Oh, but she’s harmless. She’s as harmless as one of those stuffed birds.
Psycho has, somewhat inaccurately, been credited with being the ancestor of what we now call the “slasher” film, despite having virtually nothing in common with modern horror films, in plot, theme or tone. It’s more of a godfather to that genre. At the very least, it gave birth to the horror movie tradition of the audience shouting to the characters on the screen, “Don’t go up those stairs!”
Rather than being a horror film in the traditional sense, Alfred Hitchcock‘s first film of the 1960′s is really a blood-soaked character study and that character is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who single-handedly gave “momma’s boys” a bad name for a generation or more.
