Groundbreaking and brilliant

Rating: 9/10 (6 June 2010)

I was fortunate enough to see Psycho for the first time at a late night cinema presentation with an audience full of teens who had heard about the shower scene but had, like me, never seen the film before. And, apart from the notoriety of the shower scene, we didn't know the rest of the story.
There was no internet, no IMDb, it hadn't been on TV yet, and people had been quite good about keeping the main elements of it under wraps.
So we didn't know that we were going to identify with Marion Crane, tempted into committing a robbery, realising the mistake she'd made, having a helpful conversation with the nice young man at the motel she had checked into which led to her resolving to put things right. And then being abruptly, savagely, and shockingly slaughtered. We didn't know we'd identify with her. But Hitchcock did and, while we were sitting in the darkness trying to regain some sort of footing after the emotional carpet had been ripped out from under our feet, Hitchcoock was sitting behind the camera quietly amused at how he had manipulated us.
And then he did it again (without cutting us loose from our emotional moorings, admittedly) - Arbogast's killing, the revelation of the mummy, Norman's appearance in the doorway, and Norman's final look to camera - all shocking, horrifying moments.
This movie is a masterclass in audience manipulation, with nothing to equal it before or since (Jaws came close).