Say "shower" and "movie" to anyone and the response is invariably the same: Psycho. It is a movie that has become larger than its infamous parts by outgrowing the confines of the horror genre to become a part of our cultural language. Surely no other director has been more feted, dissected and second-guessed than Alfred Hitchcock. Entire film festivals, university courses, books and magazines have been devoted to him and his work. He's been put through the critical mill by the Freudians, feminists, Marxists, structuralists/formalists, deconstructionists and a host of other theorists. Yet do we understand Psycho more than we did when it was first released?

1960 was the year of The Apartment, Exodus, Ehner Gantry and Sons and Lovers. It was also the year of The Brides if Dracula and Dinosaurus! Accelerating during the 1950's, quickly-made, low-budget efforts like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Fly (1958) were attracting large numbers of young audiences. That so many of these films had made so much money interested Hitchcock, who was always attuned to his audiences both on a visceral and a commercial level.

Hitchcock liked to call his 47th movie "my little joke." Certainly it was a departure from his usual glossy, sophisticated suspense fare. His previous movie, North by Northwest (1959) followed the formula that his mature audiences had grown to expect from a Hitchcock movie. Hitchcock claimed that what initially intrigued him about Robert Bloch's novel was that the heroine was killed off so early in the story. Hitchcock bought the rights to the book for the bargain price of $9,000, but Paramount (the studio where he had a production deal) turned squeamish when Hitchcock presented them with his next project. They refused to finance the picture. So Hitchcock struck a deal with the studio: he agreed to finance the movie himself using low-grade Universal International's facilities and to waive his director's fee (about $250,000) for 60% ownership of the negative. Using a production crew from his television show which was accustomed to working at a fast pace, Psycho would cost only $800,000 to make. Hitchcock's experiment would ever after change his bank account as well as many preconceived ideas about him as a director.

Psycho wasn't Hitchcock's first stab at experimentation in filmmaking. The confined physical space in Lifeboat (1944), the "no-edit" style of his first color movie Rope (1948), the use of 3-D in Dial "M" for Murder (1954, and the documentary-like The Wrong Man (1956) attested to Hitchcock's willingness to take on stylistic or technical challenges. In all of these movies, however, elements of Hitchcock's tell-tale style came through: his irony, an almost puritan avoidance of violence, the smooth villain, and moral resolution. None of these nor any of his other movies shocked his critics and audience like Psycho, which displayed an unnerving ability to be both a "Hitchcock movie" and something entirely new.

Psycho received mixed reviews upon its first release in the summer of 1960. Some later writers, in attempting to explain the movie's initial reception, have attributed hostile reviews to critics peeved that Hitchcock abandoned the usual advance press screenings. This seems a weak argument, although by the end of the year some critics had reassessed their original opinions. The New York Times's Bosley Crowther, for example, gave the movie a lukewarm reception, but by the end of the year had elevated it to "one of the year's 10 best." The movie's low-budget look and shocking violence preempted it from serious consideration in many quarters. Andrew Sarris, film critic for the Village Voice and flag bearer of the auteur theory in the United States, was an early and vociferous champion of Psycho. Many critics, however, continued to share the opinion of Film Quarterly's Ernest Callenbach, who called Psycho, "surely the sickest film ever made."

Considering the violence and gratuitous gore of later movies, the emotional reactions of audiences and critics appears a bit naive to us today. But, in addition to being shocked by Psycho's violence, critics and audiences exhibited a sense of betrayal: they had gone to see .a "Hitchcock movie" and Psycho certainly didn't fit the picture of what they had come to expect. Hitchcock caught audiences off guard by giving his creative tricks an unnerving twist. His sly sense of humor was there, but it, too, had become skewed: "Mother... what is the phrase?... isn't quite herself today."

I didn't start off to make an important movie," Hitchcock claimed in his vintage, dry style. "I thought I could have fun with this subject and situation." In Psycho's case, however, that he vastly underestimated the screams and emotional responses to Psycho is evidenced by his inquiring about remixing some sections of the movie to brighten dialogue drowned out by the loud reactions to previous scenes. (This was never done.) Between word of mouth and heavy publicity, Psycho became a huge hit. It made $15 million in its first year of release, becoming Hitchcock's most successful picture.

In published interviews throughout his career, Hitchcock preferred to discuss the technical aspects of his movies rather than analyzing his characters' psychological makeup. The director took great delight in remaining aloof and his interviews are delightful cat-and-mouse games with interlocutors trying to pin him down. Francis Truffaut's book of interviews, Hitchcock (1967), is a classic example of Hitchcock's evasiveness and oblique technique: the reader learns more about what Truffaut thinks about Hitchcock's films than what the director himself thinks of them.

The theoretical wheels were spinning around Hitchcock long before Psycho was released, especially in France. During the 1950's, several issues of Cashiers du Cinema had already been devoted to the director and his work. From the 1960's onward, he has continued to be a favorite subject of mainstream cinema periodicals and academic journals. The plethora of material written about Hitchcock and Psycho falls into personal/phenom­enological pairing of Hitchcock vs. his audience. Except for critical reactions by the press, published work of Psycho for the most part avoids critical assessment - or reassessment - of the movie's quality. Its high place in Hitchcock's oeuvre and influence on subsequent movies isn't usually argued. Much more fun for the theorists than debating the film's merits is trying to explain Hitchcock's motivations and mind games.

The Freudians and their lot have been an especially fecund group of Hitchcockian theorists. While their work smells suspiciously of academic publish-o-mania (a trait endemic to film theory in general) there are some notable additions to a critical understanding of Hitchcock's work in particular and film theory in general. Laura Mulvey, for example, refers to Hitchcock's female characters in her seminal 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."

On the other hand, Theodore Price's book, Hitchcock and Hornosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute - A Psychoanalytic View (1992) is a messy speculation on the impulses that formed the director's creative impulses. Like many writers who focus on Hitchcock's motivations - whether they be Oedipal, Catholic-moralist, misogynistic, etc. - Price dismisses the director's defense of his films by calling it denial.

On the other side of the theoretical fence are books and articles that isolate Psycho's shower scene by reproducing it shot by shot. Such technical efforts do little to help us understand its shock effect.

It ignores the fact that the scene would not have been as effective if Hitchcock had not developed the audience's fascinating ambig­uous/sympathetic identification with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). Articles like "Through a Shower Curtain Darkly: Reflexivity as Dramatic Component of Psycho" by Edward Recchia go a long way toward understanding Hitchcock's movies by examining the complicated relationship between the director and his audience. As Donald Spoto remarked in his biography, Hitchcock: The Secret Life of a Genius, "In Psycho, with perhaps greater insistence than elsewhere, Hitchcock directs the audience more than the actors."

In the years since Psycho first hit movie screens, audiences have become anesthetized to violence in their entertainment. Psycho may not scare us the way it scared audiences in 1960, but it remains frightening. In examining the critical/theoretical explanations and analyses dedicated to Psycho, it becomes apparent that intellectual battles may be good for academic exercises or attempts to further a particular agenda, but they can't always help us understand the movie and the moviemaker. Hitchcock's critical standing remains high and Psycho stands among his greatest achievements. The true test of a classic, as it has been many times said, is that it survives the test of time. In Psycho's case, it has also survived the tests of continual analysis.