As someone who has an incredible hatred of scary movies, I was surprised to find myself genuinely enjoying Psycho. In my opinion, this is most likely because what makes this movie scary is very different from what makes the majority of today's horror films scary. Today's horror movies scare people with high quality special effects intended to create visual representations of the supernatural world. However, Psycho manages to be scary using nothing but knife murders, jump scares, and heart pounding music. What makes these rather simplistic killings so scary is exactly that, their simplicity. The perpetrator of these killings is a seemingly normal person, and his murders take place in normal, everyday situations. Even his name, "Norman", seems to portray a sense of averageness, leading the audience to think that if a normal man like him can secretly be such a psychotic murderer, why not anyone else they meet? He also commits his murders in everyday situations, such as in the shower. A shower is a place where people spend time every day, and this scene drove 1960's audiences to become scared of showering. Leading up to the shower scene, the first toilet flush in a major motion picture is shown, which probably made the 1960's audience feel just a bit uneasy. That uneasy feeling followed them out of the theater and into their everyday lives. It is this everyday application of the fears generated by Psycho that make this film so scary.
The film, to this day, still generates fear of the bathroom:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2582566/Schoolchildren-aged-nine-left-terrified-bathroom-teacher-plays-horrific-clip-shower-scene-1960s-Hitchcock-film-Psycho.html
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