Psycho

1960

Alfred Hitchcock's thriller follows Marion Crane, a Phoenix secretary who steals a cash deposit from her employer and disappears into a rainstorm on a back road. She checks into a nearly empty roadside motel run by a shy young man who lives with his invalid mother in the house on the hill. Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates opposite Janet Leigh as Marion, with Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam as the people who come looking for her. Hitchcock shot it cheaply with his television crew and reset what American audiences expected a mainstream thriller to be willing to do.