Do you have any vacancies?

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2015)

Fed up of only being able to have brief trysts in hotel rooms with her long distance lover, Sam Loomis, Marion Crane decides to take the forty thousand dollars her bosses' client has given her to deposit at the bank and head to California to be with him and start a new life.
However, the drive from Arizona to California is a long one and after she is questioned by a cop for sleeping in her car at the side of the road, she decides to check into the nearest motel the next time she is tired.
She stops at the Bates Motel, run by Norman (played by Anthony Perkins, who did such an outstanding job at playing him that it apparently type-cast him for the rest of his career) and his crotchety, overbearing house-bound mother.
Lonely Norman seems grateful for the company and invites Marion to eat with him where he reveals more about himself and his unhealthy relationship with his mother.
After the conversation takes an unnerving turn, Marion excuses herself and retires to her room where she takes the fateful shower, in which Mrs. Bates, who is apparently displeased at her presence in the motel viciously stabs her to death.
Upon discovering Marion's lifeless body Norman decides to protect his mother and covers up her crime. He hides Marion and her belongings, including the forty thousand dollars which she had hidden inside a rolled up newspaper, in the boot of her car and drives the car into a nearby swamp.
Marion's disappearance prompts her sister, Lila, to start a police investigation. But when the detective goes missing as well, Lila decides to trace her sister's last steps for herself, appealing to her sister's lover to help her.
They head to the Bates Motel where they discover the disturbing truth behind Norman and his mother.
Often credited as being the first slasher film, Psycho is by far one of the most influential movies of all time.
The twist ending, where it is revealed that Norman is the real killer and assumes his dead mother's identity to commit murder, has been mimicked and parodied so many times but was considered very shocking and perverse at the time it was made.
Hearing the detective describe Norman as a 'transvestite' stood out to me when I first watched the movie as it was so unusual to hear the term in a movie that was released during that time, and it very nearly wasn't as the MPAA allegedly tried to cut it from the film.