10 Films Where Dead Bodies Were Main Characters

Perhaps the crown jewel of Alfred Hitchcock’s career, 1960’s Psycho broke numerous barriers in film production, including being the first film to show a toilet on screen and also being chock full of then-exploit murder scenes; it’s your choice which one is more heinous.

The first half of the film follows a woman on the run named Marion Crane, who thinks that she’s found a temporary safe haven in a sleepy little motel. The owner seems a nice enough man, despite his constant arguing with his mother, but this suddenly changes when the offscreen Mother murders her in the shower, leading to a police investigation.

As everyone should know by now, it’s ultimately revealed in an agonizingly detailed exposition dump that the friendly proprietor, Norman Bates, has actually been keeping his mother’s dead body in her room and engaging with a dual personality that’s an exact replica of her.

While the Mother isn’t technically a character in the film, seeing as how she’s been dead the whole time, her influence nonetheless permeates down to the very core of Norman Bates and ultimately propels him into being the eponymous psycho.