2. Psycho (1960) - The Shower Scene
Hitchcock's finest masterpiece in suspense, murder and the darkest, darkest impulses of the human mind,
Psycho is a film that encapsulates Hitchcock's obsessions with the sexual, the bloody and the twisting knee-jerk turns that he employed to great effect. For those unaware,
Psycho is a story of three acts - the first involves Janet Leigh's Marion, a bored secretary carrying on an affair with a divorcee and who steals money from a client to ill effect; the second follows Arbogast, a P.I. hired to track down Marion by her client; and the third involves Marion's boyfriend, Sam, and her sister Lila, teaming up to track her down and solve the mystery of her disappearance once and for all. The most iconic and awesome moment? There's a few to choose from, but it simply has to be the shower scene where an off-guard Marion is assaulted and stabbed to death in her motel room shower by a mysterious assailant. The scene is brutal, unflinching and iconic - Marion's screams, the blood (actually chocolate sauce) pouring down the drain, the rapid-fire cuts. Hitchcock controversially refused to change it after censors protested the scene (he lied and said he had, leaving them satisfied) and its supposed nudity (of which there is none), and it's all better for it. It's a one-minute long class in truly shocking an audience and revitalising a genre - after all, killing off your leading lady thirty minutes in is bold, if nothing else.