Psycho (1960)

Psycho (1960)



Hitchcock's psychological thriller still shocks - especially the brutal shower-murder montage. A young, in-love, attractive real estate office secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) impulsively steals $40,000, flees from Phoenix, and eventually ends up at the deserted Bates Motel. Following a conversation over dinner with the sympathetic, shy, and nervous motel manager Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), she vows to return and extricate herself from her predicament involving the larcenous crime. As a cleansing act before retiring for the night, she prepares to take a shower.

In the next scene, the vulnerable woman is shockingly stabbed to death - it is the most famous murder scene ever filmed. The infamous scene begins peacefully enough. She closes the antiseptic, white-tiled bathroom's door, removes her robe, steps naked into the bathtub, pulls the curtain across, opens up a bar of soap, and turns on the overhead shower water. There in the privacy of her bathroom, she begins to bathe, visibly enjoying the feel of the cleansing water on her skin, relieved as the water washes away her guilt. Large closeups of the shower head reveal the water pouring down on her. The bathroom door opens and a shadowy, grey figure enters the bathroom - seen through the cloudy shower curtain, whips aside the curtain, wields a knife high in the air and repeatedly slashes and stabs at her, shattering her sense of security and salvation. Split-second images of her flesh, the knife, blood, and the bathroom tile flash on the screen. The piercing, shrieking, and screaming of the violin strings of Bernard Herrmann's shrill music play a large part in creating sheer terror during the horrific scene. Marion resists and screams - the killing is kinetically viewed from many angles and views. She is standing in water mixed with blood. She falls against the bathtub tiles, her hand 'clawing and grasping' the back shower wall after the murderer (resembling a grey-haired woman) quickly turns and leaves. In a closeup, Marion holds her hand out, grabs the shower curtain and pulls it down from its hooks as she collapses over the edge of the bathtub - her face is pressed to the bathroom floor. She lies bleeding on the floor, with the shower nozzle still spraying her body with water. The camera slowly tracks the blood and water which flows and swirls together counter-clockwise down into the deep blackness of the bathtub drain. The drain dissolves into a memorable closeup of Marion's dead-still, open right eye with one tear drop (or drop of water). The camera pulls back up from the lifeless, staring eye, spiraling in an opposite clockwise direction and revealing her face - stiff, lying flat on the bathroom floor.