So this isn’t some kind of obscure foreign film or ancient silent film. This is a movie that everyone knows well — it’s as familiar a piece of twencen Americana as Chubby Checker or Belgians in the Congo. You know all about Norman Bates and his motel and the shower scene and the mother.

And in a way that’s a damn shame. Because it turns out that there’s a lot to this movie that I didn’t know — basically everything beyond the above — and there were plenty of surprises and tensions in it, and if I hadn’t been comprehensively spoiled for the big twists, it would have been that much more shocking and tense and omgish.

Like: You know why shower scene lady goes to the Bates Motel? Because she’s stealing money from her office in Phoenix[1] and going on the lam. If you knew nothing about the movie, you might think this was going to be a tense suspense story about her crime and run from the law — after all, there’s 30 minutes of that stuff before she even gets to the motel, and she seems very like a main character. But of course we know that’s all just setup and what the movie is really about; if you want an argument for the value of not knowing spoilers, this is it in spades.

But the thing is, even having these twists ruined, the movie was still absolutely brilliant, in exactly the way that a spoiled M. Night Shyamalan movie isn’t. The cinematography, the music, the acting, the writing… it’s all just so obviously the work of an accomplished master. This Hitchcock guy, he’ll amount to something, you mark my words. There’s a reason one of his movies is also #1 on this list.

Really, the only flaw is that at the end of the movie, there’s a completely unnecessary and pointless and distracting “psychologist explains it all” scene, as if it’s a mystery that needed to be wrapped up by Encyclopedia Brown. Cut that five minutes off and the movie would be greatly improved, but maybe the movie needed a flaw to inspire Gus Van Sant to believe he could remake it better somehow.

A++ strongly recommended.

  1. To set the proper tone of horror right from the beginning, THE OFFICE ISN’T AIR CONDITIONED. IN PHOENIX. ↩︎