Hitchcock Psycho Quotes

I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

The picture's over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please." Anthony Perkin's Norman Bates Talking To Janet Leigh's Marion Crane.

My anxious gaze swept the theater. "Don’t worry. I told them it was Sunday,” Ayden said as we sat down. “And they believed you?” “Of course.” He passed me the popcorn and took off his jacket. “I’m the master of deception.” “Uh-huh. So, when did you become a Hitchcock fan?” “After I saw Psycho,” answered a voice clearly not Ayden’s. We turned to stare at Blake. And Jayden. And Tristan. And Logan. All sitting behind us. I smirked at a sheepish Ayden. “Oh yeah, master of deception.

The roots of the slasher movie stretch back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), based on Robert Bloch’s book of the same name. While Bloch stated many times that his book was based on the real-life crimes of Ed Gein, far more clippings were found in his files regarding Wisconsin’s infamous children’s entertainer and serial poisoner, Floyd Scriltch. When Hitchcock purchased the rights to Bloch’s book, he also optioned the life rights from the sole survivor of Scriltch’s infamous “Easter Bunny Massacre,” Amanda Cohen. Cohen was instrumental in the detection and capture of Scriltch and paid a heavy price for her bravery. This book is dedicated to her memory.

Harvey didn’t set his phone to beep or buzz or vibrate like a normal person. Harvey’s phone screeched with a string piece from the Hitchcock movie Psycho, the scene with Janet Leigh in the shower, the knife rising and falling, the string section shrieking with short, staccato stabs, the lone violin slashing through the fermata with discordant glissandos, more violins joining the first, violas adding their teeth, mad strings schooling like orchestral sharks at a blood-drunk feast.

Great horror stories of books and movies have seemingly come from some aspect of real-life events, and human behavior. This is evident as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Psycho. The movie was based on a serial killer named, Ed Gein in Wisconsin.

You know what I think? I think that . . . we're all stuck in our private traps—clamped in them—and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch." – Norman Bates from Psycho

Dear Serial Killers, Please stop telling the cops that you wouldn’t hurt a fly, because all we can think of is the final scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Thanks

The first American serial killer of the twentieth century was a strangler—Earle Leonard Nelson, aka the “Gorilla Murderer,” a Bible-quoting psycho who traveled from coast to coast, choking women to death before raping their corpses (Alfred Hitchcock also made a movie loosely inspired by this notorious case: his 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt).

Owls belong to the night world" as Hitchcock pointed out; "they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins's masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they're watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes." This explains other avian imagery: the crucial shot of Perkins knocking over a sketch of a bird when (in his "son personality") he discovers the body of Janet Leigh—the last "stuffed bird" is, aptly, a woman named Crane, who came from Phoenix (a city named for the mythic bird that returns from the dead); and why, when Perkins suggested candy, Hitchcock insisted it be candy corn, a confection that resembles the kernels pecked by chickens. (As will become clear, everything about Psycho points forward to and aesthetically necessitates Hitchcock's next feature film, The Birds.)