Do you know why everyone acts like Psycho is so great? Because it IS. A fun experiment while you're watching the film in a room crowded with people who know what's coming is to imagine it's 1960, when 95 percent of the film's likely audience would have been literally incapable of imagining that Norman Bates was anywhere near as fucked up as he turns out to be. Remembering that recasts Hitchcock's technique as a willful erosion of human innocence, which makes the whole thing even more powerful. by Sean Nelson