Psycho

From its early scenes of self-censored sex in an anonymous hotel room, through Janet Leigh’s cold pursuit of hard cash, to a cop-car chase shown almost entirely in a small rear-view mirror, Psycho is a study in chilling frustration, effectively photographed in shades of gray. Ironically, things only warm up at the Bates Motel where Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates brings the first elements of vulnerable humanity. “As for ‘psycho’ itself, that word, the name, the film turned it loose on the culture like a mad dog, and it shifted the Freudian age of potential treatment into one of licensed glee” (David Thomson).