Psycho (1960)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Stars: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh & Vera Miles

Summary

A woman who works for an estate agent is asked to look after and take $40,000 to the bank. However this is obviously not the case, she decides to take the rest of the day off, due to the fact that she isn’t feeling to well, so she is allowed to go home as long as on her way she takes the money to the bank. She decides to pack her bags and run away. As she is in her car and heading out to town, she stops at a crossing, only then realising that it is her boss crossing with the man buying a house. She thinks that she is busted and panics, but thankfully he must just turn thinking he was hallucinating. On her journey getting further away from town, she get paranoid that she has been caught out, and only thinks the worst. At a point she is pulled over by the police, I think it was for a routine check, and she continues on her journey as no problems occur. She fears that she is being followed, and so she buys a new car, cash, which creates suspicion with the dealer, but he accepts the money, and sells her the car. She drives on and ends up staying at a motel named, ‘Bates Motel’. Here is where the first murder takes place, and where the great classic shower scene comes from. As time goes on, other murders occur. But the end of the film reveals a very big twist.

The threat of this film is the mad schizophrenic mad man which takes on his, and his dead mother personality and state of mind and is able to switch between the two.

The main action scenes that occur are;

-          The shower scene, when she is brutally stabbed and murdered.

-          The staircase scene, when in the Bate’s house, Arbogast is stabbed and pushed down the stairs to his death.

In the film the music that it used creates much suspense, the uses of the sharp pitched noises, grabs the audience and send ‘thrill’ down their spine.

The film itself had no advance screenings, and asked people at the end of the film not to tell anyone about it as they wanted the secret to stay with the film and so that when people watch it they were able to get the full affect as the people who would have told them about it.

The film itself did have a big effect to today, as even if you have not watched the film you still knew the music and classic scene from it.