Psycho (1960)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960.
Plot
Marion Crane, a Phoenix secretary, impulsively steals $40,000 from her employer to help her boyfriend pay off his debts so they can marry. She drives off with the money, stops after dark at the nearly empty Bates Motel, and has a long, strange dinner conversation with its awkward young proprietor, Norman. Back in her room she has an attack of conscience, decides to return the money, and steps into the shower. Someone — apparently Norman’s mother — pulls the curtain and stabs her to death.
The film’s audacious move: it kills its star (Janet Leigh) forty-five minutes in, and the rest of the story becomes a search. Marion’s sister Lila, her boyfriend Sam, and a private detective named Arbogast try to figure out what happened to her. Arbogast also gets killed. Finally Lila and Sam reach the Bates house, find the mummified corpse of Mrs. Bates in the fruit cellar, and watch Norman come downstairs in a dress and wig, knife raised. A psychiatrist at the end explains it in a clinical monologue: Norman killed his mother years ago out of jealousy, couldn’t live with it, and preserved her by absorbing her — his mother is now a personality inside him, the dominant one, and she’s the one who kills.
What It’s About
Psycho is Freud as horror-thriller. The superego as a voice literally louder than the ego, the repressed as something that returns wearing mother’s clothes — the film’s whole machinery is psychoanalytic. Norman’s “mother” is the part of his psyche that punishes him (and any woman he’s attracted to) for sexual desire. Freud’s account in Civilization and Its Discontents — the superego as an internalized authority that can grow sadistic — is almost a direct description of Norman.
Hitchcock layers other Freudian mechanisms on top. The shower scene is symbolic penetration rendered as literal violence; the drained eye staring up at the camera after her death is the uncanny gaze of the corpse. The house on the hill behind the motel is a textbook split-psyche image — public face (motel, commerce, visible) and hidden interior (Victorian house, corpse, repressed). Marion’s theft of the money sets up a moral register the film deliberately discards: “punishment” for theft is grotesquely disproportionate, and Hitchcock wants you to feel how incoherent puritanical retribution is.
Formally Psycho is the most daring studio picture of the 1950s going into the 1960s: black and white (to keep the blood from looking like blood), made with Hitchcock’s TV crew to save money, scored by Bernard Herrmann with screeching strings that became a permanent piece of pop-culture DNA.
Connections
- Alfred Hitchcock — his biggest hit; the film that arguably invented the modern horror template
- Sigmund Freud — the film’s actual theorist; the closing psychiatrist speech even quotes pop-Freudian diagnostics
- Civilization and Its Discontents — the sadistic superego internalized as the “mother” voice
- Dream Psychology — the uncanny logic of Norman’s split; the return of the repressed
Lineage
Predecessors: Robert Bloch’s novel (inspired by the real Ed Gein case); Freud’s case studies; the German expressionist horror tradition (Caligari, M); Hitchcock’s own Shadow of a Doubt.
Successors: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; Halloween; The Silence of the Lambs; American Psycho; arguably the entire slasher genre; Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot 1998 remake.