[9] It has been hailed as a major work of cinematic art by international film critics and scholars who praise its slick direction, tense atmosphere, impressive camerawork, memorable score and iconic performances.

[12][13] Marion Crane, a real estate secretary in Phoenix, steals $40,000 in cash from her employer after hearing her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, complain that his debts are delaying their marriage.

[16][17] Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock's long-time assistant, read Anthony Boucher's positive review of the novel in his "Criminals at Large" column in The New York Times and decided to show the book to her employer; however, studio readers at Paramount Pictures had already rejected its premise for a film.

[18] Hitchcock, who had come to face genre competitors whose works were critically compared to his own, was seeking new material to recover from two aborted projects with Paramount: Flamingo Feather and No Bail for the Judge.

[42] He hired regular collaborators Bernard Herrmann as the music composer, George Tomasini as editor, and Saul Bass for the title design and storyboarding of the shower scene.

[62] Lastly, the scene in which "Mother" is discovered required complicated coordination of the chair turning around, Vera Miles (as Lila) hitting the light bulb and a lens flare, which proved to be difficult.

Hitchcock himself contributed to this pattern, telling Truffaut that "there were seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage",[64] and maintaining to other interviewers that there were "seventy-eight pieces of the film".

[70] The 2017 documentary 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene, by director Alexandre O. Philippe, latches onto this last figure for the production's tagline, "78 Shots & 52 Cuts That Changed Cinema Forever".

[71] But in his careful description of the shower scene, film scholar Philip J. Skerry counted only 60 separate shots, with a table breaking down the middle 34 by type, camera position, angle, movement, focus, POV and subject.

The combination of the close shots with their short duration makes the sequence feel more subjective than if the images were presented alone or at a wider angle, an example of the technique Hitchcock described as "transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience".

[102] Krohn's analysis of the production, while rebutting Bass' claims for having directed the scene, notes that these storyboards did introduce key aspects of the final scene—most notably, the fact that the killer appears as a silhouette, and details such as the close-ups of the slashing knife, Leigh's desperate outstretched arm, the shower curtain being torn off its hooks and the transition from the drain to Marion Crane's dead eye.

[107] Herrmann used the lowered music budget to his advantage by writing for a string orchestra rather than a full symphonic ensemble,[103] contrary to Hitchcock's request for a jazz score.

Later, when the MPAA switched to a voluntary letter ratings system in 1968, Psycho was one of a number of high-profile motion pictures to be retro-rated with an "M" (Suggested for mature audiences: Parental discretion advised) for further distribution.

[149] A version of the film with extended footage of Marion undressing (showing her taking off her bra), Norman cleaning up after the murder, and Arbogast's death (in which he is stabbed four times instead of two) has been shown on German TV, and was released there on Blu-ray in 2015.

[158] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: "There is not an abundance of subtlety or the lately familiar Hitchcock bent toward significant and colorful scenery in this obviously low-budget job".

Crowther called the "slow buildups to sudden shocks" reliably melodramatic but contested Hitchcock's psychological points, reminiscent of Krafft-Ebing's studies, as less effective.

[167] Harry MacArthur of Washington Evening Star wrote that "Alfred Hitchcock lets his well-known glee with the gruesome romp all over the place in Psycho, latest of his excursions in mayhem and suspense, at the Town Theater.

[173] Glenn C. Pullen of the Cleveland Plain Dealer praised the performances of Leigh and Perkins, opening his review by writing that "if the movie theater business has any ills, according to 'Doctor' Alfred Hitchcock's diagnosis, they can be cured promptly by some blood-letting horrors, a healthy shot of mystery juice, and a chilling bath in bizarre melodrama.

[176] Reasons cited for this were the lack of preview screenings; the fact that they had to turn up at a set time as they would not be admitted after the film had started; their dislike of the gimmicky promotion; and Hitchcock's expatriate status.

[179] Jack Bentley of the Sunday Mirror wrote that "Alfred Hitchcock, the 'master of suspense', has sadly underestimated the intelligence of his audience in presenting this gory story about a homicidal maniac.

[180] Ernest Betts of the Sunday People called it a "mad, morbid and monstrous film [in which] Hitchcock mixes old-fashioned hokum and the jargon of the psychiatrist to stretch your nerves to screaming point".

[183] A critic for the same newspaper, Patrick Gibbs, wrote that "it almost seems as if the director were pulling our legs and by way of improving the joke he leads us up the garden path—like Haydn in the 'Surprise Symphony'—with some serious completely realistic opening passages typically full of tension and suspense".

[185] However, an unidentified critic in The Guardian, then based in Manchester, was somewhat more favorable in his reaction, saying that the film offered "no more than quite a good sample of the old Hitchcock style, rich in suspense, tension, and the rest of it; and it is also typical in being brilliant in patches and, as a whole, quite implausible".

[141][193] Psycho broke box-office records in Japan and the rest of Asia, France, Britain, South America, the United States, and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period.

Its effectiveness is often credited to the use of startling editing techniques borrowed from the Soviet montage filmmakers,[250][251] and to the iconic screeching violins in Bernard Herrmann's musical score.

It features interviews with and analysis by Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Karyn Kusama, Eli Roth, Oz Perkins, Leigh Whannell, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Elijah Wood, Richard Stanley, and Neil Marshall.

In 2018, Zachary Paul of Bloody Disgusting said Psycho inspired subsequent horror films that had gender bender reveals, citing Terror Train (1980), Sleepaway Camp (1983), and the Insidious franchise (2011-) as examples.

[266] In the 2003 animated film Finding Nemo, the Psycho theme song is played in reference to Dr. Sherman's niece Darla, whose pet fish are known to have died in her possession.

[269] As Perkins was in New York working on a Broadway stage show when the shower sequence was filmed, actresses Anne Dore and Margo Epper stepped in as his body doubles for that scene.

The voice of Norman Bates' mother was maintained by noted radio actress Virginia Gregg with the exception of Psycho IV, where the role was played by Olivia Hussey.