I thought about doing a strip without words, using only iconic pictures from Psycho. Well, there would have been one word, “Mother.” Instead, I decided to concentrate on what made this film great at the time and that still makes it great today. Hardboiled crime fiction was the rage at not only the box office, but on the radio as well. It saturated the marketplace so completely that when Hitchcock stood the movie on its ear by abruptly killing one story line (the hardboiled genre) and switching to another story line (the horror genre), the shock had quite an effect. It changed our expectations. This heightened sense of unease would lock the scenes that followed into our memories forever, and cause a few people to keep their shotguns in the shower.
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