He was no bloodsucking vampire, no scheming mobster, no lover done wrong. With his gangly frame, soulful dark eyes and soft voice, Anthony Perkins didn't just act, he defied, and then defined, the psycho of the film's title. He seemed at once capable of offering to carry your luggage and hacking you to bits, the genteel host and the grim reaper alternating dominance in the flick of an eyelash. She died not because she was irredeemably wicked or because she was carrying a wad of cash in her purse, but because she aroused the erotic impulses of the wrong man. Bad things occur because you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, for no logical reason, when you're naked and vulnerable.
Violence is often random and sick and senseless and ugly.
The movies would never be the same again. And neither, for that matter, would showering.