Throwback Thursday: Psycho and the Twist That Started This Whole Column
Throwback Thursday is a retrospective, not a graded review – one twist per era, spanning the decades this whole idea of a “twist ending” grew out of. There’s no better place to start than Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock), the film usually credited with teaching mainstream audiences, and every thriller that came after it, what a structural reveal could do to a story already in progress.
The Twist
Psycho commits an act of structural violence before it commits its twist: Marion Crane, the woman the entire first act has followed as its protagonist, is murdered less than halfway through the film. The Bates Motel’s shy, awkward proprietor, Norman, is established as a suspicious but sympathetic bystander to whatever his unseen, controlling “mother” is doing upstairs. The reveal, when it comes, is that there is no mother – not alive, at least. Norman murdered her years earlier and has been preserving her corpse and adopting her identity, alternating personalities to the point that “Mother” committed the murders Norman himself carried out.
Hitchcock’s most influential choice wasn’t the twist’s content – it was structural discipline in service of it: killing off the assumed lead character removes the audience’s safety net entirely, so nobody watching in 1960 had a reliable protagonist left to anchor their expectations against. That’s the mechanism later films would borrow for decades, this site included: the twist doesn’t just add information, it removes the thing the audience thought the story was about. Famously, Hitchcock bought up as many copies of the source novel as he could to keep the ending out of circulation, and Paramount’s promotional policy barring theaters from seating latecomers after the film started wasn’t just a gimmick – it was the first time a studio treated a spoiler as something to be defended at the box office door.