It is year 1960 in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. Our protagonist, Marion, is in a hotel room with
her lover Sam, who is making his regular visit to Phoenix to spend time with Marion. However, Sam is
reluctant to get into a serious relationship with Marion because he is still finalizing his divorce,
which renders him penniless, because he has to pay a large sum of alimony to his ex-wife. Seeing
Marion’s disappointment, he promises that they’d find some way to make their relationship work.
When Marion arrives to work right after, which is at realtor’s office, her boss walks in with
an arrogant investor, who recklessly hands the company forty thousand dollars of cash.
He wants to purchase a house as a wedding gift for his daughter. The boss promptly asks Marion
to deposit the money to the bank, and she puts the money envelope in her purse. Marion then
asks her boss if she can take the rest of the afternoon off, and that she was not feeling
well. Her boss grants her request, and she'll go put the money on the bank before going home,
and this is where the story gets interesting. Instead of going to the bank, Marion goes home to
pack her things, before she ultimately decides to steal the money, and driving away from the city.
Well, you heard that right, Marion is running away with the cash, and plans
to use it to build a life with her lover Sam. Headed for the town where Sam lives, Marion
drives out of the city as fast as she could, and keeps on driving through the night. At some point,
she pulls over out of exhaustion and falls asleep by the side of the road.
She is woken up by an officer standing outside her window. Marion who is carrying around the
40 thousand dollars she stole from her company is acting palpably nervous.
This seems to raise the officer’s suspicion, but the officer lets her go.
The officer ends up following her into town.
Marion then pulls up at a used car dealership and plans to exchange her current car with a new
one in hopes that it would be harder to trace her whereabouts.
With the officer watching her
every move, she only grows more anxious, so she takes the first car offered to her.
The officer drives into the car dealership as Marion settles her deal with the salesman,
and she drives off before the officer gets to question her anything.
Marion keeps driving through the night until she nears the city where Sam the lover lives.
A rainstorm forces her to pull up at the nearest motel called Bates Motel,
where she would stay for the night.
Nobody seems to be guarding the motel, but she sees a silhouette of a person inside a
house across the lot. She honks her car until a young man exits the house and walks up to her.
He welcomes her into the lobby, and Marion learns that she is the motel’s only guest for the night.
The young man then gives her a small tour of the motel room,
and introduces himself as Norman Bates. Not only that, he even extends his hospitality
by asking her to join him for dinner tonight. He then leaves her to get settled,
and says he’ll return once dinner is ready. Now that Marion is alone, she decides to hide
the money between the pages of a newspaper and tucks it on the nightstand, right when
she overhears a voice yelling in the distance.
Marion learns that Norman's mother forbids Norman
from bringing strange young girls into the house.
When Norman heads back into the motel, they end up having dinner in the parlor next to the lobby.
Norman tells Marion that he’s passionate about taxidermy and that his mother is his best friend,
despite the fact that his mother is mentally ill, and that she yells at him a lot. Hearing this,
Marion casually suggests that he put her in a mental hospital, but Norman’s demeanor suddenly changes.
Possibly feeling weirded out, Marion excuses herself and returns to her room.
Now that Norman is alone, we are now assured that he is a little creep because apparently,
he has installed a peep hole in the wall that allows him to see straight into Marion’s room.
Norman then returns to his house behind the motel to loosen up.
Later on, the clueless Marion decides to take an evening shower, right when this happens.
The psycho goes stabby stabby before leaving her to bleed to death
We can hear Norman screaming in shock and fear from the house across the lot.
Norman rushes into the motel, and is mortified to find Marion lying dead.
However, instead of reporting this to the police, he decides to clean up the crime scene.
Not only that, he throws Marion’s dead body inside the trunk of her car along with her suitcase.
He also throws her folded up newspaper that unbeknownst to him contains a lot of money.
Norman then takes the car to a swamp nearby and sinks it.
A week later, Marion’s sudden absence is starting to worry everyone including her sister,
Lila. She goes to visit Sam the lover at his place of work, and demands him to tell her where Marion
is. But of course, Sam is just as clueless. It turns out that Lila has hired a private
investigator named Arbogast to find her sister.
He confirms Marion is suspected of having stolen $40,000 from her employer.
After making sure that Marion
isn’t in the shop with Sam, Arbogast goes around town in case anyone has seen Marion.
During his search, he stumbles upon Bates Motel and meets none other than Norman Bates himself.
Norman obviously denies ever having a visitor for the past few weeks.
Unable to say no, Norman lets Arbogast check the guest book and finds a guest named Marie Samuels
whose handwriting is an exact match as Marion’s. Norman grows nervous and tries reasoning that
it’s hard to keep track of time and that he tends to forget people who pass through here.
He then makes up a story about Marion staying the night and then leaving very early in the morning.
Seeing Norman’s strange demeanor, Arbogast grows suspicious and asks to check all 12 cabins.
He then sees a figure standing by the window and Norman is forced to admit that it is his mother.
The detective proceeds to ask Norman if he could speak with the mother but Norman refuses.
Hearing this, Arbogast relents and leaves. He then makes a phone call to Lila to inform his
recent meeting with Norman Bates, and the new information he received from the encounter.
He informs Lila that he believes Norman had a sick old mother
and the mother saw Marion talked to her. He then tells Lila that he’s going to return
to Bates Motel to question the mother and he’ll ring her again in an hour.
Arbogast returns to Bates Motel but doesn’t find Norman there, so he crosses the lot and walks up
to Norman and his mother’s house. He goes straight inside and finds it eerily quiet.
Arbogast falls off the stairs and gets stabbed to death.
Back in town, Lila and Sam are getting
impatient waiting for Arbogast to call them again.
Sam tells her to stay put while he goes to Bates Motel himself to check things out.
Not long after, he returns only to inform Lila that he couldn’t find Arbogast nor Bates,
only that he saw a sick old lady by the window. He assumes that Arbogast must have left in a hurry
and is probably on his way to check out a new clue in his investigation.
Lila finds this hard to believe, so the two decide to go see the town’s sheriff to ask for help.
However, the sheriff merely dismisses their worries and
decides to call Norman to assure them that everything is alright.
After the phone call, the sheriff informs them that according to Norman,
Arbogast left right after getting a clue about Marion’s whereabouts and never returned.
Lila finds this odd because she remembers Arbogast saying that he wanted to speak
with Norman’s mother. Hearing this, the tired sheriff finally tells them that Norman Bates’
mother is dead and buried for the past 10 years. Mrs. Bates killed her lover after finding that her
lover was married before committing suicide, and Norman found them dead together in bed.
Learning that Norman Bates’ mother is supposedly dead surprises Sam,
because he swears that he saw an old woman by the window of a house behind the motel.
Back at Bates Motel, we see Norman enter his house and it appears that he is arguing with his mother.
Norman decides to hide her mother in the cellar despite her protests.
He is afraid that the police are going to come after her for murdering two people.
A few days pass, and we see Lila and Sam walk up to the sheriff in hopes he will give them
an update. The sheriff informs them that he made a visit to Bates Motel but finds nothing
amiss. He assures Sam once more that Norman lives alone and that Sam must be hallucinating. After
they part ways with the sheriff, Lila and Sam decide to investigate Bates Motel on their own.
They come up with a plan to disguise themselves as a married couple and they will stay at the motel
for the night, while they secretly go investigate. Norman welcomes them and helps them check in when
they arrive, and watches in suspicion as they walk into their assigned room.
After making sure Norman isn’t around, Lila and Sam enter room number one, which was the room
Marion stayed at according to Arbogast. Inside the bathroom, they find a scratch paper with Marion’s
handwriting, which contains a subtraction of 40 thousand dollars. Now eager for more evidence,
Sam plans to distract Norman while Lila sneaks inside the house to find the sick old woman.
She investigates the rooms while Sam holds a conversation with Norman. However, it
doesn’t take long before Norman grows suspicious.
The two fight and Norman knocks Sam on the head.
Norman rushes back inside the house, forcing Lila to go hide.
She then discovers the door to the basement and decides to enter it.
It is at this point that she finds the mother, but then…
Hearing Lila scream, Norman dashes into the basement dressed as his mother,
revealing Norman to be the murderer all along.
As it turns out the sheriff is right: Mrs. Bates is dead, but for some sick
reason Norman has been keeping her dead body all this time.
At the county courthouse after
Norman's arrest, a psychiatrist who interviews Norman reveals that Norman has two personalities,
one where he thinks he is his mother, and the other is himself. Not only the killings of Marion
and Arbogast, but that Norman had been excessively dominated by his mother since childhood,
and when she took a lover, Norman became insanely jealous that she had "replaced" him, then murdered
his mother and her lover. Later, he developed a split personality to erase the crime of matricide
from his memory and "immortalize" his mother by stealing and "preserving" her corpse. When he
feels any sexual attraction towards someone, as was the case with Marion, the "Mother" side of
his mind becomes jealous and enraged.
The movie ends with Norman sitting alone
in the interrogation room with his mother’s voice narrating in his head,
talking about how it was really Norman, not her, who committed all those murders
and that she should have 'put him away' years ago.
The final scene shows Marion's car being recovered from the swamp.