Review of Psycho (2007) by Jacob M — 21 Jun 2014

"A boy's best friend is his mother.".

Everyone knows this honest and truthful fact: Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most brilliant and genius film directors who ever lived, creating the most creepy, the most suspenseful, and the most scary films ever made. What's surprising is that although I'm a HUGE Hitch fan, I have never watched what many consider to be his ultimate suspense thriller, Psycho. If you know me well, the former Hitch film that I was really going crazy over was Vertigo, which is slowly beating out Citizen Kane as Hollywood's all-time best. Vertigo was my favorite film from The Master of Suspense... until I watched Psycho. Oh man! Psycho has got to be the craziest, most suspenseful, and the most frightening horror film I've ever seen in my life!

The film is about Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is tired of her job. She steals $40,000 from her boss and leaves her city of Phoenix to start a new life. Tired, she ends up at the Bates Motel, run by the nervous and slightly freaky Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who tells freaky stories about his sick mother and specializes in taxidermy. The story then unfolds into complete madness when Marion decides to take a shower...

Psycho also features John Gavin as Marion's lover, Vera Miles as Marion's sister Lila, Martin Balsam as a suspicious detective, John McIntire as a sheriff, and Hitchcock cameos outside the business Marion works for.

From the opening scene, showing Marion and her lover in a hotel room (something controversial for a film released in 1960 when the Hays Code was still in office), Psycho has managed to grab my attention more than any other horror film ever made. Unlike today's so-called horror films, where a grand story is scrapped in favor of more blood and gore, Psycho, with it's suspenseful story, manages to get a few great scares in, such as the infamous shower sequence and another on a staircase which caught me off guard. Considered controversial at the time for these crazy, insane violent scenes, Hitchcock has created the ultimate horror masterpiece. From what I've heard, Hitch was inspired to make this film after watching William Castle's classic cheesy horror B-Movie The Tingler, starring the great Vincent Price, intending to create as cheesy a film as Castle's was, unaware that the film that he was making ended up to be more suspenseful and scary than The Tingler ever was.

Released in a time when color was becoming ever popular, the black-and-white cinematography is a stunner in this already mentioned excellent masterpiece. Had this film been made in color, Psycho wouldn't have been as scary, nor would it have been as groundbreaking. Plus Bernard Herrmann's truly delightful, creepy, and intense score is Herrmann at his all-time best (the shower sequence cue has become a household name).

But what makes Psycho the great film it is? I believe it has to do with the performance of Anthony Perkins as the psycho Norman Bates. He may act like a nice person, but when looking at his facial expressions in more intense moments, it's freaky, freaky, and extremely freaky. Without giving too much away, Norman has the presence of a freaky psychopath yet graces the screen as a troubled soul. Perkins is brilliant. The other noteworthy performance here is Janet Leigh as Marion Crane. Though her role is brief, Leigh's troubled and insane beliefs and ideas are haunting and delightfully brilliant, plus who doesn't know the famous scene in the shower?

Psycho is Hitchcock's ultimate masterpiece, filled with a chilling performance from Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, incredible black-and-white cinematography, a truly intense, violin-heavy Bernard Herrmann score, and with Hitch's desire to tell the story over scares, Psycho may very well be the greatest horror film of all-time, and Hitch at his all-time best, yes, better than Vertigo.