by Sophia Tran (’24) | March 1, 2024

This article contains spoilers. 

We’re going back sixty years to one of the most classic horror films in history: Psycho (1960). One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most controversial and famous films, Psycho sets the stage for a future generation of psychological thrillers. It would be a crime to not discuss such an iconic movie in this column dedicated to horror films.

The film begins by introducing us to Marion, a rather average young woman who finds herself at the hospitable Bates Motel in the middle of nowhere. Here, Marion meets Norman Bates, the handsome motel manager. He lives in a separate house right beside the motel with his mother and is the sole caretaker of the premises. Honestly, I liked Norman at the start. Awkward yet polite, he seemed like the type of young man who goes to Sunday Mass and plays bingo with his grandmother. He also has an unusual affinity for taxidermied birds, a fact that is made apparent with how the motel is covered with dead birds: dead owls on the wall, dead crows near the mantelpiece, dead robins by the door. Despite his unfortunate taste for stuffing dead bird carcasses, though, Norman appears to be a nice guy.

However, Psycho soon reveals Norman’s other, more concerning obsessions, one being with his mentally ill “mother.” He discusses with Marion how he did not want to put his mother in a medical institution despite her condition, and when Marion asks if he has any friends, he claims that “every boy’s best friend is his mother.” Norman Bates, a thirty-year-old man, likes to stuff dead birds in his free time, and his only friend is his mother. Marion is, unsurprisingly, slightly disturbed. Still, more troubling to me was the creepy silhouette of a woman staring directly at Marion from Norman’s house in the middle of the night. In one case, when Marion decides to take a shower, the silhouette of the “mother” appears and stabs Marion to death. At this point in the story, it’s logical to make the conjecture that the “psycho” of this story is obviously the “mother.” After all, I even directly stated that the silhouette of the “mother” appeared, right? 

What if I told you that Norman was the “mother”? 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there is in fact no real mother. Norman’s biological mother died years ago when Norman poisoned her after a fit of jealousy over her relationship with another man. The silhouette staring every night from the window is only the preserved, taxidermied corpse of his mother. The film establishes “the mother” as a representation of Norman’s alter ego, the imaginary jealous mother who is really just Norman in a grubby wig and woman’s clothes, which is what the audience sees moving around during the day. 

After concluding this film, I couldn’t help but rewatch it a couple more times. One thing I quite enjoyed about Psycho was its exploration of the Freudian idea of the subconscious and the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is described as the subconscious attachment of a child to their parent of the opposite sex, something that was exhibited through Norman and his dead mother. As a viewer, what made this psychological film so intriguing was figuring out the distinction between Norman’s actual conscious desires versus his subconscious taste for violence personified through the “mother.” 

A bird motif is used throughout the film to demonstrate this Oedipus complex. To me, the bird image represented the comfort of motherhood. Numerous paintings depicted in the motel featured a bird at its nest. In the context of the film, the entire motel and house are like the “nest” for Norman, while the bird represents the attachment between him and his mother. However, unlike the typical birds who fly away from their mothers, Norman is unable to escape his “nest”; he is stuck in this motel, obsessively trying to preserve his mother’s corpse in a jealous desire to reunite with her. In a strange way, I see the taxidermied birds as Norman Bates’ own twisted way of “reviving” his mother. Even after death, Norman adheres to the Oedipus complex by dressing up as his mother in order to satisfy his subconscious desire to be with her.

Overall, this film was a memorable start to a genre of many other psychological films, including Silence of the Lambs, Us, and Get Out. A film that Hitchcock first only regarded as a joke, Psycho certainly doesn’t joke around when weaving this intricate story around a psychopath’s psychologically unstable yet fascinatingly complex mindset. Although the film lacks the same gore as many other contemporary horror films, Psycho still packs a good punch and reminds me how just a smile from Norman Bates is enough to fill my nightmares for the rest of the week.