Released in 1960, Psycho was Alfred Hitchcock’s very first horror film.  Adapted from Robert Bloch’s classic book by the same name, inspired by the real-life story of Ed Gein, and brought to Hollywood by the screenplay of Joseph Stefano, Psycho serves as the blueprint for films in the genre to this day. With its rich symbolism, brilliant casting, timing, and set design, it remains a groundbreaking thriller.

The film’s plot revolves around the disappearance of Marion Crane who is in a relationship with a divorced hardware store owner, Sam Loomis. Sam’s financial situation forestalls the prospect of any wedding, which leads Marion to steal $40,000 from her office. She flees the city immediately in her car, with the hope that Sam and she can start a life together with the stolen cash. When Marion decides to sleep the second night at the secluded ‘Bates Motel,’ she meets the shy, yet edgy, Norman Bates, the motel manager. Norman is, at first, awkward and kind; nonetheless, he invites her to dinner. However, Marion soon hears voices coming from his house on the hill. She hears the hysterical voice of Norman’s mother who forbids him from bringing a strange girl into the house. The following scene where Norman apologetically ‘fixes’ a dinner for them in the motel’s gothic parlour is haunting. The double-entendre laden conversation between the two reveals Norman’s repressed sexual desires and the oppressive life he leads around his controlling mother. Soon after, when Marion goes in to shower, she is stabbed violently by a shadowy figure, an iconic scene in movie history. In the meantime, her crime has been discovered and a detective, Milton Arbogast, has been assigned to the case. After he traces Sam and questions him about Marion’s whereabouts without success, he visits the Bates Motel. When Milton finds Norman’s responses confused and evasive, he decides to stay on to investigate further. His suspicions are further stirred when he sees a female figure behind the curtains in the house. Milton insists on speaking with Norman’s mother and makes a call to Lila, Marion’s sister who is also looking for her. However, Milton meets the same fate as Marion when he enters the ominous house on the hill. He is shown reeling off the stairs after being attacked; the camera angle suggests to the viewer that the fatal blow had been struck by Norman’s mother. After the detective’s disappearance, Lila and Sam take it upon themselves to look for Marion. As in the case of Milton, Norman’s nervous behavior and awkward chats confirm their hypothesis that there is more to the story than meets the eye. Hence, Lila decides to search the Bates’ house while Sam keeps Norman busy. The suspense and thrill reach a crescendo as Lila makes her way to the basement where she find’s Norman’s ‘mother’ – a mummified corpse with her eyes gouged out. When Lila screams in horror, Norman, who is now wearing his mother’s clothes and a wig, rushes in to stab her. However, Sam, who had been knocked out by the motel manager, enters just in time to save Lila. The movie ends with the psychiatrist explaining that Norman had, in fact, murdered Ms. Bates and the detective out of jealousy. He had later exhumed the body and created an alternate personality in his mind. Gradually, he began to wear his mother’s clothes and talk like her to preserve the illusion of her being alive. His murderous rage, often a result of oedipal complex, led to the killing of several young girls. However, Norman committed these murders as his ‘jealous mother’ – a symptom of dissociative identity disorder. The last scene, another classic moment in the movie, shows Norman, now in a psychiatric ward, smiling menacingly and speaking to himself. He has fully transitioned into his ‘mother ‘who protests that Norman is the recalcitrant killer-son with whom she has nothing to do. Hitchcock captures this hair-raising mood in the now historic line, ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

It is clear that Hitchcock’s vision in the film was to draw the viewer of the 1960s into the uncomfortable layers of the subconscious where voyeurism, sexual repression, and violence are intimately connected. It is now a famous anecdote that Psycho changed cinema-going habits: Until then, movie goers could walk into a theatre in the middle of a film, but Hitchcock insisted that no viewer be allowed to enter the movie hall once the film begun. This was managed so, to draw the audience absolutely into the grip of the thriller, much like Norman Bates allures his victim into the parlor.

With a runtime of 1 hour 49 minutes, and shot with Hitchcock’s own money, the black and white film brilliantly uses Bernard Herrmann’s score to heighten suspense, tension, and complexity. Hermann used string orchestra to accommodate the movie’s low budget and the resultant severe and screeching music is integrated perfectly and thematically into the film. For instance, the viewer is immediately taken in by the shrill, yet jumpy sound and choppy edits of the opening credit role, as well as the devastating background score of the shower scene.

The attention to detail given to the sets is impeccable. Pyscho is rich in symbolism through the play of shadows, birds, and wall paintings. One of the key elements in its set are mirrors and glasses – reflecting and upholding the inner duality of its characters, mainly Marion, to the audience. In the opening scene, Marion is seen dressing herself before the mirror – she looks directly into it, implying that she can still bear to look at herself since her personality has not taken on a morally duplicitous role yet. Once Marion decides to steal the money, she turns her back on the mirror in her room; from this moment on, she will avoid looking straight at her own reflection. The next time she sees her face clearly, it is reflected on the dark glasses of the unnerving police officer who knocks on the window of her parked car. She can barely look at him, not only because she feels intimidated by his questions, but also because she can’t face her own image as it reminds her of the crime committed. Similarly, when she enters the Bates Motel, we see her at the front desk through her mirror reflection. It is her guilty side, her dual personality, her immoral half – and shortly after, Norman Bates enters the mirror frame. The camera captures this moment for a split second to symbolize the meeting of the dark facets of both characters. The interplay between duality and singularity continues through Psycho and especially in the scenes with Norman and Marion together. The former has no mirrors or reflective objects around him, signifying his already completed crossover to his dark side, whilst Marion’s profile is almost always visible through a mirror by her side, either at the office or in the motel, as though to serve as a subterranean conversation between the two characters’ shared duplicity. Marion continues to avoid looking into her reflection, thus postponing self-reflection, and precipitating her own death.

These scenes are made more spectral through the motif of birds that Hitchcock introduces.  Norman is a taxidermist in the film. His parlor, into which he invites Marion, is eerily decorated with stuffed birds. Thus, Marion becomes another of his ‘birds,’ (a word that also means ‘women’) and eventually a prey. It is also interesting to note that her last name is Crane, a double-play on the word. The taxidermy or bird motif continues in the mummified corpse of Norman’s mother, who he has ‘stuffed’ like a dead bird, and thus, suggesting hints of necrophilia.

What especially stood out for me in this film is the treatment of mental illness. Released in the 1960s, both the book and the movie speak directly to the obsession with psychiatry and mental health diagnostic practices that had captivated Western medicine for the better part of the 20th century. The Freudian ideas of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious are symbolized by the attic, bedroom, and basement of the Bates House, with Lila ‘finding out’ or exposing Norman’s greatest and deepest secrets and decoding his desires through the mummified Mrs. Bates in the basement. Further, we now know, sixty years on, that the idea of schizophrenia implicit in the character of Norman Bates was misplaced in Psycho. In addition, the portrayal of Dissociative Identity Disorder adds to a long list of popular literature and movies that continue to stigmatize those with DID and indeed represent them as ‘psychos’ to the outside world.

Despite such disservice to the discourse of mental health, Psycho remains Hitchcock’s highest grossing film. Famous for its innovative camera angles, innumerable cuts and odd shots, the film’s biggest success for me lies in its exploration of the fragile connections between desire and criminality, as well as violence and voyeurism – both at the sexual and social levels - at a time when the film industry was barely prepared for ‘psychological horror.’ It is indeed a legacy in terms of film-making, story-telling, and exploration of social taboos.