Remember the first time you saw Psycho

[gracebuster]

Got to shoot this candid of Grace watching for the first time!



Now THAT is how a Horror Movie should make you feel!

[Toy Ranch]

Heh!  Psycho is still a classic fright, even with some of it's power removed by all of it's imitators making the concepts more familiar to us.  Psycho, The Exorcist, Jaws...  there are only a few horror movies that succeeded on that level. 

She does look scared...  don't be surprised if you wake up with a kiddo in your bed. 

[drthomasholmes]

I was about 12 or so. My father sometimes worked 2nd shift once in a while so my stepmother was nice enoough to feed my love of horror movies all night. This was in the 80's when tv stations would broadcast horror films all weekend. She would say, "I can't wait til they play Psycho- you'll love it". Finally, it was on one night. I must say it was one of the biggest shock endings I've seen- until this day. Not many things compare to a 1st time veiwing of this movie! Been a fan since!

[MDG]

I went to a screening of Psycho last year where there were a lot of teenagers-early 20s people in the audience.

Everyone knows "shower scene" so there wasn't a huge reaction when it happened, but [SPOILER WARNING, if that's at all possible at this point] a huge tremor went through the auditorium when Arbogast got it, and there was palpable tension as Lila walked up to the house. (I could appreciate how/why William Castle built the Fright Break in Homicidal to mimic that scene.)

[Gary D Macabre]

Psychos is a masterpiece of modern horror.  Although it's sequels could never attain the level of the original, I find the critics have been a bit hard on them likely for this reason alone.  I personally find that the series on the whole this is likely one of the best.  Psycho II had solid writing and very competent acting, and followed a very solid progression from the first with another great ending, and the third where Norman finally becomes a murderer straight up is great too.  The ice cube scene is one Hitch would have been proud of.

[Minion]

I was spending the night at my cousin's house when I was a kid the first time I saw it on TV. Must have been on a Saturday because I remember watching Saturday Night Live later that night, also for the first time.

[Monster Bob]

PSYCHO is a classic for sure.

PSYCHO fans owe it to themselves to see the films DERANGED and also ED GEIN, two more films based on the hijinks of Wisconsin necrophile Edward Gein. Both are much closer to what actually happened in 1950s Dairyland than the better known PSYCHO. BTW, the German DVD of DERANGED has scenes omitted from US releases(makeup,etc. by Tom Savini), and the British version of ED GEIN is in letterbox (US version is not) for a heightened movie experience.

Visiting Gein's hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin is a roadtrip well worth taking for unparalleled creepiness. And no kids, this isn't me, but this character is a 'pally' of mine...

[Monster Bob]

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[typhooforme]

"I apologize for callin' you a hog, mama."  DERANGED is tremendous fun--thanks so much for bringing it up, Bob!  Roberts Blossom makes a quintessential Ed Gein (in this film, called Ezra Cobb).  Here are a couple pics of the Savini-made head of Miz Cobb when it was in my collection.  It's owned by a buddy of mine who had no place to display it, and was "on loan" to my collection for a couple years before I--sob!  gulp!--gave it back to him.



"I know I c'n trust her--cuz she's fat!"

[Monster Bob]

Wow! Great piece! 

[Monsters For Sale]

I saw it as a first-run attraction when I was 14. 

It made an impression.


Adam

[typhooforme]

But yes, I DO remember the first time I saw PSYCHO, and I was 13 or 14 years old.  PSYCHO hadn't been out too long.  Our neighbor's adult daughter wanted to see it, but was afraid to go alone--she had heard from friends that it was scary.  So she asked my folks if they'd mind if she took me to see it.  I'm sure that was one of my life's turning points!  Here where I am living again, in the house where I grew up, there is a basement fruit cellar--and back in those early post-PSYCHO years of the early '60s my mom would say, "Go down to the fruit cellar and get a jar of peaches..."  And I'd go.  With a feeling of dread, for our fruit cellar had (and still has) that same darn bare lightbulb and hanging chain--and you have to open the door and "feel" through the air, in the dark, for that chain.  I always expected to see something horrific in that room when my 13-year old self pulled that chain!  Now I'M in my early 60s--and I still think of Mrs. Bates sitting there in the dark.

Hard to get a good angle showing the ceiling bulb, but this is the fruit cellar here--photo taken this morning!

[Gary D Macabre]

Ed Gien certainly has had an affect on horror.  I have heard about "Ed Gein" (released under another title which eludes me in europe and changed for north america) but I have never seen it.  As for major motion pictures the Characters of Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill and Leatherface are always lauded as characterizations of Ed Gein.  Interesting that these characters are nothing alike.  Buffalo Bill is a murderous psychotic perverted transvestite, Leatherface is simply a mindless tool in a skinsuit living amongst the Macabre trappings of human remains and Norman is the quiet unassuming guy down the street that has serious issues hidden deep inside and an undeserved morbid devotion to his mother.  In reality Ed Gein was all three of these characters lumped into one man.  A truly disturbing example where life is indeed stranger than fiction.

Of the three only one of them I find the slightest bit interesting and really the most horrifying, and of course that is the Norman Bates character.  Norman was not a murder, it was mother.  Norman was appalled by her actions.  He was interested by taxidermy but not in human mutilation and keeping the remains of victims for perverse pleasure.  Like the classic monsters of the golden era he was a lot more horrifying in that we the audience could actually relate to him and be sympathetic.  But below that there was a very disturbing deadly monster.  The latter two were just the crude monstrous sides of Ed Gein without any redeemable human characteristics.  Boring.

Robert Bloch, a devotee of Lovecraft and classic horror thought very little of excessive gore and violence seen on modern horror and his novelization of 'Psycho II' (completely unrelated to Universal's sequel)  was about really about his disappointment with Hollywood and the trend to vulgar visceral horror.  So it is only natural he didn't adapt those parts of  Ed Gein's personality into the Norman Bates Character.  Norman Bates is the most intriguing, unselltling and human parts of Gein's personality, the kind of thing a true fan of classic horror would sees as the best character.

I always felt the Ed Gein parallel with Norman was over emphasized in the media (and of course affecting public opinion).  Certainly The Ed Gein phenomenon would be familiar to Robert Bloch, and he used some basic facts from the known accounts as a basic foundation for Psycho and Norman, but that's where the similarities ended.  I recall reading an interview with Robert Bloch which supported this.  Believe it or not with a quick Google I found this very interview published online.  Here is a quote from Robert Bloch in regards to Psycho and it's relationship with Ed Gein.

RL:  Wasn't the original Psycho novel based on the real-life story of Ed Gein?
RB:  It was based on the situation. I didn't know much about Mr. Gein personally at that time. I did know that he lived in a small town of seven hundred people. I was living about fifty miles away in a small town of twelve hundred people. I realized that the kind of situation where if you sneezed on the north side of town, on the south side they said "Gesundheit!" So, all I knew was that a man had committed several murders of a shocking nature in a very small community. He had lived there all his life and nobody ever suspected him. It was that situation which made me think there was a story there. So, I based the novel on the situation. It wasn't until later, after inventing the character of Norman Bates, that I discovered how close he was to the real-life Ed Gein.

[Gary D Macabre]

Sadly I don't remember the first time I saw Psycho

[OldTimey]

I was 6 or 7 years old. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and I was stuck indoors. This was the early 70's, and there were only three Television stations, so it was often slim pickins as far as TV viewing was concerned.

I flipped around the dial (that didn't take long) and found Psycho already in progress, but I had only missed a few minutes. I was immediately drawn into this story of a woman stealing money from work and trying to get away with it. I wasn't exactly sure what I was watching, but I was intrigued, so I figured I'd go along for the ride.

The shower scene shocked me senseless. I had never seen anything like that before. It wasn't just the brutality of watching a woman stabbed to death in graphic detail, but that woman was as nekkid as the day she was born, and I was pretty sure that I was seeing something that I shouldn't have been watching. I was only in the second grade, for gosh sakes, and I had just seen my first naked woman! This was turning into a red letter day.

I watched the rest of the movie while periodically looking over my shoulder to make sure that my mother didn't discover what I was doing...this was new territory for me, a movie where any crazy thing might happen...and happen it did. The killer was Norman bates?!? Bates was his own mother?!? A man wearing woman's clothes?!? ... And did I mention that a buck nekkid woman was slashed to ribbons while taking a shower and that she stared at me with cold dead eyes??