by Julian Spivey 

Alfred Hitchcock was the king of the thriller. Nobody has ever been able to pull off the type of success he found as a director. Psycho, released in 1960, was definitely one of Hitchcock’s finest films.

Psycho is known by many as the mother of all horror films and has graced the top spot on many scariest movies lists. The movie is based on the 1959 novel by Robert Bloch. The movie was done relatively cheap as Hitchcock simply used his crew from his television series at the time Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The movie was filmed for only $800,000, a miniscule number for even that time. Even though color films had been around for many years by 1960, and Hitchcock’s previous films Rear Window, Vertigo and North by Northwest were all filmed in color, Hitchcock decided to go black and white for this eerie movie. The black and whiteness of the film adds even more to the scariness of the film.

Psycho starts out with Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, as a secretary at a bank who looking for a new start to her life steals a large sum of cash and runs away with it. Lost and tired Crane makes her way to an almost abandoned little country motel run by the mother-fixated Norman Bates, played brilliantly by Anthony Perkins. The ending of the movie is definitely one that shocked audiences everywhere at the time of its release and still does to this day for those who have never seen or heard of the ending.

The shower scene from Psycho is without a doubt one of the most familiar and parodied movie scenes in cinema history. This historic scene took Hitchcock and his crew an entire week to film correctly and the finished product contains over seventy interspersed cuts even though it only lasts forty-five seconds in length.

Leigh and Perkins do exquisite jobs in their roles, especially in the scene in the motel’s parlor where the two are conversing in a room filled with stuffed birds, as that is Bates’s pastime. This scene also includes the movies most memorable lines: “A boy’s best friend is his mother” and “We all go a little mad sometimes.” The supporting cast of Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam bring delightful performances to the film as well.

Hitchcock’s eerie filmmaking and choice of black and white cinematography along with almost flawless acting, and not to forget the stirring stringed score by Bernard Herrmann make Psycho one of the scariest and greatest films in cinematic history.