Film · 1960
Psycho
A stranded woman checks into a quiet motel run by a shy young man and his difficult mother.
- Year
- 1960
- Directed by
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Starring
- John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, Vaughn Taylor, Frank Albertson, Lurene Tuttle, Pat Hitchcock
- Running time
- 109 minutes
- Country
- United States
- Original language
- English
- Kind of horror
- Psychological, Slasher, Isolation
It starts small. Rain on the windscreen, a wrong turn, a motel sign still lit though the road it once served has moved on. She only means to stay the night. The young man who runs the place is polite in a way that's almost too careful, quicker to talk about anything else than about the house on the hill behind him, where a lamp keeps being switched on and off.
This isn't a film that jumps out at you from behind a door. It lets an ordinary evening turn on you slowly, then spends the rest of its running time making you doubt your own reading of everyone in it. The dread sits under the skin rather than on the surface, and it stays there.
Watch it properly dark, properly quiet, with nobody talking over the parlour scenes near the end, because that's where it does its real work. It's a slow, careful kind of frightening, the sort that unsettles rather than jolts, and it lingers long after the credits.
If you like this, try
28 Years Later
A boy who has never known anything else must get his ill mother to help, decades after Britain's outbreak began.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
A group of teenagers are hunted in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, an undead killer bent on revenge.
A Quiet Place
A family must live in near total silence to survive creatures that hunt by sound alone.
Alien
A commercial crew answers a distress call and finds they are not alone on their own ship.