Metrograph

Perhaps no film so wholly revolutionized the average American’s relation to screen violence as this structurally revolutionary, viewer implicating proto-slasher, which begins with Janet Leigh doing a bit of impulse embezzlement, then takes a terrible turn as she takes refuge at the Bates Motel, a remote roadside stop-off managed by mother’s boy Norman. Adapting with gothic flair Robert Bloch’s novel, which was inspired by the case of killer Ed Gein, Hitchcock took a butcher knife to the collective consciousness—and nothing has ever been the same.