SUBJECTS

Motels -- Drama, Mothers and sons -- Drama, Murder -- Psychological aspects -- Drama, Parricide -- United States -- Drama, Psychopaths -- Drama, Theft -- Drama

Psycho

(Psycho), (Psyco), (Psychose)

featuring

Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin,

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).

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Joseph Stefano
Based On
  • The novel by Robert Bloch

Cinematographer
  • John Russell
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 109 mins
Source
  • NBC Universal
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Psycho documents  

Psycho (review), Campus Circle, Candice Winters, 2010

Halloween free screening : Psycho (program note), AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival, Lane Kneedler, 2007

Hitchcock: the master of suspense (program note), Stanford Theatre, 1992

Thriller seeker (article), Village Voice, Robert E. Kapsis, 1992

Behind the curtain (article), Memories, Stephen Rebello, 1990

The women who knew too much -- excerpt (book excerpt), Methuen & Co., Tania Modleski, 1988

The last days of Alfred Hitchcock (article), Esquire, David Freeman, 1982

Psycho (program note), Los Angeles International Film Exposition, Richard Whitehall, 1981

The lost films of Alfred Hitchcock (article), New West, Michael Goodwin, 1981

Michael Powell (article), Films In Review, William K. Everson, 1980

Displaying 10 of 38 publicly available documents.


View all Psycho documentation on CineFiles.