10 Flawed Elements In Otherwise Flawless Films

Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho is a cornerstone not just of the horror genre, but the film canon as a whole. And it's easy to see why. Robert Bloch's novel of the same name, about a woman who goes on the run with her company's money and runs afoul of a lonely, malicious motel owner, was pushed into three dimensions by the master director, who laid down iconic shots and setups that made an archetypal horror out of what could have been a run-of-the-mill killer-thriller in another director's hands.

But few other mainstream directors would have had the stomach for this material at the dawn of the 1960s. After all, the movie features a protagonist who dies before the halfway mark, several extremely violent and apparently bloody scenes, a desiccated corpse in the basement, and a cross-dressing antagonist with multiple personalities. Unfortunately, this last matter is where the film experiences its only hiccup.

It's always great to leave audiences with something to chew on, and while Psycho does that with the fly-and-skull double whammy, the preceding scene robs this of a bigger, better, and scarier impact. After the reveal that Norman's mother is dead and he is dressing like her to murder his patrons, perhaps the worst thing to do would be to explain it all away, but that is what Psycho does, with medical professionals rationalising Bates' psychological shortcomings in monotonous detail, and snuffing out all residual tension in the process.