Classic Horror!

Rating: 10/10 (30 November 2013)

An excellent classic horror flick. Hitchcock raised the bar for all horror movies without showing any blood, guts or nudity. A trailblazer for his time indeed. Hitchcock deliberately wanted "Psycho" to look like a cheap exploitation film. . . That is the mystery of why Hitchcock marred the ending of a masterpiece with a sequence that is grotesquely out of place. Whenever anyone speaks about Psycho, the first images that come to mind are those of Janet Leigh being hacked to death in the shower. The scene is so famous that even people who have not seen the movie are aware of it. Bernard Herrmann's strident, discordant music has been used in countless other movies to denote the appearance of a "psycho." The brilliance of the scene lies in the editing. Those who go frame-by-frame through it will note how much is left to the imagination. We see a knife, blood (actually chocolate syrup), water, and a woman's naked body (with certain parts strategically concealed from the camera), but only briefly is the penetration of the blade into the flesh shown*. The full horror of the murder is only hinted at on-screen. It takes the power of the viewer's imagination to fill in the blanks. Brilliant movie indeed.