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| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: September 8, 1960 |
Starring:
Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh
Summary:
A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer's client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) under the domination of his mother.
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Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece blends a brutal manipulation of audience identification and an incredibly dense, allusive visual style to create the most morally unsettling film ever made. The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure. It's a deeply serious and deeply disturbing work, but Hitchcock, with his characteristic perversity, insisted on telling interviewers that it was a "fun" picture.
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What makes Psycho immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers.
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It's got a jet black sense of humor that becomes increasingly apparent upon repeated viewings and there's no doubt that it is masterful filmmaking. Hitchcock himself approached it almost as a technical joke...The film is a textbook example of audience manipulation, as Hitchcock shifts our identification from character to character with the alacrity of a magician.
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Felt in the full impact of a theatrical screening (with the pleasure of seeing patrons reflexively kick or stiffen at the sight of Miles startled by her mirrored reflection), its power is not just that of a showman’s calibrated scare machine, but of a somber fugue on the trapped 20th-century creatures who inhabit its world, clawing but never budging an inch.
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What is offered instead is merely gruesome. The trail leads to a sagging, swamp-view motel and to one of the messiest, most nau seating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion and hemorrhage in the process by which a living human becomes a corpse...The nightmare that follows is expertly gothic, but the nausea never disappears.
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Dec 23, 2017
Hitchcock's finest achievement till date and he wouldn't even harm a fly.
Eerie, suspenseful flick from the Master Of Suspense.
Eerie, suspenseful flick from the Master Of Suspense.
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Oct 6, 2020
Whoever says this movie is not perfect is lying. A masterpiece, the best horror movie of all time.
3 of 3 users found this helpful30
Feb 4, 2019
Directing a story so propitious with everything there's genre has in its better, it comprehensive why Hitchcock was called master of thrilling.
0 of 0 users found this helpful00
Oct 15, 2021
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Dec 24, 2022
The original Slasher movie is a one of the best Black and White Films I've ever seen and for good reason, considering that the director has the last name of Hitchcock.
0 of 0 users found this helpful00
May 29, 2020
Uptight thriller with one of the best villains in cinema ever.Absolutely revolutionary thing,which could not be ignored by true cinema fans!
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Oct 26, 2019
I watched this movie for the first time recently and this is the most borring movie ive ever seen
1 of 14 users found this helpful113
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