The Shower Scene That Took a Week

The most famous murder in cinema lasts about 45 seconds. It took a week to shoot.

Alfred Hitchcock storyboarded the shower scene in Psycho in extraordinary detail: roughly 78 camera setups and about 52 cuts packed into three-quarters of a minute. On screen it feels like chaos. It is actually one of the most tightly controlled sequences ever assembled, cutting so fast that the audience's eye never gets time to check whether what it's seeing makes sense.

What it never shows is a knife entering a body. Not once. The violence is entirely constructed from cutting, from Janet Leigh's performance, from a body double for some shots, and from Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings — violins played so aggressively that the players were reportedly asked to attack the instruments rather than play them.

The blood is chocolate syrup. It reads correctly in black and white, and it was far easier to clean off a set. Hitchcock shot Psycho in black and white partly for budget and partly because the material was considered too graphic for colour in 1960.

The film cost around $800,000 and became one of the most profitable of Hitchcock's career. The sequence has been dissected frame by frame for sixty years, partly because of a persistent rumour that Leigh was actually stabbed. She wasn't — but the scene is edited so precisely that the rumour survives, which is arguably the highest compliment a piece of film editing can receive.