Psycho (Norman's Mother)

This scene from PSYCHO is the scene where we see Norman’s mother for the first time and realise that Norman is a psychopath. The first time you see her is in the basement of Bates House which is a creepy location and backed up with the low-key lighting represents evil in Norman through her mother.

The music in this scene is very tense as don’t know what Norman’s mother looks like which is Parallel music as matches the emotion in the scene.

The psycho killer in the film is Norman as he keeps his dead mother in his house which is an example of Necrophilia and also oedipal complex. He has poisoned his mother’s lover, and how he loves his mum so much he dresses up as her when he does his murdering. This reflects the historical context of the time as Ed Gein as he did similar things by keeping his victims as trophies after he killed them, this only happened a few years before the film came out so this shows Janet Staiger’s Interpreting Films (1992) is right as you need to understand a film’s context and who the audience is at the time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           This scene backs up Thomas Schatz Genre Theory as shows that the film is a Psychological horror as the main killer in the film is a psychopath. This is shown in his book (Hollywood Genres 1981)