Psycho

Psycho (1960) changed the rules of cinema, and it did so with a single move: it killed its own star forty five minutes in. Marion Crane steals money from her employer and runs. She loses the road in heavy rain and stops at the Bates Motel, where the manager, Norman Bates, lives with his mother. Until then no film had killed the actor with the largest name on the poster halfway through. Hitchcock did it deliberately and left the audience without footing. Nobody knew who was safe any more. The shower sequence was cut together from around fifty separate setups and there is not a single frame in which the knife touches skin. The violence is produced by editing and by Bernard Herrmann's strings. Herrmann scored the entire film for strings alone. Hitchcock insisted that nobody be admitted to the cinema after the film began. That rule feels normal now. It did not exist before this. It was shot in black and white partly for budget and partly because blood in colour would have been cut by the censors. Good for: the history of horror and suspense, Hitchcock, and anyone interested in technique. Less good for: it is slow next to modern horror. One murder scene still lands hard.