10 Lies About Famous Movies You Probably Believe

5. Psycho

The Lie:"The shower scene contains no actual nudity or violence. Psycho was such a progressive film that you could make a movie just about its clashes with the censors (and it'd be a damn-sight better than the muddled Hitchcock). The first film to show a toilet flushing and also dealing with a psychological subject that could easily be sexually misconstrued (oh, spoiler, the killer's a guy dressing up as his dead mother), the biggest point of contention was the shower scene. A series of rapid cuts depicting the stabbing of Marion Crane, the sequence is a masterclass of suggestion; despite what you may think you never see any nudity or actual stabbing."

The Truth: There's one shot that shows the stabbing. The claim (mainly to get the film past the censors) that the shower scene is gore-free is easy to state when proving otherwise requires re-watching the whole film (difficult pre-home video). Nowadays we can go through the Blu-Ray frame-by-frame and see that actually there's one split-second shot of the knife penetrating Marion's skin. Very slight and devoid of gore, it's subconsciously a key contributor to the scene's shock factor.