10 Movies That Tricked You By Killing Main Characters Early

Be it Gus Van Sant's failed shot-for-shot experimental remake or Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 original, Janet Leigh's now-infamous shower stabbing 40 minutes into the film was a game-changer. Opening on Leigh's Marion Crane as a real-estate secretary in Phoenix, we're intended to assume she's the protagonist, even after she makes the cardinal sin of stealing $40,000 from her boss and skipping down.

Tired, she makes the fateful stop at the Bates Motel, meeting the nervous but seemingly harmless Norman Bates. The two converse and we get to know Marion further, cementing her role as the likely protagonist with Norman's unseen, demanding mother clearly acting as her rival.

In 1960, these were the rules the movies set, and Hitchcock, always one to please a crowd, wouldn't dare break convention.

That is, until Marion takes a shower. It's as effective today as it was then if you don't know it's coming (which, lets face it, is a rarity), but when Norman's mother throws open the shower curtain and jabs in one of many wounds with a butcher knife in Marion's body, it was the first of many shocks in a film so filled with them that, at the time, it required a psychiatrists to explain the ending in the closing minutes.