It ain't for kids

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2003)

Psycho ain't for kids. Not because of the much celebrated shower scene, but because it asks something of its audience that a lot of children haven't developed yet.
Hitchcock takes all the time in the world introducing us to the world of Marian Crane (Janet Leigh) before the bottom falls out of reality. And there's the real horror. This poor fool wallows into a trap of her own making, wanders into another set for her by the amazingly weird Norman Bates, played intently by Anthony Hopkins.
After the prime horror of the story is completed, no one can do anything. Not the detective Arbogast, not the handsome but useless boyfriend, no one, because the prime horror was committed long before Marian Crane ever stepped into that shower, and it came out of the excesses of the nuclear family. But you're in Hitchcock land now, and what seems clear, beautiful and all-American is hiding a deep corruption steeped in fear of sex and death, and that is heavy indeed.
A film like this reeks of a certain conscious angst, which is perhaps why the full color remake of a few years ago was so presumptuous. Psycho works because we have Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock playing out some of the darkest realms of the subconscious in black and white. It is we, the audience, who add the color, in this dream that surrounds the dream. No color remake can ever hope to attain the same effect.
In the meantime, this tight horror film stands, not only in its own time, but for the foreseeable future.