The Moment of Psycho

It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing likePsychohad existed before; the movie industry-even America itself-would never be the same.InThe Moment of Psycho, film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred Hitchcockrsquo;s career,...
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It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing likePsychohad existed before; the movie industry-even America itself-would never be the same.InThe Moment of Psycho, film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred Hitchcockrsquo;s career, recreating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide. Thomson shows thatPsychowas not just a sensation in film: it altered the very nature of our desires. Sex, violence, and horror took on new life.Psycho, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film-and, as Thomson brilliantly demonstrates, still does.