Alfred Hitchcock - Physco

Rating: 9/10 (6 February 2014)

Alfred Hitchcocks "Physco" is truly classic horror film, with the main character: Lila Crane who's played by actress Vera Miles is abandoning her previous life with a stolen forty thousand dollars. In her process of escaping she ends up checking in to a remote motel which is run by a young male, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who is strongly controlled by his mother, even though she died on the 10th of June, 1949.
The use of shades and shadows throughout the film sets an eerie theme to the entire film. With one of the best scenes taken from behind a shower curtain, at this point you can only see Lila Crane as a silhouette of a person with a knife appears behind the shower curtain, Lila Crane then meets a grizzly demise as she is attacked. The mystery of the character leads you to believe it was either Norma or Norman Bates but at this time you are unaware of Norma Bate's death, so you are torn between the friendly but creepy Norman or the unseen (Except for a shadow in her bedroom window) Norma. The fast edits and audio throughout this scene represent the chaos that is currently taking place, the screeching of a violin shows that it is a violent attack and is used to shock the audience with loud and uncommon sounds.
The final scene of the film shows Norman Bates in the prison cell alone, the frame starts of as a wide shot but is slowly getting closer to Normans face while a voice over, which is in his mothers voice is talking about how he's not even going to hurt a fly. This show's that he has truly gone insane and believes he is fully innocent. As the framing of the shot comes closer to his face, he looks into the camera and smiles while the screen fades to the vehicle where he hid Lila Crane's body that is being pulled from the swamp. For a brief second in this shot you see his mothers corpse' teeth over the top of his smile, this represents that his mother's half of his mind has taken over.