Marion Crane works in an office in Phoenix and is frustrated with the cards that life has dealt her. Her lover Sam Loomis – who she can only meet during her lunch breaks – can’t offer her marriage because of his financial commitments in the form of alimony.

One Friday afternoon Marion is presented with the opportunity of completely turning around her fortunes. She is given $40,000 by her employer to pay in to the bank. However, instead of depositing the money with the bank Marion flees town and heads to Sam's store in California.

Whilst on route Marion is caught in a storm and decides to gets off the main highway. She pulls into The Bates Motels where her fortunes really do change...


Alfred Hitchcock, the ‘Master of Suspense’ – uses his fabled ‘macguffin’ – an object or plot element that occupies the audience's attention, but which is ultimately irrelevant – most audaciously in Psycho. For the first third or so of the movie the audience is cleverly misdirected. With the introduction of Norman Bates we learn that the film is neither a love story nor about theft. The $40,000.00, which we have been following, really doesn’t matter.

What followed – including the infamous shower scene, the thrills evoked by Bernard Herrmann's racing staccato score and the shock twists - meant that this movie quickly became and remains a ‘classic’. The movie is a groundbreaking masterpiece, which spawned many imitations, but has never been surpassed.

Psycho is one of the all time great horror classics. Alfred Hitchc0ck is a genius i would of loved to see what he could of done in this day and age. Anthony Perkins made his career playing Norman Bates his dual personality was phenomenal nothing much more to say but an easy 5/5 stars...

Hitchcock's masterpiece of terror hasn't dated a bit in the years since its release. The ominous opening chords of Bernard Herrmann's now famous theme (set against the stylish credit design of Saul Bass) makes our hearts beat faster, as well as making it immediately clear that whatever lies ahead, it's not going to be agreeable to any of the characters... But Hitchcock intended to mislead us from the start. For the first half hour the film is a straight crime thriller, featuring an established star on the run for embezzlement--classic Hitchcock material that comfortably fits the assumptions one might have had upon entering the cinema. Psycho was his first foray into horror, and even then it didn't happen until a third of the way through the film. Shot in black and white (mainly to evade the censor's scissors) the film is stunning. Every shot is framed with subtle beauty, and every cut carefully considered to achieve precisely the intended effect. But none of this is news. The film appears in almost every 'all-time top 10' list devised, and for good reason. The interesting thing is just how unusual all this is for a horror film. Hitchcock lavished "Psycho" with at least as much care and attention as he did any of his films, and he did it at a time when the genre wasn't taken seriously. Horror (like sci-fi) was for drive-ins, existing only as exploitation B-movies since the demise of Universal's classic "Frankenstein", "Dracula" and "Wolfman" pictures, while the British Hammer films had yet to make any impact in the States. What "Psycho" did was change the way cinema-goers thought about an entire genre. It made horror respectable again.

Great movie. One of the original thrillers ever realeased. Hitchcock was a genius. Next to frenzy one of his most gruesome movies ever. Pretty much invented slasher movies. Also created the infamous shower scene. Five Stars across the board. Also random fact: color tv came out before this was filmed. He chose to go black and white to get the effect he wanted.