At the Bates Motel, you can take a shower...AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Rating: 10/10 (27 April 2002)

One can pinpoint with reasonable certainty where the modern horror movie really began. It began in 1960 with the release of Alfred Hitchcock's all-time masterpiece PSYCHO.
The story of Marion Crane stopping off at the Bates Motel and taking the shower which would live in cinematic history and infamy is so well known that no regurgitation of the plot is necessary. But what is important to know about PSYCHO is the fact that it introduced a number of important elements to the genre that had never been used before. It introduced us to the "slasher", in the form of Anthony Perkins' off-balance Norman Bates and his "Mother." It bought the horror film firmly into contemporary times by being set in the present. It also took a very unique approach to psychology and murder in a way that no film had done before, and few films have done since.
What is the most significant about PSYCHO's celebrated shower murder, besides the literal knife-edge editing and Bernard Herrmann's classic shrieking strings, is the way Hitchcock depicts this scene. So many slasher films entirely miss the point of that scene, focusing only on the (limited) blood. But Hitchcock manipulates the film in such a way as to make this scene LOOK much more graphic than it really is. It is a brilliant feat of movie-making on the part of the cinema's ultimate Master Of Suspense.
Even the much-criticized final scene involving the psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) isn't very bothersome; he brings up the first real honest-to-goodness explanation of a disturbed killer. As he relates Norman's story, he tells the group there in the room, "He was never all Norman. But he was often ONLY Mother."
Scripted by Joseph Stefano from Robert Bloch's novel of the same name, and loosely based on the case of Wisconsin mass murderer Ed Geinn (which also inspired the 1974 cult masterpiece THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE), PSYCHO remains a masterpiece to this very day, even after more than four decades of sequels, imitators, imitators of imitators, and an atrocious remake. No self-respecting fan of horror or suspense movies should be without a copy of this genuine fright classic!