Happiness, for Hitchcock, is a traumatized audience. In an interview he tells Robin Wood, "You have to remember that Psycho is a film made with quite a sense of amusement on my part. To me it's a fun picture." If so, it remains one of the most disturbing fun pictures ever made. The famous 45-second shower sequence, which took seven days to shoot and seventy camera set-ups, retains its place in film history as the most traumatic sudden eruption of violence since the eye-slashing sequence in Un Chien Andalou. Hitchcock's prying camera movements and point-of-view shots in Psycho continually remind the viewer of the voyeuristic pleasure at the core of cinematic spectatorship, only to then shock us with the horror of what we wanted so much to see. Psycho encourages meditation not just on Hitchcock's perverse pleasure in terror, but also on our own. -Marilyn Fabe