The Death Card Files ·

Stabbed Through the Shower Curtain

The Psycho shower scene taught generations to lock the bathroom door, its own star included. The real danger was waiting somewhere else.

A dark motel bathroom at night, the shower running behind a slightly open white curtain

By Jack Malacat

Content note: This article discusses murder.

One of the Death Cards in Serial Killer, my card game, shows nothing but a dark bathroom. The shower is running, and the curtain hangs slightly open. The card reads “Stabbed through the shower curtain,” and anyone who has seen the Psycho shower scene knows whose bathroom that is. When I went back into the research I did for this card years ago, I found that a 45-second scene from 1960 did something few films ever manage: it changed what people do when they’re alone and about to shower. Generations of viewers learned to guard the bathroom, and so did the actress whose character died in it.

I was one of those viewers. I saw Psycho before I was a teenager, back in the Philippines, where horror is practically a family pastime and nobody was checking what my cousins and I put on the TV. My shower at home has glass sliders now, with no curtain at all. I still lock the bedroom door, then the bathroom door, before I turn on the water.

The shower came first in a novel. Robert Bloch published Psycho in 1959, and the trivia everyone repeats is that Norman Bates resembles Ed Gein, the Wisconsin man whose 1957 arrest horrified the country. Bloch’s book was nearly finished when the case broke, so he slipped a single line alluding to Gein into one of the final chapters.

In the novel, the shower murder is over fast: a figure who looks like an old woman beheads the young guest with a butcher knife. Hitchcock later told François Truffaut that the suddenness of that murder was what made him want to make the film. He kept the suddenness and reinvented almost everything about how the killing looks.

He planned the scene shot by shot with the designer Saul Bass and spent a full week filming it in December 1959. The result packs 78 camera setups and 52 cuts into roughly 45 seconds of screen time. Nearly every shot is a close-up, and almost none lasts long enough to study. Watch it slowly and you’ll notice that the knife never visibly enters her body. The editing only implies the nudity and the wounds, and the stabbing everyone remembers is one the audience assembled in their own heads.

The rest of the illusion came from the kitchen. The sound of the blade going in was a casaba melon, chosen from several varieties because it sounded most like flesh. The blood swirling into the drain is chocolate syrup, which looked more convincing on black-and-white film than stage blood did. Hitchcock first wanted the scene to play in silence, but Bernard Herrmann scored it anyway, and his shrieking violins became the sound many of us hear whenever a curtain moves.

Then the scene began to reproduce. Brian De Palma opened both Carrie (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980) in the shower. Mel Brooks parodied it in High Anxiety (1977), where the attacker is a hotel employee wielding a newspaper. The Simpsons has borrowed the violins and the Bates house so often that many kids probably knew the strings long before they knew the film. Gus Van Sant remade Psycho in 1998, and in 2015 Scream Queens gave the scene to Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of the woman in the original shower.

The most interesting copy might be the one that refused. In 2017, Bates Motel put its own Marion Crane, played by Rihanna, in the shower with the music cued and a shadow at the curtain. She gets spooked and leaves, and Norman kills her lover there instead.

The fear followed audiences home almost at once. One story that has circulated for decades says a father wrote to Hitchcock because his daughter, already afraid of baths after Les Diaboliques, now refused to shower too. Hitchcock supposedly wrote back: “Send her to the dry cleaners.”

Janet Leigh never found it funny. In 1995, 35 years after the film came out, she told The New York Times that she had stopped taking showers and took only baths. When a shower was her only option, she locked the doors and windows of the house, left the bathroom door and the curtain open, and kept facing the door the whole time. I lock my doors where she left hers open, but reading her routine felt like reading my own. It’s worse on the road. As a flight attendant, I stay in a different hotel almost every night, and every unfamiliar bathroom feels a little like checking into the Bates Motel.

Leigh had more than a movie to make her careful. For years, strangers sent her letters promising to do to her what Norman did to Marion, and luckily none of them followed through. During filming, she had a stand-in, a woman who took her place under the lights while the crew set up shots. In 1988, that woman was murdered by a neighbor who did odd jobs for her. Some newspapers wrongly reported that the shower scene’s body double had been killed. The stand-in died at the hands of someone she knew, which turns out to be how most murders happen.

The numbers back that up. In US homicides from 1993 to 2008 where the relationship was known, between 73 and 79 percent of victims were killed by someone they knew. The bathroom does have a real danger, and it lives on the floor. In 2008, about 234,000 Americans aged 15 and older went to the emergency room after a bathroom injury, most often in or around the tub or shower. Roughly four in five of those injuries came from falls.

I still lock both doors, and knowing the numbers hasn’t changed that. A wet floor is far more likely to hurt me than anyone on the other side of the glass, and if someone ever did mean me harm, odds are I already know who they are. Great. Hitchcock gave all of us a stranger to watch for. So when you check behind the curtain tonight, who are you actually expecting to find?

Images adapted from Psycho (1960), dir. Alfred Hitchcock, and the Serial Killer card game.

About the author

Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.

Venom Haus Archives Author, Jack Malacat

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