CLASSIC MOVIE CORNER: "Psycho" (1960)

“Psycho” (1960)

MPAA Rating: R

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin

The Gist: “Psycho” is simply the mother of all slasher films.

The Story: Marion (Leigh) did a bad thing. She stole $40,000 in cash from the real estate office where she works. Hoping to start a new life, she takes to the road, leaving her Phoenix home behind. She heads for California, where her lover, Sam (Gavin), lives. Along the way, exhaustion and a heavy rain force her to make a detour. She checks into the Bates Motel, a secluded little hole-in-the-wall with 12 cabins and 12 vacancies. Norman (Perkins) is the cordial young man who runs the place. He’s sweet, but his mother is a homicidal harpy.

The Review: Robert Bloch wrote the novel “Psycho” in 1959, but Hitchcock’s film adaption, one year later, established the horror yarn as a modern American myth. Few filmgoers had ever seen anything like it. Before 1960, most horror films involved threats from the realm of fantasy. Nosferatu, Dracula and Frankenstein were scary in their day, but thoroughly grounded in the world of legend. Later movies introduced evil aliens and 50-foot-spiders. Again, these monsters were safely unrealistic. But “Psycho” turned the average American family home into a ghastly chamber of horrors. Mom could no longer be trusted, and ordinary domestic objects like showers and kitchen cutlery became macabre symbols of death.

The Classic Quote: Norman: “You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

(Jorge Sosa is a staff writer for the Hutchinson Leader. He can be reached at sosa@hutchinsonleader.com)