Psycho analysis- Mother's reveal

This scene in Psycho comes near the end of the film and has Lila Crane, Marion’s sister, exploring the Bates Mansion. She stumbles into the cellar and discovers the corpse of Norma Bates; “Mother”. This is a close up shot with the corpse being composed in the centre of the shot denoting it’s the main focus of attention in the shot.

The smile on the corpse’s face is wide and shows the teeth to be bared in a grin. This connotes happiness and laughter which represents the fact that Mother is enjoying the events and murders that are happening, as when she was alive she was protective of Norman and didn’t want him near women. This part of her personality ideologically lives on in Norman’s head and makes him kill.

 The lighting in this scene is not only low key and motivated by a light bulb on the ceiling but is also a moving light source which casts huge moving shadows across the corpse’s face and the room. The shadows illuminate her face in different ways and almost animate the corpse so that it looks like it’s laughing and rocking back and forth which further reinforces the representation of the corpse enjoying the events taking place, especially as another women was about to be killed who interfered with Norman.

The corpse is a direct historical context to Ed Gein and inspired the actions of Norman and “Mother”. Ed Gein was a serial killer in the 1950’s who famously killed and raped women before cannibalising them. He kept his Mother’s corpse too and would perform necrophilia. This was due to the emotional link Gein had to his mother though an Oedipal Complex; which is loving your mother but hating your father. Gein was also schizophrenic and would use this emotional link to embody his mother and the ideals he was brought up with from her. This would also result in him killing other women if he became attracted to them as the “Mother” part of his brain forced him to not have sexual urges that would pose a threat to the relationship of Gein and herself.

Using Thomas Schatz’s “Genre Theory” we can see how this scene links into the horror genre. In this scene we not only see the old corpse of Norma Bates, but we also see the psycho killer, low key and motivated lighting, phallic weapon, final girl and male hero; all of which are conventions of the horror genre and present in Psycho.