Villainism In The Movie Psycho

The most effective villain, in terms of being frightening that we have witnessed in class would definitely have to be Psycho's (Hitchcock 1960) Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Norman Bates is a quirky young man. He lives in a stranded part of town with his 'mother'. He owns a stranded motel, the 'Bates Motel', and rarely gets any guests. When he does, strange things seem to happen a lot of the time, due to his mother not being very fond of anyone who goes. Throughout this film Norman's persona develops into something horrifying, making this villain figure the scariest one we have seen in class.
Psycho is successful in sustaining that eerie, creepy feeling throughout the film. Although it does not start off scary at all really, the fact that

It's not a film where a girl somehow walks out of the television screen and calls to tell you that you are going to die in seven days. It is a film that holds some realistic sense to it. Murderers are as real as anything can be. The reality that is witnessed within the screen when watching psycho is what truly makes it scary. Checking into an isolated hotel in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, where the only people there are an odd man and his creepy mother seems like a total nightmare and coincidentally realistic. Mental illness plays an important role in Psycho. Norman was mentally ill, which is what made him commit all the crimes he did. "Psycho" along with many other films, portrays mental illness in what we can see is a negative light. A man who is mentally ill keeps his mother's body preserved through his previous knowledge of taxidermy, and from there he kills a good number of people, when the 'mother' part of him comes out. From the way things play out for Norman Bates, we can assume that he is schizophrenic and suffers from a bad personality disorder. Simply by knowing this, we see how negatively mental illness is depicted, especially for people who actually have these mental illnesses, the vast majority do not turn out to be psychotic killers. People with mental illnesses do not want to be viewed as crazy, they truly are not.

Although very different, they have many similarities. They were both categorized as mentally ill. From the society we live in we can say that a lot of the time when a person of color commits a crime they go straight to jail, or even end up being killed. When a white person commits a crime, even one as terrible as murder, they can go to jail but a lot of the time they are classified as mentally ill. This happens with both Norman and Joan. Another similarity we see with these characters is that they both had some sort of trigger, Norman's was having murdered his mother which led to the rise of all his evil actions. Joan's was that her parents never picked her up during winter break, and died in a car accident. This event somehow made her vulnerable which in turn caused her to turn to demons and witchcraft for comfort. Although they share similarities, they are also different. Norman is an awkward, scrawny guy. Joan was a well-liked school girl, who enjoyed school and played the piano. Both of these people were people who you least expect to commit such an atrocious crime. This in turn makes the films even scarier. We never know what anyone is truly capable of or what goes on in their