Psycho (1960)

If Vertigo was Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho was only a whisker behind and certainly his greatest public success. Psycho, made in black and white, has since achieved fame and cult status as the ultimate horror movie. Several books have been written about it and never known an audience to gasp audibly with shock as in Psycho.

The film was a low-budget movie that was sketched out, frame by frame, by Hitchcock in the minutest detail before he finished the entire filming in a few weeks. Its sets are now famous, especially The Bates Motel and the horror house that Paramount still preserves as a cinematic icon.

The film has been analyzed from several angles by well-known critics, and deep meaning has been read into the movie with the usual Hitchcock themes of guilt, paranoia, police persecution and mania lurking beneath a banal exterior. Anthony Perkins played the role of his life and has been typecast ever since.

The other roles by Janet Leigh, Vera Miles and the brilliant Martin Balsam as a detective Arbogast are now part of cinematic folklore. The famous shower scene is also screen history, but the loudest scream from the audience came with the murder of Arbogast.

Among the many dark themes read into Psycho by famous critics like Donald Spoto are Hitchcock’s use of mirror images. Spoto considered Hitchcock’s attempt to portray the perceived and the real in a dual persona. Spoto counted 131 frames in Psycho that included mirrors. He also considered birds which Hitchcock always projected as creatures of doom, were specially introduced in the film. There are stuffed birds, Perkins’s obsession with taxidermy, prints of birds everywhere, and the heroine is Marion Crane!

The shock and suspense that Hitchcock achieves in ‘Psycho’ is unmatched in cinematic history. He also draws brilliant acting performances by his main actors – the conversation between Perkins and the prying detective in Bates Motel being one of the most scintillating and truthful dialogues in the history of cinema. Psycho was made on a shoestring budget and was an immediate box office bonanza.

In fact, Psycho, more than any Hitchcock film, made him a millionaire. At the time, it was criticized by some humanitarian groups as excessively savage and brutal, but a closer look at the shower scene shows that shock is achieved through the use of music, and images of knives that are never actually seen to strike flesh. The savagery is not displayed on the screen and exists only in the audience’s imagination.

Psycho was Hitchcock’s most successful film. It raised him to the pinnacle of his profession without a shadow of a doubt. No other director could have conceived and filmed Psycho. In many ways, it is the ultimate Hitchcock.