Psycho was released during the year of 1960. It was director Alfred Hitchcock's response to a frenzy created by the media's first publicized serial killer Ed Gein. Psycho brings back memories of a time when film was just as much about story as it was style. Hitchcock embodied that, a true storyteller at heart. He was an inventor, using misbegotten images and twisting them into something darkly erotic through voyeuristic tendencies presided inside of characters. Hitchcock didn't make films to scare the audience with what happens, he made films to scare the audience with what they shouldn't see but can't help but want to. I have always said that it is not hard to scare an audience if the initiative is there, but it takes a true mastermind to produce scares that will not take away from the films point, rather uphold it. Hitchcock was that mastermind. Who else could have made a murder scene in which we see a victim stabbed to death but never once actually witness the knife penetrate the flesh and still have it disturb audiences forty years later? The story to Psycho is simple, given the routine inspection. The idea, on the other hand is complex, twisting and turning around corners and bends, leading the audience to grasp onto central ideas and characterization only to turn it around and reinvent itself, as if to have never even implied any motives in the first place. That was Hitchcock's way. Janet Leigh is Marion Crane. We open to a scene of her with her secret lover. She has a headache and is going to work; they may never see each other again. Our interest has already flared. After arriving at work Marion asks for the rest of the day off after she takes an envelope filled with forty thousand dollars in cash to the bank (a client's payment on a new home). But instead of depositing the money she skips town without telling anyone and checks in at the Bates Motel. Here she meets the owner, Norman Bates, who ensures her that he has a vacancy, `in fact I have twelve.
