[Spoilers ahead…]
It feels impossible to discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), his most famous film, without discussing its twists. Its best, most memorable moments are designed to shock—and so, it goes without saying, are most effective when the audience is not expecting them. Nevertheless, those moments—the murder of the protagonist one quarter of the way in, and the revelation that the murderer has been hiding in plain sight all along—have also become the most well-known things about it. Some of its elements (the shower scream, the shrieking soundtrack) have grown so famous that they exist on their own, as references or pastiches in other works. And so, fifty-nine years after the film’s premiere, Psycho’s spoilers are nearly impossible to avoid. But there are a few people out there who have managed to dodge learning about these twists. One of these people was, until fairly recently, my older brother, Sam.
Sam has never liked scary films, so there never would have been a chance he would seek out Psycho on his own. But I sought out Psycho. Five or six years before I saw it, I knew the film’s full story thanks to the many film history books I inhaled like air. Sam, who is five years older than me, had always kept me safe from movie spoilers, and it’s thanks to him that I saw The Godfather without foreknowledge. I was eager for him to see Psycho in the same way I had seen The Godfather. Whenever Psycho came up, I would abruptly change the conversation or make him cover his ears.
My wish for my brother was the same one that Hitchcock had for his original audiences. He refused to have advance screenings for critics and other industry opinionators to prevent plot details from leaking. Outside of the theaters, themselves, audiences were made to wait in long lines. As they waited, recordings of Hitchcock’s voice played, saying “I’ve suggested that Psycho should be seen from the beginning. In fact, it is more than a suggestion. It is required.” Once inside, audiences would be greeted by life-size cut-outs of the director holding a sign restating that no one would be allowed into the screening after the start of the film. In 1960, if you were two minutes late to a showing of Psycho, you would be refused entry and offered a ticket to the next “complete performance.”
Psycho begins with the story of Marion Crane, a secretary for a real estate company who steals $40,000 from an obnoxious client and flees to live with her boyfriend. But then she gets murdered in a motel by a killer only identifiable by silhouette. After her death, the film starts switching its point-of-view, seemingly trying to locate a new protagonist, as it moves to uncover the identity of the murderer.
Sam finally watched Psycho with me, when he was a senior in college. I was a junior in high school. Thanks to my years of running interference, I surmised that Sam knew as much of the plot as the average moviegoer did circa opening weekend in 1960. We watched in silence until Marion Crane, the main character, pulls off the highway so she can spend the night at the roadside Bates Motel. When Sam saw the sign for the Bates Motel, he called out, “Don’t go there. That’s the bad place.” His joke immediately made me nervous—did he know that Crane was about to get murdered in the shower? Would this ruin the film for him? Were all of my efforts to protect him from the twists in Psycho in vain?
I was dismayed to learn that Sam did know about the “shower scene.” But to assume that this scene is the “one true shock” of Psycho is to misread Hitchcock’s film and misinterpret his plans. The true beauty of Psycho is that it has an entire cavalcade of twists, and some, like the foreboding spookiness of the Bates Motel, are meant to be correctly guessed. And although Sam knew about one of them, this would have been fine with Hitchcock, who even publicized the idea of a “shower scene”—sharing in an interview with The New York Times during the first week of filming, that Psycho would have “one violent bathroom scene, showing a young woman murdered while taking a shower…” The end of the trailer for Psycho, which features Hitchcock giving a tour of the Bates Motel, showed Hitchcock standing in the set for the infamous bathroom in Crane’s motel room. He tells the audience that, “They’ve cleaned all this up now…You should’ve seen the blood,” pulling back the shower curtains as the trailer cuts to a close-up of a screaming woman (not Janet Leigh who plays Marion Crane but Vera Miles, who plays Crane’s sister Lila).
This is how Psycho operates—by outlining rules beforehand, it seems to promise to play by them.This is how Psycho operates—by outlining rules beforehand, it seems to promise to play by them. All of Psycho’s advance press materials were designed to manipulate audiences. The rules that Hitchcock set for watching it acted as extra-cinematic devices that would help further jolt audiences. Psycho breaks every rule it sets up. It doesn’t stick to a single genre (it goes from realistic crime story to psychological thriller to murder mystery). It kills its main character. Its main villain turns out not to exist. The character who takes over the plot is revealed to have been taken over by another force, a long time ago.
The rest of the film, after Marion’s murder, is devoted to finding out who killed her.
(Take this as my last spoiler alert: if you have not seen the film and don’t know the identity of the murderer, like Sam, then don’t read further. When you do see it, you will then be able to participate more in the search. Watching Psycho in some ways is like being told a joke, and jokes are of course always better if you don’t know the punchline but are trying to guess what it is.)
Hitchcock, though, made sure audiences thought they could predict what was coming. Psycho makes its audience think that the murders are not being committed by the obvious suspect: Norman Bates, the shy and awkward owner of the Bates Motel. The advance press materials and the film itself inform its audience that they are all committed by his mother. Hitchcock told New York Times reporter James W. Merrick that Psycho was about “a young man whose mother is a homicidal maniac.” He also told reporters that he was considering Helen Hayes or Judith Anderson to play Bates’s mother, a statement that led actor Norma Varden to lobby for the role. During the trailer, Hitchcock would frequently talk about “the woman,” and shows the audience her creepy room, but he diminishes Norman’s role in the story. He only mentions Norman briefly, mentioning that “you had to feel sorry for him.” When original audience members saw the “shower scene” for the first time, they would notice that the faceless murderer wears feminine looking clothing and has a matronly haircut. After the murder, they would hear Norman seem to look at his mother and cry, “Oh God, mother! Blood! Blood!” All of this, in addition to actor Anthony Perkins’s sympathetic (if a little creepy) performance as Norman, combines to make him seem no more than a reluctant accomplice to his mother’s murders.
The only moment that explicitly suggests that Norman might be the true killer is when we learn from Deputy Sheriff Al Chambers that Norman’s mother died ten years ago. But after Marion’s boyfriend Sam tells Chambers that he saw an old woman in the window of the Bates House, Chambers wonders, “Well, if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates… who’s that woman buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery?” The next sequence features a conversation between an offscreen Norman and his mother, where she says that he once hid her in a fruit cellar. The last shot features him carrying a body dressed in feminine clothing down the stairs as his mother’s voice begs him to put her down.
At this moment, Sam turned to me and said, “well, there goes my theory.” I knew he had been thinking Norman had committed the murders. I stayed silent through Lila’s discovery of the corpse of Bates’s mother, as well as the shot of the true murderer: a deranged looking, knife-holding Norman dressed as his mother. (The conversations he had been having earlier with his “mother” involved him doing an impression of his mother’s voice.) Sam was, needless to say, as shocked as I had hoped he would be.
The last part of Hitchcock’s release strategy was for theaters that showed Psycho to have 30 seconds of darkness in the theater after the film ended. He wrote that in this period of time “the suspense of Psycho is indelibly engraved in the mind of the audience.” And so, for about 30 seconds, Sam and I sat there in the darkness, thinking about what we had seen. The viewing conditions under which my brother saw the film are not preserved in today’s world—in fact, they probably were not preserved for long after opening weekend, when people began to talk about what they had seen. But for those in today’s world who do have the luxury of ignorance, experiencing the remainder of its twists—even just the revelation that Norman Bates is the murderer—in real time, experiencing a zig where you expected a zag, remains an electrifying experience. It is also an experience that is more accessible to 21st century viewers than you might expect. When I told my horror-adverse mother that I was writing this piece, she promptly asked me a question. It is one that I hope will continue to bedevil and fascinate audiences, just as Hitchcock wanted: “what happens at the end of Psycho?”
It’s a twist that remains just as effective as it did in 1960, I think. After we finished the movie, I walked upstairs, but I couldn’t sleep because the full movie had such a powerful effect on me. I walked downstairs and found that Sam couldn’t sleep either.
