It is a Friday afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona, and a secretary named Marion Crane is lying on a bed in a cheap hotel room with her lover, Sam Loomis. She has stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer, and she is going to run. She drives out of Phoenix in the rain, stops at a lonely motel on a dark highway, and meets a shy young man named Norman Bates, who keeps the motel and lives in the house on the hill with his mother. She takes a shower. And then the curtain opens, and a figure steps in with a knife, and cinema is never the same again.
Psycho is the most famous film Alfred Hitchcock ever made, and it is also the strangest. It was made cheaply, in black and white, with a television crew, by a sixty-year-old director at the height of his fame who decided to make a small, sordid, terrifying little film about a murder in a motel bathroom. It broke every rule in the book. It killed its heroine a third of the way through. It showed a toilet flushing on screen. And it became the most profitable film of Hitchcock’s career.
The Little Book Nobody Wanted
The story began with a novel almost no one had read. Psycho, by the American writer Robert Bloch, was published in 1959, a short, grim thriller about a lonely motel keeper and the woman who stops at his motel one rainy night. Bloch had been inspired, in part, by the case of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin murderer whose crimes had horrified America. It was not the kind of book that Hollywood turned into films. It was too small, too sordid, too strange.
Hitchcock found it through a review. He was always reading, always looking for material, and something about Bloch’s novel caught his eye. He bought the film rights anonymously, for about nine thousand dollars, and then he bought up as many copies of the book as he could find, so that as few people as possible would know how the story ended. He understood, even before he had shot a frame, that the secret was the film.
His studio, Paramount, wanted nothing to do with it. The executives thought the story was tasteless, the budget too small, the whole idea beneath a director of Hitchcock’s standing. North by Northwest, a glossy, expensive, romantic thriller with Cary Grant, had been a huge success in 1959. Why would he follow it with a cheap black-and-white horror film? Hitchcock did not argue. He would make the film himself, with his own money, on his own terms.
A Television Film in Disguise
Psycho was shot for $806,947, a fraction of what a Hitchcock film usually cost, and it was shot like a television show. Hitchcock used the crew of his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, shooting on the Universal lot where the series was made, working fast and cheap, in black and white. The film was financed through his own television company, Shamley Productions, and Hitchcock gave up his usual director’s fee in exchange for a share of the profits.
The shoot began on 11 November 1959 and ended on 1 February 1960. The black-and-white photography was not just a matter of economy. Hitchcock believed, correctly, that colour would have made the blood too explicit, and that the film would never have passed the censors. In black and white, the violence could be suggested rather than shown, and suggestion was always Hitchcock’s weapon of choice.
The screenplay was written by Joseph Stefano, a young writer Hitchcock had chosen because he liked his take on the opening scene. Stefano kept Bloch’s structure but deepened the characters, giving Marion a real inner life, giving Norman a terrible, tender loneliness, and giving the audience a reason to care about both of them before the knife came out.
The Casting Gamble
The casting of Psycho was as unconventional as everything else about it. Janet Leigh, a beautiful, established star, was the film’s biggest name, and she agreed to take the part of Marion Crane for a quarter of her usual fee, because she wanted to work with Hitchcock and understood, as he did, that the part was worth more than the money. She was the heroine, the woman the audience would follow, the woman whose face was on the poster. And Hitchcock was going to kill her a third of the way through the film.
Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates, was a young actor known for sensitive, boyish roles, and he was the opposite of what audiences expected a murderer to look like. He was shy, nervous, charming, a little awkward, and Hitchcock knew that the audience would trust him, would like him, would feel sorry for him. That was the point. Norman Bates is not a monster. He is a lonely young man who loves his mother too much.
The rest of the cast was chosen with the same care. Vera Miles played Lila, Marion’s sister, who comes looking for her. John Gavin played Sam Loomis, Marion’s lover. Martin Balsam played Arbogast, the private detective who comes to the motel and does not leave. Each of them was a solid, unshowy professional. Even Hitchcock’s own cameo was unobtrusive: he appears a few minutes into the film, standing outside Marion’s office in a cowboy hat, and if you blink, you miss him.
Seven Days in the Shower
The shower scene is the most famous sequence in the history of cinema, and it is famous for a reason. It lasts, in the finished film, only forty-five seconds, and it took seven days to shoot. Hitchcock used dozens of camera setups, some accounts say seventy, some say seventy-eight, and he cut them together so quickly that the audience sees a murder without ever actually seeing a knife touch flesh. There is Bosco chocolate syrup swirling down the drain, because in black and white it looked more like blood than blood did. There is a body double, Marli Renfro, a twenty-one-year-old model, standing in for Janet Leigh in the most exposed shots. And there is no Anthony Perkins at all: he was in New York, rehearsing a Broadway show, and the figure in the wig is a stuntwoman.
The sound of the stabbing was made by stabbing melons. Hitchcock’s sound team tried dozens of different fruits before settling on the casaba melon, whose thick rind kept the sound from being too hollow, supplemented by recordings of a slab of sirloin being stabbed again and again.
And then there was the music. Hitchcock had originally wanted no music at all in the shower scene. But his composer, Bernard Herrmann, disagreed, and he wrote the score anyway, a shrieking, stabbing passage for strings alone that sounds like the knife itself. When Hitchcock heard it, he was so impressed that he doubled Herrmann’s salary, and reportedly told him the music accounted for a third of the film’s effect.
There is one more detail, and it belongs to Alma. When the film was finished and Hitchcock showed it to the studio executives, Alma pointed out that at one point in the shower scene, as the camera pulled slowly back from Marion’s lifeless face, you could see Janet Leigh take a breath. Leigh had left the production, and there was no money for reshooting. Hitchcock cut away to a shot of the showerhead to cover the error. Alma saw it, as she always did.
The Secret
Hitchcock understood that Psycho would only work if the audience did not know what was coming, and he protected the secret with an obsession that became a legend. He forbade Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins from giving the usual television, radio, and print interviews, for fear they would reveal the plot. He made a trailer in which he himself toured the Bates Motel set, chatting amiably, showing the audience the house, the motel, the bathroom, and telling them nothing at all. The trailer even included a shot of Vera Miles screaming in a shower, so that audiences would think they knew what was coming.
And then, in the boldest move of all, he changed the way films were shown. Before Psycho, audiences wandered in and out of cinemas whenever they liked. Hitchcock insisted that no one would be admitted to Psycho after the film had started. It was the first film sold in America on that basis, and theatre owners, who feared they would lose business, opposed it furiously. Hitchcock did not care. He believed that anyone who walked in late, who missed Janet Leigh’s performance and wondered where she had gone, would feel cheated. The policy told the audience, before they had even sat down, that this was not an ordinary film.
The Night the Audience Screamed
Psycho opened on 16 June 1960, at the DeMille Theatre and the Baronet Theatre in New York City. People queued around the block. Inside the theatres, the audience screamed. The director Peter Bogdanovich, who was at one of the first screenings, remembered it years later: the moment the curtain opened and the stabbing began, there was a sustained shriek from the audience, so loud that the soundtrack could not be heard. Through the entire shower scene, he said, it was the first time in the history of movies when it was not safe to be in the movie theatre.
The critics were divided at first. Some were shocked by the violence, some were baffled by the structure, some thought the film was a cheap trick. But the box office did not care about the critics. Made for $806,947, Psycho earned fifty million dollars around the world, becoming the most profitable film of Hitchcock’s career. The audiences had spoken, and they had spoken in screams.
It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Hitchcock, his fifth and final nomination, and Best Supporting Actress for Janet Leigh, who won the Golden Globe for the role. It won none of them. Bernard Herrmann’s score, one of the most famous in the history of cinema, was not even nominated. The Academy, as it had done throughout Hitchcock’s career, looked the other way. It did not matter. The audience had already given its verdict.
The Aftermath
The legacy of Psycho is difficult to overstate. In 1992, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2001, the American Film Institute named it the greatest American thriller ever made. The shower scene has been studied, imitated, parodied, and analysed more than any other sequence in the history of cinema. Martin Scorsese modelled a fight scene in Raging Bull on it, shot by shot.
But the film’s real legacy is simpler than that. Psycho changed what a horror film could be. Before it, horror was about monsters and castles and things that went bump in the night. After it, horror was about ordinary people in ordinary places, about a motel on a highway, about a young man who seems perfectly nice, about a shower in a bathroom that looks like your own. Hitchcock took the terror out of the gothic and put it in the everyday. The slasher film, the psychological thriller, the modern horror film: they all begin here, in a motel room in Phoenix, on a rainy night in 1960.
And the film changed Hitchcock, too. It proved that he did not need a studio, did not need a big budget, did not need a star, did not need colour, did not need anyone’s permission. He could make a film with a television crew and a bottle of chocolate syrup, and the whole world would come to see it. He was sixty years old when he made Psycho, and it was the freest, boldest, most dangerous film of his life.
The curtain opens. The figure steps in. The violins scream. And more than sixty years later, we are still watching, still afraid to step into the shower.