The Great Cinematic Poem

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2014)

The strings of Bernard Herrmann combined with the screams of Janet Leigh, the knife of Norman Bates and the cuts of Alfred Hitchcock makes the movie moment that penetrated pop culture like no other.
My impression is that Psycho is perceived as purely a great piece of craft and entertainment, but in my mind what makes Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho such a singular work is the deep and personal poetry it contains.
Hitchcock was completely fearless in his ideas at this point. He makes his most radical and innovative film. The movie is heightened from his famous thrillers to a pure and modern horror movie. The visual universe is now dirty and grim as opposed to beautiful and glamorized. The icy and sophisticated blonds are gone and there are no traces of sympathetic heroes.
Everyone who has seen an interview with Alfred Hitchcock knows that he hides behind an inflated and parodic character. In his interviews he is very secretive and doesn't revel anything about himself. The opposite is true in his films. In his movies he is often completely open and naked. He exposes the most shameful truths about himself and his life. In Psycho he does a personal examination on a level beyond anything I've ever seen. He puts himself in the space where he is the most vulnerable. He offers a "peeping hole" into the darkest corners of his personality. The movie is extremely revealing, but in very subtle ways. One has to work to find the treasures of Psycho.
Psycho is like a novel in the way images are often suggested and has to be completed in the heads of the audience. The sexual and violent scenes are never explicit. This makes the movie even more disturbing than it ever could be if we had seen the images, and this was also the only way Hitchcock could convey what he wanted to convey and still get past the ridiculously strict American censorship laws of the time.
Sexuality is always a theme in a Hitchcock movie, but he never explored it as profoundly or intimately as he did in Psycho. The shower scene for example feels like a rape as much as it does a murder(the feeling intrusion, the nakedness and so on). Norman desperately desires Marion Crane. He is sexually satisfied by killing her(it might be a stretch, but I see the knife as a symbol of the male sex organ). This scene is all about the childish shame of Normans sexuality. Norman, or the mother side of him, tries to suppress his sexuality completely. This is one of the examples of the openness of Hitchcock in this movie. His catholic upbringing would suggest a lot of shameful sexuality in his life as well. Something he has in common with his biggest contemporary director hero, Luis Bunuel. Bunuel are one of very few directors who explored his own sexuality with anything close to the amount of honesty of Psycho.
Psycho is such a rich movie. It is filled with details. I believe you could watch it fifty times over and still find something new the fifty first time you watch it. Pay for example attention to all the little symbols and metaphors scatterd all over every single frame. Notice all the fascinations or "fetishes" of Hitchcocks that he put into it. The stuffed birds and the way they mirror Normans mother. The way food and eating connects with murder and sex. The peeping hole as a symbol for voyeurism and the movie camera. The cellar as a symbol of the suppressed and the shameful truths about Norman Bates. I really want to go into all these details, but like I said, there are too many and too much to discuss. It wont fit into the format of an IMDb review...
If you don't see the same things I do in this movie, please watch it again. Even more than the magnificent "Vertigo" Psycho has the ability to grow immensely on a second viewing, and continue to grow on the third, fourth, fifth, sixth... In my heart it has grown to be one of the absolute best films in movie history.