Psycho is a 1998 American psychological horror film produced and directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, and Anne Heche.

During a Friday afternoon tryst in a Phoenix hotel, real-estate secretary Marion Crane and her boyfriend Sam Loomis discuss their inability to get married because of his debts.

Returning to work, she decides to steal a cash payment of $400,000 entrusted to her for deposit at the bank and drive to Sam's home in Fairvale, California.

At the police station, psychiatrist Dr. Simon Richmond explains that Norman jealously murdered Norma and her lover by poisoning them with strychnine ten years earlier.

[3] After the release of Van Sant's financially successful Good Will Hunting (1997), Universal Pictures agreed to option his proposed remake of the film.

[4] Van Sant's pitch was to remake the film shot-for-shot, which Casey Silver, then-head of production at Universal Pictures, felt was "a very strange idea.

[6] Julianne Moore, who was cast as Lila Crane, intentionally chose to portray the character as a more aggressive personality in contrast to Vera Miles's interpretation.

[12] Though almost entirely a shot-for-shot remake of the original, the film does feature slight differences in terms of visuals, minor plot details, as well as the actors' portrayals of the characters.

[10] Psycho was released theatrically in the United States on December 4, 1998, in 2,477 theaters, ranking at number two at the domestic box office below A Bug's Life with a weekend gross of $10,031,850.

[21] Literary critic Camille Paglia commented that the only reason to watch it was "to see Anne Heche being assassinated" and that "it should have been a much more important work and event than it was".

Universal Pictures received the Founders Award "for even thinking the moviegoing public would line up and pay to see a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho".

He thought Vaughn was miscast, unable to capture the "secret pool of madness" in the character of Norman Bates, and Heche was guilty of overacting.

Ebert wrote that the film "is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted".

[23] Janet Maslin remarks that it is an "artful, good-looking remake (a modest term, but it beats plagiarism) that shrewdly revitalizes the aspects of the real Psycho (1960) that it follows most faithfully but seldom diverges seriously or successfully from one of the cinema's most brilliant blueprints"; she noted that the "absence of anything like Anthony Perkins's sensational performance with that vitally birdlike presence and sneaky way with a double-entendre ('A boy's best friend is his mother') is the new film's greatest weakness".

[25] Jonathan Romney of The Guardian also championed the film, writing: "Somehow, Van Sant has managed to spin a big-budget studio project into a piece of conceptual art, a provocative inquiry into the nature of cinematic originality.

He describes it as a "slow, stilted, completely pointless scene-for-scene remake of the Hitchcock classic (with a few awkward new touches to taint its claim as an exact replica)".

Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who wrote the original script that was carried over to the remake, thought that although she spoke the same lines, Anne Heche portrays Marion Crane as an entirely different character.

[12] Although the film's overall reception was less-than-favorable, it did receive a blessing from Hitchcock's daughter Pat, who stated that her father would have been flattered by the remake of his original work.

[34] On February 24, 2014, a mashup of Alfred Hitchcock and Van Sant's versions of Psycho appeared on Steven Soderbergh's Extension 765 website.

The soundtrack also includes the track "Living Dead Girl" by Rob Zombie, which can be heard during the film when Marion trades in her old car for a new one.