Release Year: 1960

Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch (novel)

Stars: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles

Psycho wants you to know that there are bad people out there.

That seems simple enough; everyone who's sat through an elementary school Stranger Danger class knows there are bad people out there. (And that they drive in white vans.)

But in the simpler times before 1960, horror movies usually didn't think that "bad people" were horrible enough to be, well, horror. Instead you needed vampires, werewolves, creatures from the black lagoon, or alien monstrosities. Bad people weren't nasty enough to send shivers up your spine and screams past your tonsils.

But Psycho doesn't need the zombies or the vampires. The Big Man himself, director Alfred Hitchcock, figured that normal people could be scarier, nastier, and way more upsetting than any mere alien. For one thing: aliens usually look like… aliens. Bad people can look like, say, a harmless boy-next-door type named Norman Bates.

(Ugh. The three syllables of "Norman Bates" are enough to send our blood running backwards and our fingers towards our front door deadlocks.)

The film starts out with a good girl gone bad: Marion Crane. The first thing we see her doing is having illicit sex with her boyfriend on her lunch break—no biggie today, but a real shocker back in 1960. Then the next thing she's stealing a huge chunk o' change from her real estate job and running for the hills—which is still a despicable thing to be doing, even today.

Marion's bad news. But she's not the worst news. That'd be (ugh, that name) Norman Bates.

Norman owns the Bates Motel, where Marion stops for the night to rest up from her flight with all that money. And Mr. Bates seems like a sweet man with a clinically insane mother… until he stabs Marion to death in the shower, stabs a detective to death on the stairs, is revealed to be in possession of his mother's long-dead corpse, is revealed to be suffering a split personality, and is revealed to have a record of homicidal lunacy that's longer than an Olive Garden menu.

Hey: who needs werewolves when you have a voyeuristic, serial killing maniac like (ugh: that name, that name) Norman Bates?

But who actually wants to watch this stuff? Who wants to watch a movie that imagines the worst about everyone? Who wants to leave the cinema seeing a nasty thief in every secretary and a murderer in every hotel clerk?

Ha. Ha, ha. Everyone does.

Psycho was hugely popular on its release, breaking box office records around the globe—people stood in Disneyland-long lines to get into a showing. It made more than $15 million by the end of the year it was released, which made it by far the most successful of Hitchcock's movies. (And Hitchcock was a massively successful director.)

As a result, Psycho generated numerous sequels, and many popular imitators, launching a whole genre of money-making exploitation films dubbed slashers, including the Halloween series, the Friday the 13th series, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

The public loved Psycho, but critics were uncertain about it at first. Early reviews were mixed. But the film eventually become celebrated as one of Hitchcock's greatest achievements, and as one of the most important films ever made. It received four Academy Award nominations, including for Best Director and for Janet Leigh as best actress. It's now so highly regarded that it's hard to believe in retrospect that it didn't win them all.

Maybe the judges were just too traumatized by this film to give it the gajillion little gold Oscar statuettes it deserved.

We admit it; sometimes we get a little overenthusiastic. That burrito last night was not literally the best thing we have ever eaten. That corgi was not really the cutestwutestthingohyesyesyesyouare. Despite everything we once said, Drake's dancing in the "Hotline Bling" video is probably not more influential than everything Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp did, combined.

But when it comes to Psycho, the idea of hyperbole doesn't really exist. This film is just that boundary shattering.

We talk above about how it redefined horror movies. And that's huge. But Psycho's main achievement was that it changed the way stories in cinema could be told.

And we're not exaggerating.

Psycho: the story of Marion Crane. Who steals a ton of money. Who runs away. Who goes to the Bates Motel. Who… gets stabbed and dies fifty minutes into her own movie.

And Psycho ain't a 70-minute film. It's an hour and fifty minutes long. Which meant that Hitchcock killed off his own protagonist less than halfway through the film… and didn't even replace her with another protagonist.

Sure, it's the fact that Marion gets stabbed (and not that she's an absentee protagonist) that will have you taking baths and not showers for the next three weeks. Sure, the image that will stick in your mind after watching Psycho is probably Mrs. Bates' skull-head (and not the bar at the bottom of your screen telling you that you still have an hour to go after Marion bites the big one).

But in terms of filmmaking, this one little murder changed the entire landscape of how you were allowed to tell stories.

Remember that this was a different world. Movies were a little conservative, and a little escapist, back in 1960. If a character was introduced as the protagonist and stuck it out through the first half hour of the film—and especially if the POV of the film gazed through her eyeballs—she wasn't expected to buy the farm until the last moments of the last reel.

And yet, Hitchcock disposed of Marion Crane the way you'd dispose of a used Kleenex. (No, not by stabbing her in the shower. What are you doing to your poor Kleenex?)

This is as groundbreaking as if Hitchcock—one of the most famous, influential, and well-regarded directors ever—had just told the world: "A climax? In a story? Nah: you don't need one." Or if he had decided to say "You know, we're just going to tell this thing backwards. How d'ya like them apples?"

And of course, today we have Memento (a film told backwards) and we have Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a film with zero real climax). But without Hitch breaking one of the most sacred rules of onscreen storytelling, we might not have gotten to that place quite as easily.

So while Alfred H. is rightly remembered as the The Master of Suspense, the Granddaddy of Gore, the Blonde-Whisperer, The Bloke With Birds, and Probably The Most Enjoyably Sadistic Director Of All Time (we made a few of those up), we'd like to also point out that he also turned cinema storytelling on its dang head.

And then he stabbed at cinematic storytelling's head and cackled as it screamed. Because Hitchcock.