Psycho - Alfred Hitchcock

Psycho

Heyy Guyssss,

Last week in lesson my class and I finished watching the 1960s film that was produced my Alfred Hitchcock which I found quiet interesting and also thought that it was something that was very good for its time. It was also written by Joseph Stefano and the main characters in the Thriller are Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles.

The story line of the movie is ... That Janet Leigh steals money from a man who is going to buy a house, instead of taking the money to a bank she runs off with the money with the intention of running away to her boyfriend. Instead she decides to go back to where she came off but decides to stop off at a hotel while she’s on her way back.  The stops off at ‘The Bates Hotel’ but while there she ends up getting killed. Her sister (Vera Mills) goes out looking for her and gets in touch with her boyfriend in an attempt to try and find her. Janet Leigh and Janet Leigh boyfriend hire a detector to try and find her, the detector ends up getting killed as well. In the end they find out that the person who killed Janet Leigh and the detector was Normal Bates (the owner of the hotel) He had been impersonating his mother all this time and making it out that it was his mother that was killing all these people; they also later on found out that he was doing this because he had a mental issue.

What made this Movie such an Archetypal Thiller is that:
The external threat that was in this movie was from a man with a deranged mind

The thriller has quite a few face paced which is a theme that follows through in all thrillers.

The film demonstrates this by the shower scene, the staircase scene and the car scene.

However in all thrillers there is always a resourceful hero – but this isn’t the case in psycho as there isn’t a resourceful hero in the movie. Rather everything is revealed at the end of the movie Psycho wasn’t seen as any other ordinary thriller movie at its time. This is simply because Alfred Hitchcock goes beyond the expectations of an ordinary thriller movie that was released at this time. In the movie there are 2 major surprises. These are the shower murder scene and the revelation of everything at the end. What also makes it such an iconic movie is the early exit of Janet Leigh, this is very unexpected for the audience because the audience believed that Janet Leigh was the main character, this feature is a red herring because we thought that she was the main character and that the movie was mainly going to be centred around her. The screen play had tricked them. Because Janet Leigh has been taken out of the movie, the point of view turns to Norman Bates. In order for Alfred Hitchcock to keep the crucial aspect of the film a secret there were no advanced screenings and no one was admitted to the showing after the feature had started.