Sometimes I think the world thinks of the entire film of Psycho as ONLY "the shower scene."
Oddly enough, for me, the shower scene is perhaps the third or fourth thing I picture when I think about the movie.
I picture the house. The motel. The motel AND the house. Anthony Perkins.
And then the shower scene.
But frankly, I picture the staircase murder scene almost as much.
Still Hitchcock said that "pretty much the only reason" he even made Psycho from the Robert Bloch novel, was because of the shower scene "coming, as it were, out of the blue."
I might add that Hitchcock said the same thing about scenes in two other movies:
The Mount Rushmore chase in North by Northwest: "It was the only reason I wanted to make the movie." (And yet the crop duster scene is perhaps more beloved.)
The rape-strangling in the office in Frenzy: "It was the entire reason why I made the movie."
Hmmm...
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The shower scene remains famous, I suppose, because...everybody takes a shower sometime. And it usually feels safe and secure in there. Except you are naked. And entrapped. And standing on a slippery surface with poor footing. And naked.
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Actually, I feel that the Psycho shower scene outdistances all others because of the peculiar SET of identifications we make, in our minds, as the horrific slaughter takes place. Consider:
A beautiful woman
Naked
In a shower
In the bathroom of a motel room
In a shabby motel
With no other guests
15 miles away from the nearest town
Down the hill from an aging American Gothic mansion
At night
After a rainstorm
Is stabbed to death
With a huge butcher knife
By a maniacal monster of an old woman
...who turns out to be a man.
All the elements save the last(a man) are happening in our minds even as the horror unfolds. And once we add "who turns out to be a man" to the equation, the horror intensifies retroactively.
Level upon level.
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