10 Best Horror Movies With No Supernatural Elements
1. Psycho
Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece wrong-foots its audience by spending the first act appearing like anything but a horror. There’s steamy romance, road trip action, thriller, right up until Marion Crane, on the run, rocks up at the Bates Motel. There, things quickly get grizzly.
Psycho’s sleight of hand doesn’t end there, of course. We’re introduced to Norman Bates, a man deeply in thrall to his domineering mother. He strikes up a cautious camaraderie with Marion. Later that night, she’s killed, presumably by Mrs Bates.
It only gets weirder when we learn that Norman’s mother is long dead. We’ve heard her speak - is this a ghost story? Well, no. Ultimately it turns out to be that hoariest of horror tropes: good old mental illness.
That’s facetious, of course, with Psycho basically pioneering the psychiatric approach to horror. While the profiling at the end of the film may not stand up to scrutiny, the film is an elegant, properly sinister classic, with Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates one of the genre’s most perfectly pitched killers. Sheer melodramatic joy.