65 Years Ago, Hitchcock’s Most Iconic Thriller Redefined Horror — And Has Never Been Replicated

Sometimes, movies can transcend their original contexts and become signifiers for something bigger. When someone refers to “making an offer they can’t refuse,” you don’t need to have seen Goodfellas to get the sentiment. “Life is like a bunch of chocolates” is now a common phrase completely separate from Forrest Gump. But one movie has become so iconic that you don’t need words to reference it: just the sound of shrieking violins.

More than half a century later, this movie is more than just horror shorthand: it’s an incredibly innovative story that changed the game in a way that’s never been replicated since.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name, begins as your standard paranoid thriller: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) absconds from her workplace with $40,000 in cash, hoping to start a new life with her lover, Sam (John Gavin). As she drives away, she keeps hearing voices of how she imagines people in her life will react to her crime, making her increasingly nervous about her every move.

A wrong turn brings her to the Bates Motel, where young proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) seems to be under his domineering mother’s thumb. Marion shares an awkward dinner with him, and after deciding to return the money, she takes a shower. A shower scene in 1960 was scandalous enough, but what came next was completely shocking: an old woman figure suddenly appearing with a knife, brutally murdering the protagonist only 40-ish minutes into the runtime.

The rest of the movie focuses on Sam and Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) as they investigate Marion’s disappearance, and as they learn, along with the audience, just how dark the Bates Motel’s secrets really are. It may seem absurd to hide spoilers for a 60-year-old movie, but on the off chance you don’t know the final twist, it’s worth keeping mum.

But the innovation of the first twist of Psycho — the murder of Marion — cannot be overstated. Usually, film viewers can assume that the protagonist of the story is safe, because they are who the audience relates to, the point-of-view character. But Psycho completely upended that assumption, and in doing so, made every character fair game for the deranged villain on the loose. In fact, it’s often identified as one of the first slasher movies ever, along with Peeping Tom, which premiered earlier the same year.

It’s the kind of watershed moment that can’t be redone: while plenty of horror movies use this Decoy Protagonist technique, it’s usually not given enough real estate to truly work, often sidelined to a cold-open scene before the title drop like Drew Barrymore’s scene in Scream. In contemporary commercial films, only Zach Cregger’s Barbarian has truly pulled it off, spending its entire first act on an AirBnB-set horror story before abruptly shifting to Hollywood actor AJ for the remainder of the runtime.

But even that just repeated the success of Psycho. There will never be another horror movie like it, just like there will never be another first movie to use sound or color. It may only be a narrative innovation, not a technological one, but that just means it still holds up 65 years later.

Psycho is now streaming on Peacock.