Analysis of Psycho

The film is introduced by an establishing shot, this starts from a general view of Phoenix, and goes to the particular which is a hotel room. This is where the audience is likely to believe that the main characters are being introduced, they are Marion Crane and her boyfriend Sam. The audience is told that they cannot get married because of financial instability and that they can only meet during Marion's lunch breaks.

The plot thickens when Marion is trusted to bank $40,000 which was given to her by an employer. Instead of doing what she was told with the money, she saw it as an opportunity to start a new life with Sam, by stealing the money and using it to cover their financial issues.  As Marion is making her escape from the life she hates, she stops at The Bates Hotel, where she is soon to meet the Psycho.

The motel is ran by a quiet man ran named Norman Bates, the audience quickly find out that his mother controls a large part of his life and what he is able to do.

The audience is initially lead to believe that the film is about the forty thousand dollars and how Marion will be able to start a new life with it, however they are quickly proved wrong, and as the plot continues to develop the audience no longer has an understanding of what will happen, which allows Hitchcock to use devices of shock and suspense to their greatest potential.

We find out later on in the film that Norman actually killed his mother and her partner and later forced himself to act in a way that would make him feel like his mother still exists. Two separate personalities developed within him, one which was his own and another to represent his mothers. Any time Norman would meet a woman that he found attractive, his mother half would become furious with jealousy and he would be forced to kill them. That is the fate that struck Marion Crane. Norman is also forced to kill several other people as they come to look for him, anyone who tries to approach him eventually ends up dead which makes the audience wonder when his rampage will come to an end.

Several typical techniques were used by Hitchcock in this film to make it more effective. Firstly, a hugely effective plot twist is used when the audience is shown that it is not in fact Norman's mother killing people but Norman himself, under the effect of the second personality that has developed within him.

A red herring was also used relatively effectively, in the scene where Marion's sister wonders down to where Norman kept his mothers corpse, the audience is lead to believe that when she lets out a scream upon seeing the corpse, Norman would be able to locate her and kill her, but she is saved and Norman is captured for questioning.

This film strays away from the archetypal thriller recipe because it does not have a single hero, a lot of the people who the audience believes to be main characters actually end up dead in the first part of the film.

The title of the film being Psycho is another technique that could perhaps throw the audience off. This is because initially we are lead to believe that it is his mother who is a psycho, but we later find out that it is in fact Norman. Norman is initially presented as a normal man who has a possessive mother, the audience deduces this through the conversations they had. We later find out that it was just Norman talking to himself, presenting both of his personalities at the same time.

An interesting fact about the film is that it caused a lot of people to be too afraid to take showers after the shower death scene, including the actress of Marion herself.