The film kicks off with a voyeuristic motion of the camera as it pans across the vast city landscape and moves slowly and intrudingly into a single hotel window, creeping under the Venetian blinds to reveal a couple in the midst of a private make-love session. Here, Hitchcock launches his manipulation by turning the audience from innocent sightseers overlooking a scenic city panorama, into peeping toms or private agents who sneak into the private domain of others, spying and peeking without a right of their own. Hence, the theme of guilt emerges; the audiences feel a prick in their conscience as they behold the secret meeting between the two lovers.

The same sense of guilt will recur lat

In fact, the setting of the old, Victorian house against the motel becomes highly significant in the story. As a complement to her character, the foreboding, towering house on the hill seems to embody Mother, while the low lying L-shaped motel seems to represent Bates himself. Thus, like Mother, who is always at home ‘looking through’ one of the windows, the sinister-looking house watches over the ‘suppressed’ motel (Bates) through its menacing bright lights, that bears an uncanny resemblance to a pair glaring and inquiring eyes.

The next scene, where the sense of being viewed and watched is prevalent, is that of Marion and Bates eating in the parlor. Bate’s overhanging bird taxidermies contribute to the misc-en-scene of the film. Outstretching its wings massively and staring down at Marion and Bates is the predatory, nocturnal owl, which could be symbolic of Mother’s presence in the room. Her scrutiny is being felt by Bates internally, rendering it as an inner surveillance of the soul in contrast to the policeman’s scene. Mother here ‘sees’ her own son taking a liking to this beautiful young woman, and since she is portrayed to be a “clinging, possessive woman”, she would take action against those who try to steer her son’s attention away from her, again foreshadowing Marion’s plight.

In order to intensify the audience’s involvement as voyeurs and to invoke a stronger sense of realism in their witnessing events, it is said that Hitchcock insisted on the use of 50-millimeter lenses through the shooting of the entire movie. These lenses were supposed to give the closest approximation to the human vision technically possible, since “He wanted the camera, being the eyes of the audience all the time, to let them (view the action) as if there were seeing it with their own eyes.” as revealed by script supervisor Marshal Schlom.

The sense of guilt generated by Bate’s peeping is significant here as it awakens the ‘mother’ within him; the ignition of her jealously is the main instigating element of the perturbing shower murder moments after. In fact, when Bates hurries back to the sanctuary of his home, seemingly stumped and lost in a world of guilt, the deep focus and long shot of the corridor leading to the kitchen seems to resemble ‘Mother’s’’ continual surveillance and judgment of his actions as well as his state of mind. The existence higher being watching and supervising is thus implicated.

However, Hitchcock not only placed emphasis on his efforts in intensifying the audiences’ participation as voyeurs in the Psycho. In fact, he toys with the audiences with elements of surveillance being imposed onto them in return.

Prior to the stabbing of Arbogast, the birds-eye-view (perhaps coinciding with the bird motif) one gets fro

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