Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is an obvious choice to be included on any list of the most famous or iconic movies. The shower scene (with its violence) and the accompanying musical score (with its violins) are recognizable to anyone with even a passing interest in movies. But why does this film -- this B-movie by an A-list director -- endure? What sets it apart from the countless other tawdry black-and-white movies in which pretty women are murdered? Let's creep down to the basement and investigate. The praise: Psycho earned Oscar nominations for its direction, supporting actress (Janet Leigh), cinematography, and art decoration, but didn't win any of them. (Leigh won the Golden Globe, though.) It came in at No. 18 on the AFI's 1998 list of the 100 best American films ever made, and moved up to No. 14 on the 2007 revised list. The AFI also declared it the No. 1 greatest thriller of all time, and the film was represented on the AFI's list of greatest movie villains (Norman Bates came in second, after Hannibal Lecter), and best musical scores (No. 4). It's currently the 23rd highest-rated film among Internet Movie Database users. The context: Alfred Hitchcock had just enjoyed a decade of tremendous success when he decided to make a movie about a nice young man with Oedipal issues. Hitch's output in the 1950s had included Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, not to mention the very popular TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62). North by Northwest, another critical and popular success, was in theaters when, in the latter half of 1959, Hitchcock stumbled upon Psycho. Robert Bloch's newly released novel (based very loosely on real-life serial killer Ed Gein) was the subject of a positive review spotted by one of Hitchcock's assistants, who brought the book to Hitch's attention. The director still had one film left in his contract with Paramount, but the studio wanted nothing to do with the grisly novel or Hitchcock's adaptation of it. Even when he said he could make it cheap, Paramount was uninterested. Undaunted, Hitchcock bought the rights to the book himself (for $9,000) and made Paramount this offer: He'd shoot the movie somewhere else with his own money, and all Paramount would have to do is distribute it. Plus, he'd defer his up-front director's fee and take 60 percent of the film's profits instead. Paramount executives couldn't believe their good fortune at getting a new Hitchcock film almost for free. Hitchcock was intrigued by the low-budget B-movies to which Psycho, with its murder and depravity, bore a superficial resemblance. What if somebody good were to make a movie like that? In keeping with the spirit of the genre, he confined himself to a budget of less than a million dollars and shot the picture in black-and-white. (It is true that he also wanted to avoid the distastefulness of filling the screen with full-color blood. And yes, it's true that they used chocolate syrup.) To save money and as a matter of convenience, Hitchcock shot the film at the Universal Studios lot where his TV show was produced, using much of the same technical crew. He even had one of his TV writers, James Cavanaugh, take the first pass at adapting Bloch's novel; after finding Cavanaugh's draft boring, Hitchcock hired Joseph Stefano, an up-and-coming writer who would later work on the Outer Limits TV series. Hitchcock always worked closely with his writers, and the final screenplay for Psycho turned out pretty faithful to the novel. But there was one significant deviation that was Stefano's idea: to make Marion Crane the main character before she gets killed. The novel has Norman Bates as the main character from the beginning, introducing us to Marion (called Mary in the book) in the second chapter. Stefano thought -- and Hitchcock agreed -- that it would be delightfully macabre to make the movie all about Marion, to tell the story entirely from her point of view, right up until the moment she's murdered. To the best of anyone's knowledge, no film had ever pulled a switcheroo like that before. Your protagonist might die at the very end of the movie, but not at the 45-minute mark. Moreover, Marion was to be played by Janet Leigh, a very popular and recognizable actress. Audiences settling in to watch the film would expect her, as the star and protagonist, to make it to the end. Seeing her stabbed to death halfway through would be profoundly unnerving. Hitchcock, a master showman, knew that selling a film to the public was almost as important as making a good movie. To preserve the surprises (and to create buzz), he kept the set locked down and spread rumors about casting a character who is not actually in the movie. He forbade the stars from doing publicity interviews. He didn't let film critics see it early, forcing them to buy tickets with the common people when it opened. (Stefano later speculated that bitterness over this slight was why so many of the critics panned it.) Hitchcock also implemented an outrageous but effective publicity stunt when he got theater owners to agree not to admit latecomers. The director said it was because audiences would feel cheated if they came in late and missed Janet Leigh altogether, but that explanation sounds specious to me -- it's not like she's killed in the first 10 minutes. I suspect Hitchcock really just wanted to pique people's curiosity. The movie: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a nice lady from Phoenix, steals $40,000 from her employer and runs off to meet her boyfriend. Along the way, she stops at the Bates Motel, where the proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), has a creepy relationship with his awful old mother. To make matters worse, the motel doesn't even have Wi-Fi.What it influenced: What hath Psycho wrought? Oh, just the entire slasher genre, that's all. The Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises and their numerous copycats have a great deal in common with Psycho. Perhaps most crucial is the perverse fact that it is the killer, and not any of his victims, who is ultimately the focus of our attention. Maybe we don't "root," exactly, for Norman Bates, Michael Myers, or Jason Voorhees. But they're certainly the ones we're most interested in. They're the ones who come back in the sequels. Consider also the way that sex, shame, and violence are tangled together, like a sexy, shameful, violent tapestry. Psycho begins with Marion and Sam Loomis (John Gavin) semi-nude in a hotel room, having just finished what's known as a "nooner." The scene is quite PG, but considering the two are not married (!) and they're lying on a bed together (!!) and she's in her bra (!!!) and it's 1960 (!!!!), you may well imagine how sleazy it seemed at the time. Later, we're introduced to Norman Bates and his host of psychosexual hangups, which include spying on Marion as she undresses; shortly thereafter, Marion is murdered -- in the shower, completely nude, just as we were sort of enjoying the steamy eroticism of the moment. The connection between sex and death is implied here and made explicit later, when we learn more about Norman and his mother. Michael and Jason are likewise screwed up in the head, prone to punishing people for having sex, favoring knives (penetrative, phallic) over other weapons. How many slasher films have had scenes where an attractive female character takes a shower? How many involve out-of-the-way places where the hospitable locals turn out to be dangerous? How often have you cringed as someone made the foolish decision to go into the basement, or thrown up your hands in frustration as the local police proved ineffective? These tropes can trace their roots back to Psycho.The protagonist fake-out is now a standard device as well. The Nightmare on Elm Street films frequently focus on a particular character, only to have him or her killed early on; Wes Craven's Scream did the same thing with Drew Barrymore. It happens in non-horror movies, too, like The Hurt Locker, where the most famous actor is Guy Pearce and the movie starts out acting like it's going to be about him. If you were to compile a list of the most famous scenes in movie history, Psycho's shower scene would have to be in the top five. With some 80 fragmentary shots in less than a minute, it's a masterpiece of editing, not to mention planning (Hitchcock storyboarded everything meticulously). We truly believe we're seeing a nude woman hacked to death, when in fact no naughty bits are visible (there's a glimpse of side-boob) and only for a fraction of a second do we see the knife penetrate the skin (bloodlessly). Hitchcock was relying on something known as the Kuleshov Effect, a principle of film editing named for the Russian filmmaker who experimented with it in the 1920s. In a nutshell, the Kuleshov Effect is when two or more separate shots are edited together in sequence and the viewer infers information that is not actually shown. It's not the content of any one shot that matters so much as how it relates to the shots before and after it. For example, if you see a close-up of a man looking lovingly to his left, followed by a close-up of a woman looking adoringly to her right, then cut back and forth between them, we understand that these two people are looking at each other -- even though we haven't actually been shown that they're even in the same room, let alone connected in any way. (If you didn't want to rely on the Kuleshov Effect, you'd start with an establishing shot where we see the man and woman in the same frame, then go to the close-ups.) In the shower scene, Hitchcock manipulates us into thinking we're seeing details that aren't there, implying a nude woman being stabbed but not actually showing it. Why, here's Hitchcock himself describing the Kuleshov Effect:The shower murder has been copied several times (usually in thrillers with titles like I Saw What You Did, Blade of the Ripper, and The Crazies), parodied even more frequently (as in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety), but it's also common to see directors imitate the style of it rather than the content. For example, Martin Scorsese patterned one of the violent boxing scenes in Raging Bull after it. Bernard Herrmann's shrieking-violins musical score is the perfect complement. I've never been stabbed, but I bet it feels a lot like what Herrmann's music sounds like. Hitchcock originally wanted this scene to play without music -- which would have been creepy too -- but it's for the best that he saw things Herrmann's way. The distinctive, urgent staccato of the music has been emulated and parodied hundreds of times, making it one of the film's most identifiable trademarks. Think of the effect this must have had on audiences in 1960. They've already seen a lady in bed with a man she's not married to. They've seen Marion tear up a note and flush it down the toilet, the first time a commode has appeared in an American film. (Really!) They've seen Norman spy on her as she disrobes. And now they're seeing her -- ostensibly the main character -- hacked up violently in a montage of quick shots from multiple angles, accompanied by shrill, discordant music. Each of these elements would have been shocking individually; putting them together like this must have soiled the pants of many a moviegoer in 1960. Psycho was a major box-office hit, underscoring (and not for the first time) the divide between critics, who mostly disliked the movie, and regular audiences, who ate it up. Yet by year's end, some of those critics had changed their minds. The New York Times' Bosley Crowther, who initially called it "slowly paced" and said it "falls quite flat," wound up putting it on his top 10 list for the year. Time magazine changed its opinion, too. Meanwhile, the movie was the second highest-grossing film of 1960 (behind Swiss Family Robinson) and the most lucrative of Hitchcock's career.Naturally, the film's success prompted copycats and ripoffs; then, as now, Hollywood's assumption is that if people liked a movie, they'll surely also like a hundred other movies that are pale imitations of it. In particular, filmmakers emulated Psycho's "goriness," which I have put in quotation marks because the film actually shows very little blood. It was perceived as a bloodbath, though, and this emboldened other directors to actually show the buckets of gore that Hitchcock merely implied. Thus arose the subgenre known as "splatter films," which focused on visceral, graphic, physical violence, with traditional horror and suspense relegated to secondary importance -- in other words, just the murder parts from Psycho, magnified a hundred times, with everything else omitted. Blood Feast, from 1963, is generally considered the first splatter film. Its insane, cannibalistic mass murderer is a spiritual cousin to Norman Bates (including a fondness for killing girls in the bathtub) and a grandfather to the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. In England, Hammer Film Productions released a series of low-budget suspense thrillers obviously inspired by Psycho. The studio wasn't opposed to gore -- in fact, its Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) had also been precursors to the splatter genre -- but what it borrowed from Psycho was the idea of atmospheric murder mysteries and twist endings. Titles like Taste of Fear, Maniac, Nightmare, Hysteria, and Fanatic were made cheaply and quickly throughout the 1960s, presumably until Hammer ran out of one-word titles that were reminiscent of Psycho.Three Psycho sequels (one direct-to-video) were eventually made, all with Anthony Perkins reprising his role as Norman, none with any involvement from Hitchcock, who had the good sense to die three years before Psycho II. In 1987, NBC aired a TV movie called Bates Motel, starring Bud Cort as a man who'd roomed with Norman at the asylum and has now inherited the hotel. Yes, this was a weird idea. No, the TV movie didn't do very well. Yes, an 18-year-old Jason Bateman was in it. There was also one of the strangest cinematic experiments of all time: Gus Van Sant's 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, starring Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn. The director basically just duplicated Hitchcock's original, using the same dialogue, blocking, camera angles, and so forth. It was fascinating to see that you could make something that was for all intents and purposes an exact copy of the original, yet that somehow wasn't as good. There is apparently an undefinable magic involved in making a great film, one that can't be xeroxed. In the Halloween films (some of which star Janet Leigh's daughter Jamie Lee Curtis), the psychiatrist played by Donald Pleasence is named Sam Loomis, after Marion's boyfriend. Perhaps because Halloween got the ball rolling, the name Loomis shows up frequently in horror movies, including the Scream series, They, Stay Alive, The Wraith. ("In the Master's Shadow: Hitchcock's Legacy," from the 2008 DVD release of Psycho, has numerous modern directors talking about how Hitch influenced them, with clips from his movies shown next to theirs so we can see the similarities. You can watch it on YouTube in three parts, here, here, and here.)What to look for: If you're watching the film for the first time, do not look for a lot of murders. Psycho may have been a forerunner to the splatter and slasher genres, but it was light years behind them in terms of body count.Mirrors are a recurring theme, as befits a movie about dual natures. The first glimpse of a mirror is in the scene where Marion -- who was wearing white underwear before, now black -- decides to steal the money. They appear regularly thereafter, especially in scenes with Norman Bates. If you've seen the film before, it's fun on repeat viewings to notice all the things Norman says that take on a creepier meaning now that you know the whole story. In fact, pretty much every word out of his mouth is darkly funny. It is true that Marion is our protagonist at first. No scenes take place without her in them. But there's actually a subtle shift in perspective just before she dies, signaling that we're about to change protagonists. First we stick with Norman as he spies on her, making us complicit with him as he violates her privacy. (Considering Marion has been our heroine up to this point, we should feel pretty scummy for betraying her like this.) Then Norman goes up to the house on the hill -- and we go with him, leaving Marion behind altogether. He doesn't do anything particularly important up there, nothing we HAD to see. The point is to lay the groundwork for the major change that's about to take place. After the murder, our loyalties shift to Norman -- which is outrageous, yet here we are. When he dumps Marion's car in the swamp, we're as tense as he is waiting for it to sink. We want him to get away with it. Hitchcock manipulates us into following whoever the protagonist of the moment happens to be. It turns out that as an audience, our allegiances are fickle. Once our first protagonist is dispatched, we don't know what to do with ourselves. The film ends with a scene that even the movie's greatest admirers find faulty, in which a psychiatrist explains what Norman's deal is. It seems particularly superfluous to a modern audience, one that has been bombarded with psychological terms since birth. Such topics weren't as pervasive in everyday life in 1960, though I suspect even then this scene felt like too much. What's the big deal: There are movies that are scarier, more suspenseful, and more shocking than this one. Some films, including a few of Hitchcock's own, demonstrate greater technical proficiency. But Psycho stands in a class by itself for helping to change (and not always in good ways) the way psychosis and murder are presented on the big screen. The success of Psycho -- and by a respected A-list director, no less -- made it OK for other filmmakers to dabble in B-movie genres that had previously been considered beneath them, opening up a whole new world of entertaining possibilities. It made taking a shower kind of scary, too.Further reading: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, written by Stephen Rebello and published in 1990, is considered the most authoritative and accurate source on the subject. Rebello went through Hitchcock's personal records and interviewed most of the surviving cast and crew members, so he got the real scoop, not the myths. Roger Ebert's 1998 essay is a good overview, while Tim Dirks' entry at AMC's Filmsite is jam-packed with details and interpretations. * * * *Eric D. Snider (website) goes a little mad sometimes, as do we all.