Screening Dates
  • January 5, 2018 8:20
  • January 6, 2018 6:30
  • January 11, 2018 8:20

“The most morally unsettling film ever made.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Hitchcock’s monochrome masterwork, a blistering exercise in morbid, mind-blowingly manipulative horror, was a rude shock after years of suave, sophisticated, highly-polished colour thrillers from the Master of Suspense. Janet Leigh is Phoenix secretary Marion Crane, absconding with a small fortune of her employer’s money. Anthony Perkins is nervous Norman Bates, proprietor of the motel where Miss Crane makes the unfortunate mistake of staying for the night. Psycho​’s iconic shower scene is one of cinema’s great montage sequences (and is now the subject of a new feature documentary, 78/52, also screening this week at The Cinematheque). The movie, made on the cheap with the crew from Hitchcock’s TV series, has a technical brilliance that belies its modest means. The director’s subversive disruption of conventional audience identification, his stimulus/​response control of our reactions and implicit indictment of our voyeurism, remains startling.