Oi, you! Reader person! Have you watched Psycho before? No? Then I’d strongly advise not reading this. There’s dozens of films that work better without knowing the end twist, but I’d say doubly for Psycho that you shouldn’t read anything about it until you watch it.

Averted your eyes yet? Good.

Okay, for those that have… you’ll know which two twists I’m talking about. Such is the fame of this movie – it’s on the front cover of my 1001 Movies book, o’course – such is the way it has found its way into the public consciousness, it’s incredibly difficult to be able to sit down and watch it today without knowing that a) Janet Leigh gets stabbed in a shower and b) Norman Bates’ mother is dead and her subsequent movements are a product of his personality disorder.

So it’s embedded in movie history, it’s important, it’s a “classic”. So naturally you’d have every right to be dubious. I always try to keep an open mind with films, especially if they’re highly rated but don’t seem to appeal to me, but Psycho is one of those films, along with Citizen Kane and Singin’ in the Rain. If you want to be a film critic and yet you don’t like it, you have to have a pretty damn good reason for not liking it, otherwise you’ll be stabbed brutally to death while showering.

Luckily, it’s brilliant.

Throw away all preconceptions with this one…

1) It’s in black and white.
But so many films were colour at the time. In fact, Hitchcock had spent the 50s gracing cinema with numerous colour masterpieces – Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest – so why switch to black and white in 1960 for this one film (his later films were colour)? Well, budget reasons, to be honest; the studios weren’t exactly confident in the ideas that he was throwing around for Psycho (oh, what irony).

But Hitchcock, ever resourceful, went with black and white… and not just because it was cheaper, but because it allowed him to throw more artistic vision into it. Psycho is one of those films that (as a coloured version in 1998 apparently proved; I’m yet to see it) just couldn’t possibly work any better in colour, and its use of black and white is essential to the atmosphere of the piece. Bluntly, who cares if the blood isn’t red? Give me a stark, scary and domineering house (much like Norman Bates’ mother) instead, thanks. It even manages to slow the “aging” of the film; special effects like are actually difficult to criticise as being unrealistic because they’re in black and white, and shadow is much better implemented to mask production deficiencies. Black and white actually hides bad effects in a way that colour never can.

Not that this actually has bad effects, anyway.

2) It’s a slasher film.
For a generation fed on Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the whole idea of a mysterious killer preying on innocents feels very much done. For a further generation fed on Scream and Scary Movie, the whole idea feels very much stupid. Describe the plot to your random punter on the street, and it’ll sound clichéd: “A blonde girl travels to an inn and is slashed to death”. Yawn.

In fact, just look at this poster:

“AIEEEEEE!” And so forth.

But Marion Crane isn’t your usual girl. For a start, she’s the main character of the first half of the film, the figure of identification for the audience, and then she’s ripped away as suddenly as the shower curtains are. More to the point, she’s got a secret to hide.

She’s also an attractive lady. A blonde, no less. In a slasher film, this would be pointless voyeurism – Friday the 13th is a good example here. But in Psycho, her attractiveness is essential because, if she were ugly, Norman wouldn’t be so turned on by her, and he wouldn’t therefore have to kill her. As the birds in his study prove, Norman is fascinated by women, but he’s only able to deal with them dead. Or to put it another way; “But I don’t really know anything about birds. My hobby is stuffing things.”

Marion’s death isn’t just a great scene, it’s the turning point of the film. It’s essential.

3) We’ve seen it all before.
Not in the sense of it being clichéd, in the sense of… well, we’ve seen numerous parodies (some brilliant, e.g. The Simpsons), it’s been discussed for years in film circles, and it’s one of those films that nearly everybody knows about. More to the point, a single scene has wormed its way into public knowledge; yes, the famous “shower scene”. Janet Leigh gets stabbed in a shower, violins go “EE! EE! EE! EE! EE!”, etc.

Easy to talk about it in such a casual and cynical way. And even then, even if you acknowledge the utter brilliance in that one scene; the musical score, when in fact there wasn’t supposed to be a musical score but it impressed Hitchcock that much; the cuts between the plug and her dead eye; the deliberately violent jumpiness of the murder… even after all that, it can be hard to appreciate it on anything but an objective level. Certainly, I’d assumed that I wouldn’t be able to see it as anything beyond “a great scene”, that it’d be something that would fail to connect with me personally.

Wrong. This is wrong, because seeing it out of context, as most people have in some form, completely lessens the impact. Were this, indeed, a slasher film, this would be one of many deaths, and it’d really just fall under the category of “coolest death”, or perhaps “scariest death”. The atmosphere from the start would be telling us that Marion Crane’s due for a slashing in some form or another; Friday the 13th, for example, had to actually resort to idiotic people prophesising the teenagers’ doom in an incredibly stupid and unsubtle way.

What makes the shower scene work so wonderfully is that there’s no build-up whatsoever. If there’s anything threat in the film up until that point, it’s Crane being threatened by the presence of police as she’s committed a robbery. Effectively, if you didn’t know what you were seeing, you could watch the first third of Psycho and assume it was a heist movie. You get Norman Bates being creepy, sure… but creepy in an innocent way, rather than anything malicious.

And then Marion steps into the shower, and, indeed – *curtain is ripped open* “EE! EE! EE! EE! EE!”

And then, after that intensely gripping twist that effectively adds up to only a couple of seconds, Norman Bates rushes in and has to dispose of the body. “Blood!” he cries in disgust, and about ten minutes are devoted to his desperate but obedient need to clean up after Mother’s crime.

In context, it’s brutal and frightening.

4) It’s not scary.
Yes, well. A lot of horror films aren’t really very scary, if you put it like that – and anyway, lots of people are scared by different things. I’m personally more frightened by the psychosis on display in, say, Satoshi Kon’s films, than I am by, say, a demon possessing a young child in The Exorcist.

That’s irrelevant; horror films don’t have to be scary necessarily to work, they just have to be good. They have to tap into something that can scare us, even if it doesn’t scare us right at that moment in time. Why aren’t we scared of Norman? Oh, because we’re not currently on a long drive, and we’re not pulling over at a creepy old motel. Why are we scared of Freddy Kruger? Oh, because he attacks us in our normal homes and in our dreams. The reason we don’t fear Norman is because it seems such a distant event to us.

But even if I personally don’t exactly fear him, I do find him fascinating. In the same way that Marion Crane isn’t your normal heroine, Norman Bates is hardly your normal villain. He’s boyishly innocent; unlike his mother at the end, he would hurt a fly, but he’d do it out of curiosity rather than a desire to kill. But then there’s the other personality, that of his sexually repressing, domineering mother. The idea of a man putting on women’s clothing is utterly ridiculous on one level, but when you see Norman running around in a terrible wig, a dress and brandishing a knife, it’s suddenly terrifying. It’s terrifying that such a ridiculous thing could be such a real thing for somebody as mentally ill as he is.

And the dual aspect of his personality comes out wonderfully in Anthony Perkins’ performance; he manages to master both Norman’s boyish lapdog nature, and yet you see minor cracks of Mother creeping out from time to time (“…shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately”). It’s a multi-layered (well, obviously) and utterly creepy performance, and probably more so because his madness is real.

Say one thing about Hitchcock; his murderers weren’t interested in things like money or revenge, they were all just sick, insane people. And more to the point, they were sympathetic. You feel for Bates, and that’s the biggest achievement of this movie, a movie where everybody is tainted. A movie shot in black and white, yet the morality’s anything but.

An artistic achievement, a mainstream success, and a damn good movie all things said. Psycho still is one of the greatest, no matter which way you look at it. And I, personally, loved it… to death…