Remembering The Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece

“Psycho won’t be a blockbuster, but it will be a very strange film. It will be a film full of charm and blood. There will be lots and lots of blood,” said director Alfred Hitchcock in an interview about then upcoming horror flick Psycho in 1959.

Prior to Psycho, the legendary “master of suspense” had already racked up quite an array of box office hits. Think Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Lifeboat, North by Northwest, Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, among others. And on in this day in 1960 was the launch of Psycho starring Anthony Perkins.

The plot of Psycho, of course, centered on an encounter at the eerie Bates Motel between Marion Craine (Janet Leigh), who was on the run after stealing $40,000, and shy motel proprietor Norman Bates (Perkins) and its aftermath, in which private investigator Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), Marion’s lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin) and her sister Lila (Vera Miles) investigate her disappearance.

Unlike the sweeping North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s previous film, Psycho was filmed on a small budget in black-and-white by the crew of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In the summer of 1959, Hitchcock bought the rights to the short terror novel, Psycho, written by Robert Bloch, which was inspired by the murders of a serial killer named Ed Gein, arrested in 1957 after murdering several women, digging up corpses, and creating macabre artifacts with the remains of his victims. Gein worshipped his abusive mother, who died years earlier.

When Hitchcock submitted his idea to his studio, Paramount, the company’s executives were reluctant, so Hitchcock produced the film himself through his own production company. Sixty-five years later, Psycho remains Hitchcock’s most famous and influential work. Hailed as a major work of cinematic art, we celebrate this epic horror film with the following 10 interesting factoids:

1) In the opening scene of Psycho, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane is wearing a white bra because Alfred Hitchcock wanted to show her as being “angelic.” After she takes the money, the following scene has her in a black bra because now she has done something wrong and evil. Similarly, before she steals the money, she has a white purse. After she’s stolen the money, her purse is black.

2) The now classic shower scene in Psycho, where Janet Leigh as Marion is knifed to death by Norman’s supposed “mother” never actually shows most of things we think we see. Except for two split-seconds, the knife never even touches Marion’s flesh. But through a series of quick edits — over 90 cuts in a span of 45 seconds — Hitchcock was able to suggest the illusion of graphic violence.

The shower sequence was filmed with a body double, Las Vegas stripper Marli Renfro, in place of Janet Leigh. And chocolate syrup gave the illusion of the flowing blood.

3) Despite exiting the film after approximately the first half-hour, Janet Leigh was established as one of the earliest “Scream Queens” and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. As a footnote, the winner in the category that year was Shirley Jones for western Elmer Gantry.

4) Shirley Jones was actually one of the names in consideration to play Marion. Other actress in contention included Eva Marie Saint, Hope Lange, Piper Laurie, Martha Hyer and Lana Turner.

5) En route to California from Phoenix to her boyfriend Sam’s house in the town of Fairvale, a heavy rainstorm forces Marion to stop at the Bates Motel. Despite what seemed like endless hours of driving before she arrived, we later see Martin Balsam as Arbogast, Vera Miles as Lila, and John Gavin as Sam Loomis driving their relatively quickly.

6) In order to mislead the media, Alfred Hitchcock made it appear like he was casting an actress to play Norman Bates’ (dead) mother. Actresses mentioned in the running included Judith Anderson (the housekeeper in Hitchcock’s Rebecca) and Helen Hayes.

7) Psycho took only six weeks to film, which was closed to visitors the entire time. In addition to withholding the release of any stills from the movie’s key scenes, Hitchcock refused to let film critics see the movie ahead of time.

8) At an early screening, Robert Bloch, the novel’s author, was torn between no longer being able to recognize his work to his admiration for the film. “Psycho is either going to be your biggest success or your biggest flop,” he reportedly told Hitchcock.

9) Psycho was made with a budget of $806,000, which was considered relatively low at the time. It grossed over $32 million worldwide, while the first remake (in 1983) grossed $34/7 million worldwide.

10) British actor Freddie Highmore inherited the role of Norman Bates in the five- season psychological horror drama Bates Motel, which aired on A+E from 2013 to 2017. It depicted the lives of Highmore as Bates and his mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) prior to the events portrayed in Psycho, in a modern setting and in a different fictional town (White Pine Bay, Oregon).

Psycho, no doubt, redefined the horror genre was created the template we see today for slasher movies. At 65 years of age, the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece remains one of the greatest psychological thrillers ever made.