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In my previous article “40 Best Horror/Thriller Films”, I named the top 40 movies that I personally thought were entertaining, some dating all the way back to the 1922. Following the publication or that article, I got a lot of questions pertaining to why I made Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 black and white thriller, Psycho, number one.
taxidermy
Yes it is true, Psycho is my absolute favorite movie of all time! So while it is true the article was based off of my personal opinion of what movie was the scariest or had the best plot, I do admit that the winner could have been a bit biased on my part. Although I would not necessarily say Psycho is frightening, I do believe that the plot of Psycho was rather amazing.
Based loosely off of the story of infamous cannibalistic serial killer, Ed Gein, Hitchcock re-invents Gein as a mentally disturbed hotel owner, Norman Bates, who unknowingly suffers from a mental illness known then as, Split Personality or today as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
The movie starts out focusing on a secretary who wants to marry her lover but due to his recent divorce, can not afford it. Although he promises to one day marry her, the secretary takes matters into her own hands by embezzling money from a wealthy client at the establishment in which she works. After stealing the money, she goes on the lam hoping to reunite with her lover and ride off into the sunset. However, when a storm hits she is forced to stop at a nearby motel, The Bates Motel, in the middle of nowhere, for the night. After the estranged hotel manager Norman Bates takes a liking to her, we are switched to the infamous shower scene (now re-done in many movies and television shows such as Scream and Pretty Little Liars) where we see the the secretary taking a shower when what appears to be an old woman comes and stabs her to death.
After talking to his “mother”, Norman Bates finds out the secretary is dead and begins cleaning up the murder. He dumps her car along with all of the cash in a nearby swamp. Unfortunately for Norman, the secretary’s sister had hired a private investigator to look for her sister following the theft scandal. When the P.I. follows clues, and traces the secretary to the Bates Motel, Norman Bates works tirelessly to cover up the crimes of his “mother”. After the P.I. goes missing (killed by “mother”), the sister and the secretary’s lover began snooping around the Bates motel, and what they found was less than pretty.
Showing up to the motel pretending to be husband and wife, the two begin to look around for clues. After sneaking into the Bate’s home which resides directly behind the motel, the sister makes a gruesome discovery. The stuffed body of Ms. Bates, whom had been dead for a very long time. After discovering the body, she is attacked by Norman Bates dressed up as an old woman, where she is saved by her sister’s lover. The movie ends with a psychiatrist telling everyone that Norman Bates suffers from split personality or better yet, DID. It comes to light that after Norman Bates’ mother died, he dug her up and stuffed her using his knowledge of taxidermy. Following the “resurrection” of his mother, Norman created a second personality, his mother, to deal with her death. So in actuallity, it was Norman killing the people however, he thought it was his mother.
For being such an old movie, the plot is actually really complex. In the 1960′s, mental illnesses such as split personality were not really known to the public, because no one had really determined if it truly existed. However, Hitchcock uses this to re-invent a serial killer that was not only feared, but popular! That is why I chose Psycho as the number one movie on my previous article, because it truly deserves to be there.
Link to “40 Best Horror/Thriller Films” article: http://candornews.com/2012/07/26/40-best-horrorthriller-films/
