FAQ for
Psycho (1960) More at IMDbPro »

The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers for this film and the original novel. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags have been used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.

For detailed information about the amounts and types of (a) sex and nudity, (b) violence and gore, (c) profanity, (d) alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and (e) frightening and intense scenes in this movie, consult the IMDb Parents Guide for this movie. The Parents Guide for Psycho can be found here.

Yes, Psycho is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by American writer Robert Bloch (1917-1994), who was in turn inspired by the crimes of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein.

From chapter one:

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NORMAN BATES heard the noise and a shock went through him. It sounded as though somebody was tapping on the windowpane. He looked up, hastily, half prepared to rise, and the book slid from his hands to his ample lap. Then he realized that the sound was merely rain. Late afternoon rain, striking the parlor window.

Norman hadn't noticed the coming of the rain, nor the twilight. But it was quite dim here in the parlor now, and he reached over to switch on the lamp before resuming his reading.

It was one of those old-fashioned table lamps, the kind with the ornate glass shade and the crystal fringe. Mother had had it ever since he could remember, and she refused to get rid of it. Norman didn't really object; he had lived in this house for all of the forty years of his life, and there was something quite pleasant and reassuring about being surrounded by familiar things. Here everything was orderly and ordained; it was only there, outside, that the changes took place. And most of those changes held a potential threat. Suppose he had spent the afternoon walking, for example? He might have been off on some lonely side road or even in the swamps when the rain came, and then what? He'd be soaked to the skin, forced to stumble along home in the dark. You could catch your death of cold that way, and besides, who wanted to be out in the dark? It was much nicer here in the parlor, under the lamp, with a good book for company. The light shone down on his plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair as he bent his head to resume reading.

It was really a fascinating book -- no wonder he hadn't noticed how fast the time had passed. It was The Realm of the Incas, by Victor W. Von Hagen, and Norman had never before encountered such a wealth of curious information. For example, this description of the cachua, or victory dance, where the warriors formed a great circle, moving and writhing like a snake. He read:

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The drumbeat for this was usually performed on what had been the body of an enemy: the skin had been flayed and the belly stretched to form a drum, and the whole body acted as a sound box while throbbings came out of the open mouth -- grotesque, but effective.

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Norman smiled, then allowed himself the luxury of a comfortable shiver. Grotesque but effective -- it certainly must have been! Imagine flaying a man -- alive, probably -- and, then stretching his belly to use it as a drum! How did they actually go about doing that, curing and preserving the flesh of the corpse to prevent decay? For that matter, what kind of a mentality did it take to conceive of such an idea in the first place?

It wasn't the most appetizing notion in the world, but when Norman half closed his eyes, he could almost see the scene: this throng of painted, naked warriors wriggling and swaying in unison under a sun-drenched, savage sky, and the old crone crouching before them, throbbing out a relentless rhythm on the swollen, distended belly of a cadaver. The contorted mouth of the corpse would be forced open, probably fixed in a gaping grimace by clamps of bone, and from it the sound emerged. Beating from the belly, rising through the shrunken inner orifices, forced up through the withered windpipe to emerge amplified and in full force from the dead throat.

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The book begins at the Bates Motel, with the first portion of the novel being focused on Norman's unhappy domestic life with "Mother." He is a short, morbidly obese man in his mid-forties, with a fixation on pornography and books detailing gruesome murders and rituals. The Marion character is named "Mary" and is first introduced upon arriving at the motel, where Norman treats her in a gruff, sometimes hostile manner. When "Mother" attacks Mary in the shower, she kills her by severing her head rather than just stabbing her.

When the Lila Crane of the book first meets Sam Loomis at the hardware store, the light is so dim, and Lila looks so much like Mary, that he takes her in his arms and kisses her, an action she angrily rebuffs. In the movie, Sam (John Gavin) makes no such mistake.

In the book, it is revealed that Norman's blackouts--meaning the times when he switches over to the mother personality--are the direct result of his getting drunk and that so long as he remains sober he is able to keep his homicidal impulses under control. In the film, Norman never drinks.

Marion's theft is certainly a rash and foolish act, and she eventually realizes that she could never truly get away with it. Why does she steal it? As the novel explains, and as the movie implies, Marion is running out of time. She's probably in her early thirties (she's in her late 20s in the book), and that's awfully late for a girl of her era to be unmarried. She believes the money will solve Sam's financial troubles and allow him to marry her. Circumstances conspire to deceive her into justifying the act. (1) She has a boss who air conditions his own office, but not the outer office where the secretaries work; Arizona weather can become terribly hot, and Marion's boss and the millionaire both comment on how unbearable it is in the secretarial pool. (2) Her mousy coworker keeps going on and on about her marriage. (3) She's stealing from a drunken millionaire who makes a sloppy pass at her, spoils his own daughter, cheats on his taxes, and says while waving the bills in the air, "I only carry as much as I can afford to lose."

As for the theft's function in the story: it serves as something similar to a MacGuffin. It sets the narrative moving, but then becomes irrelevant once Marion has been murdered. (A classic MacGuffin, though, is something the characters care about, but the audience doesn't, e.g. the uranium in Notorious or the microfilm in North by Northwest. The audience does care about the stolen money.)

He has no idea that she is fleeing Phoenix after having stolen money from her boss. But her behavior is suspicious. Remember that he first takes an interest in her when he sees her car parked along the highway. He finds her asleep on her front seat. He taps on the window; she panics and makes a reflexive attempt to drive away. From that moment on, she is nervous and anxious to leave. No wonder he follows her.

The scenes with the patrolman are a means of misleading the audience into believing this will be a story about a girl who steals money. Unwary audiences don't know she will be murdered before the film is half over.

He has to make a living. Besides, the human mind is capable of enormous self-deception. Norman tells himself that his homicidal mother "just goes a little mad sometimes." Later we learn the extent of his self-deception when it turns out that "mother" is a personality stored in his own mind.

Audiences of 1960 were shocked to see a toilet on screen, in close-up, and to see and hear it being flushed. (Marion tears up a small sheet of paper and flushes the pieces.) A precedent for the toilet scene can be found in the Warner Bros. cartoon short, Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930), in which an animate bathtub dances around the bathroom and throws toilet paper into the air like flower petals. The "camera" pans along with it, and we catch sight of the edge of a toilet and a full view of the pull-cord used for flushing it. [Watch Sinkin' in the Bathtub on YouTube here]. Also, in the Van Beuren cartoon short, Piano Tooners (1932), a tuner takes a sour musical note (which cartoon magic has made into a living creature) and flushes it down the toilet. Again we see the edge of the toilet; and we clearly hear the flush. [Watch Piano Tooners on YouTube here].

Very little. Audiences were shocked when Marion Crane was stabbed to death in the shower. Hitchcock had mislead them to believe the film was about a woman on the run from police. More, Janet Leigh was a major star. Killing her off less than halfway through the picture was unthinkable. Not even the novel is much of a precedent. We spend far less time with Mary Crane in Robert Bloch's book than we do with Marion in the movie. The City of the Dead (1960), a British horror picture that was released three months after Hitchcock's film, seems to have independently hit upon the idea of killing its attractive blonde protagonist before the film is half over. But even if City had been released first, its blond was played by a minor starlet (Venetia Stevenson) and her story was less engrossing; it could never have had the same impact as Psycho.

Throughout most of the shower scene, Janet Leigh is shown from the bust up, which hides her breasts from view. She also has moleskin taped to her, which protected her modesty from the technical crew. We see her bare back, but she is never shown in any real state of nudity. Her nude stand-in is shot from overhead in such a way as to show that she is indeed nude. But her hips are turned to avoid showing the pubic area; and one arm across her chest shields any real view of her breasts.

After the killer has fled, and Marion Crane slides down the wall, she reaches out and grabs the shower curtain with her right hand. Look carefully at the close-up insert shot of the hand coming into frame and clutching the shower curtain. While your attention is drawn to the hand and curtain on the left side of the screen (both in sharp focus), look again at the fuzzy, out-of-focus grey and white areas in the background to the middle right. It may take adjusting the contrast and several viewings, but there is indisputably a pair of naked breasts in the background of the shot.

No. Saul Bass, who designed the title sequence for Psycho, reportedly claimed that he directed the scene. He did storyboard the scene, but Hitchcock shot it. Many persons on the set, including Janet Leigh, confirm that the only person directing the scene was Alfred Hitchcock. Many of the cast and crew are angered by this, as Saul obviously lied and tried to take credit for directing one of motion pictures greatest moments.

No. In the documentary The Making of 'Psycho' (1997) (V), Janet Leigh recalls that Mr. Hitchcock was very considerate of her comfort during that scene and that her scream was pure acting.

A Hitchcock rocking chair. The director spins the chair for effect, not realism. It doesn't pay to be too literal-minded while watching a Hitchcock film. Another possibility is that it might have been an old-fashioned high-backed wheelchair. A slight nudge could have made it pivot around the way it did.

The psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) gives us information that was otherwise ambiguous or missing. It also provides a pat explanation for Norman that some moviegoers would have been unhappy without. (We're free to accept or reject it.) The scene is also a breather for the audience--a way for them to relax before the creepy final scene.

Also note that television in the latter half of the 20th century, especially crime dramas and daytime talk shows, have made the average person far more aware of basic psychology than audiences of the 1960s would have been. The scene allowed for a glimpse into Norman's mind that audiences of the day would not necessarily have been privy to without some background information.

The executives at Universal insisted on the epilogue [source needed], which is almost identical with the one in the novel. They were worried that the audiences of the day would think that Norman Bates was a homosexual or a transvestite. A murderer is one thing, but.... A character declares that Norman must have been wearing women's clothes because he was a transvestite. The psychiatrist contradicts him and makes the "real" reason clear. If you dislike this scene you're not alone. Pauline Kael called it the worst scene in a Hitchcock movie.

Hitchcock noticed that low-budget shockers were cleaning up at the box office, and he wanted to make a low-budget shocker that outclassed all rivals. Black and white photography kept his costs down. Another reason was the blood. Hitchcock thought all that red blood in the shower would be too gruesome.

There is a version of the film, aired for some time on German TV, which is about 18 seconds longer. It has not been released on DVD. It includes Marion starting to take off her bra (while being watched by Norman), Norman washing his bloody hands, and a slightly longer version of the second murder. A detailed comparison with pictures of these scenes can be found here.

As John Mauceri said at a Hollywood Bowl concert of movie music. When the shower scene was first screened for the British censors, as John Mauceri said at a Hollywood Bowl concert of movie music, they rejected it for being too violent and graphic. Overnight Hitchcock redubbed the soundtrack with music other than the original Bernard Hermann score and resubmitted the scene. It was approved! The story is a tribute to the influence Hermann's music has in creating the atmosphere and tension in the movie.

In 1960, audiences attended Psycho for the same kind of shocks and thrills that modern filmgoers demand in far stronger doses. Psycho has lost its ability to shock--while retaining its power to horrify.

For some. For others, a film without at least the number of nasty thrills provided by The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or Se7en (1995) does not qualify as a real horror film. Whatever the merits of these two critically acclaimed movies, both require a high suspension of disbelief; and neither has a story one could seriously imagine reading about in the newspaper.

Psycho itself is not especially realistic, but it's far, far less hyperbolic than the average thrill-ride of today. For many modern viewers, this adds to the horror. Marion Crane commits a rash act many of us can imagine committing; she finds her way to a banal motel that many can imagine staying in; she meets a nervous young man many can imagine meeting. (Do you know anyone like Hannibal Lector?) And then something horrible happens.

If you wonder how this is a horror film, just place yourself in the position of any one of its characters.

If so, that may keep a movie like The Silence of the Lambs out of the horror category. But it would seem silly to disqualify Psycho on a technicality. The movie is rich in supernatural overtones. "Well, if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates--who's that woman buried out in Greenlawn cemetery?"

Janet Leigh is a knife-wielding housewife-murderess in House on Greenapple Road (1970).

Leigh is a faded star of film and stage who murders her husband in Columbo: Forgotten Lady (#5.1) (1975).

Vera Miles and Barbara Rush do away with a manipulative cad in "The Outer Limits: The Forms of Things Unknown (#1.32)" (1964).

Miles and her father (John Carradine), a former silent movie director, kill a car mechanic in "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Death Scene (#3.20)" (1965).

Miles is the head of a cosmetics company who kills her employee to get the formula for a wrinkle cream in Columbo: Lovely But Lethal (#3.1) (1973).

Fear Strikes Out (1957). Anthony Perkins plays the real-life baseball player Jimmy Piersall, a Boston Red Sox shortstop who battled mental illness. This movie will give students of Psycho a good idea of what its original audience might have expected from an Anthony Perkins character, what course they might have thought the plot would take and why certain events in the film were so shocking to them.

Alfred Hitchcock places himself in a small cameo in each of his movies. His cameo in Psycho occurs about five or six minutes into the movie. He can be seen as a man in a cowboy hat standing on the sidewalk outside of Marion's office. A photo of his cameo scene can be seen here.