What everyone thinks: It's really scary. Although the truth that sits up in the house behind the Bates Motel is known to just about anyone who's ever set foot in a cinema, the thing everyone remembers from Psycho is the shower scene. An envelope pushing moment with over fifty cuts, its an audio-visual assault, with Bernard Herrmann's string score and Hitch's fast cutting of Mrs. Bates knife attack of young Marion Crane creating a sequence so suggestive the censors couldn't decide if there was gore and nudity or not. The real reason it's good: Hitchcock flat out tricks you. Psycho relies on the old bait-and-switch. The entire marketing campaign hinged on Alfred Hitchcock keeping the plot of the film a secret; he brought up all copies of Robert Bloch's novel, released a trailer that seemed enlightening but doled out no story details and produced posters telling audiences they wouldn't be admitted if they missed the start. This all builds into the film's opening; for the first forty minutes we follow Marion Crane, a seemingly normal secretary who steals $40,000 and goes on the run. Ah, she must be the Psycho from the tit... oh my God she's just been killed in the shower. The real movie doesn't kick off until we arrive at the Bates Motel and once there the money, up until that point the film's MacGuffin (a self-made trope Hitch was renowned for always employing), was completely thrown aside. Although countless hours have been spent dissecting the shower scene the real key to its horror isn't in the three minutes themselves; it's in what we went through to get there.
