The History of Serial Killers in the Movies -- the Crime Library

5. Psycho (1960) B/W-109m

Movie Poster: Psycho

And in the beginning... there was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Those of you old enough to remember will never forget the impact Psycho had on our society. For its time Psycho was totally outrageous, over the top, horrifying and ghoulish. After all, it was 1960. Compared with what's out there today it's more like The Sound of Music but even 40 years down the track it still packs a punch and is worth another viewing every few years or so.

Again, it was American serial killer Ed Gein (also mentioned previously in The Silence of The Lambs review) who was the role model for Norman Bates. When poor farm boy Ed's mother died in 1944 he kept her corpse in the bedroom, leaving everything exactly as it was the day she died. Then Ed took to digging up women's corpses in a local grave yard and would wear bits of their flesh and play with their sexual organs. When Ed tired of draping the human skin from the corpses over a tailor's dummy in a crude attempt to resurrect his mother and the smell of the rotting bodies drove him from the house, he took up killing fresh people to satisfy his bizarre fetishes.

So, when the Psycho publicity blurb said that there had never been anyone like Norman before, they were wrong, there had been Ed Gein, hadn't there? But, as The Silence of The Lambs was the bench mark serial killer movie of the 90s, Psycho was the most ground-breaking thriller of the century even though most of us thought it was total fiction and that folks like Norman Bates could never possibly exist and that it was all a figment of Alfred Hitchcock's imagination. But now we know different, don't we?

And it would be terribly amiss of me to let any review of Psycho go by without a mention of Janet Leigh and that shower scene that frightened the living daylights out of everyone and that she has had to live with it for the past forty odd years.

Ah yes, how could we forget the very forgettable Bates Motel that the super highway bypassed with its 12 cabins, 12 vacancies... and 12 showers. Do yourself a favour and rent Psycho again (or for the first time) soon. Trust me, it's as scary as ever.