In Novem­ber 1957, police in Plain­field, Wis­con­sin, inves­ti­gat­ing the dis­ap­pear­ance of store own­er Ber­nice Wor­den, arrest­ed one Edward Gein. Upon search­ing his house, they found Bernice’s decap­i­tat­ed body hang­ing upside down by her legs and “dressed out like a deer”. In addi­tion, they found a cat­a­logue of gris­ly tro­phies and keep­sakes made from human skin and bones. Gein con­fessed to mur­der­ing two women and, even more shock­ing­ly, exhum­ing up to nine corpses of recent­ly-buried mid­dle-aged women from local grave­yards. The Butch­er of Plain­field, as he became known, would pro­vide inspi­ra­tion for the future mak­ers of the Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and – thanks to the 1959 Robert Bloch nov­el of the same name – Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho.

Besides mak­ing peo­ple for­ev­er wary of motel-room show­ers, Hitch­cock­’s Psy­cho con­tin­ues to have an incal­cu­la­ble influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture. It was a clear mark­er in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma, par­tic­u­lar­ly the psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller, of which Hitch­cock was a mas­ter. It may not have been the first “slash­er movie” (that cred­it has been giv­en to British movie Peep­ing Tom, released just three months pri­or to Psy­cho, or even 1932’s Thir­teen Women) but it was cer­tain­ly the most dra­mat­ic and impact­ful in the pub­lic con­scious­ness.

It is of course the sto­ry of Nor­man Bates (Antho­ny Perkins), the obses­sion­al, split-per­son­al­i­ty psy­chopath of the title, and Mar­i­on Crane (Janet Leigh), the sin­gle female find­ing her­self in very much the wrong place at the wrong time, name­ly Bates Motel. The noto­ri­ous show­er scene, in which Mar­i­on is mur­dered in a fren­zied knife attack, is the piv­otal scene and one of the most stud­ied mon­tages of film edit­ing ever made. It was shot over one week in Decem­ber 1959. The fin­ished scene runs for three min­utes, includes sev­en­ty sev­en dif­fer­ent cam­era angles, main­ly extreme close-ups and fifty cuts.

For Leigh’s blood, which swirled down the show­er drain, Hitch­cock used Bosco choco­late syrup. To cre­ate the sound effect of the knife stab­bing flesh, he sent prop man Bob Bone out to fetch a vari­ety of mel­ons. The direc­tor then closed his eyes as Bone took turns stab­bing water­mel­ons, casabas, can­taloupes and hon­ey­dews (he chose casa­ba). The sound­track of screech­ing string instru­ments was an orig­i­nal and high­ly effec­tive piece by com­pos­er Bernard Her­rmann.

Para­mount had con­sid­ered the movie a high­ly risky project, so Hitch­cock deferred his salary in exchange for 60 per­cent of the net prof­it. The film cost just $800,000 to make, grossed $40 mil­lion and Hitch­cock pock­et­ed some $15 million…so not a bad deci­sion!