Psycho essentially revolutionised “horror” films showing the physical monsters as non-existent and yet the monsters in the mind are all too real. The Bates house, the looming Victorian mansion over the motel, coupled with the details within the house, such as the taxidermy returns to the audience to old-fashioned 19th Century terror with a post-modern twist. By making the audacious claim that the darkest monsters – brutal, homicidal, and unknowable – live directly inside us, Alfred Hitchcock, in the grandest stunt of movie history, did more than kill off his heroine. He made a show of killing God; he expressed the horror of a world that had seen enough real horror (World War I, the Holocaust, the dropping of the A-bomb) not to need any more
