Norman who runs the place. Norman lives in the big house on the hill with his mother. His mother does not like visitors.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
I know how it ends. Everyone knows how it ends. It still works. That’s the whole trick of Hitchcock: sometimes you know exactly what’s coming and he makes you wait for it anyway.
Anthony Perkins is the reason. Norman is shy, funny, and a little sweet. You sort of like him, which makes it all worse.
The costume detail I’ll never get over: Marion wears a white bra before she steals the money and a black one after. That’s not subtle, and it’s perfect.
Then there is the Bernard Herrmann score, all shrieking strings, which is the sound of horror for everyone who came after. De Palma hired him for Sisters for that exact reason.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
Apparently, on the first day of shooting, the cast and crew had to raise their right hands and swear an oath not to divulge a single word of the story to anyone. Hitchcock even went a step further by not revealing the ending of the script to his cast until he needed to shoot it.