User blog:ShawnCognitionCP/Shocktober: Psycho

Hello, Creepypasta Wiki community, and welcome to Shocktober! I promised influence, and it hardly gets more influential than this movie. We all know the movie, and if you don't, you're going to. No matter what, you can't escape the images this film has placed all over the world, and the replicas it spawned.

Unlike the other installments of Shocktober, this installment will have spoilers, so please be aware of that.



Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (The Birds, Frenzy) on a budget of $806,947, this film is based on a novel by the same name, written by Robert Bloch. Making 50 million dollars in the box office, this movie didn't change the field, it helped create it.

Focusing on Norman Bates, played by the fantastic Anthony Perkins, a man with dissociative identity disorder whom runs the Bates Motel. When Marion Crane comes to stay at the hotel. After falling to the alternate personality (pretending to be his mother), he slaughters women whom his mother personality (which he received after murdering her as a small child) believes are "whore".

Suspense which was unmatched at the time, scenes such as the shower scene and the build up of Norman struggling with his illness can both fool new time viewers, and shock them as well. The iconic villain didn't simply gain fame because he was first, but rather, because he was good.

Released in 1960, only a year after the novel Psycho had released, this film won many major awards, such as Best Supporting Actress, Best Actor, and even Best Motion Picture, along with being nominated for countless more awards.

The perfect mix of shock and suspense fueled the fear of the audience, and, more than likely, is the reason you get uncomfortable when you have to close your eyes in the shower.

Just like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates is yet another fictional character based on the real-world Ed Gein. Ed Gein claimed the spirit of his dead mother told him to do evil things, and both had childhoods ruined by an controverting mother, that resulted in an obsession with the parent. Also inspiring Buffalo Bill from The Silencing of the Lambs (and the books the films are based off of), Ed Gein's story is worth the read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein

Showing of Hitchcock's art skills in such a manner everything else he (a master) created is dull in comparison, this is the film which is considered to have started the Slasher genre single-handedly, being the first in the entire genre of horror.

Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Micahel, et cetera- they all owe a special note to Norman Bates, here. Norman, and his mother, that is.