The commercial success of Psycho resulted almost immediately in a flood of low-budget shockers, many of which deliberately recalled the title of this classic with names such as Homicidal (1961), Maniac (1963), Strait-Jacket (1964), Hysteria (1965), Berserk! (1967), Deranged (1974, also based on the real-life Ed Gein case), Spasmo (1974) and Schizo (1976).

Joan Crawford, star of both Strait-Jacket and Berserk!, also made another horror film that recalled elements of Psycho. In I Saw What You Did (1965), the top-billed Crawford is killed after only a limited amount of screen time. There is also a shower murder scene with a slight twist on the original.

Psycho is responsible, in some ways, for inspiring dozens of "slasher movies," which became particularly popular in the 1980s. Many of them also had some sort of sexual angle (although far less subtle), much more blatant gore, and rarely the artistry or mastery of the medium displayed in the original.

The real-life case of Ed Gein has inspired several other films, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and all its sequels and remakes and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

In the horror comedy Ed and His Dead Mother (1993), Steve Buscemi plays a nerdy young man who revives his dead mother, to whom he was strongly attached, only to have her embark on a series of gruesome acts.

References and homages to Psycho, including lines from the film, character traits and plot points, and most often, homages to and parodies of the shower scene, have turned up in TV shows and movies too numerous to mention. Among the most famous and most obvious are the films of Hitchcock fan Brian De Palma, who opens both Carrie (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980) with disturbing shower scenes. In the latter picture, De Palma stages the murder of the nominal star less than halfway through the movie in an elevator, recalling Janet Leigh's death in the confined space of the tub. In De Palma's Raising Cain (1992), John Lithgow watches a car sink slowly into a lake, a direct reference to the similar scene with Norman Bates disposing of Marion Crane's car.

Bernard Herrmann's influential score has been imitated for both horror and comic effects in numerous movies, including Robert Altman's Images (1972), Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Creepshow 2 (1987), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and Jackass: The Movie (2002). The shrieking violins theme of the shower scene, the most famous and most imitated cue in movie music history, has become part of common vernacular. Most people, in fact, can recall themselves or someone they know vocalizing it at some point. Characters in movies such as Donnie Darko (2001) and the television sitcom Friends have also referenced the famous shower theme vocally.

When Janet Leigh, as a character named "Norma," first appears in the horror film Halloween H20 (1998), a few bars of Herrmann's musical motif is heard on the soundtrack.

In his Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety (1977), Mel Brooks is attacked in the shower by a motel employee wielding a newspaper. The ink running off the wet paper flows down the drain like the black-and-white "blood" in the original.

Perhaps no television show has referenced Psycho more times than The Simpsons, which has featured the music, the Bates house, and Norman's name, among other connections, often in the show's popular annual Halloween episodes.

In the early Rainer Werner Fassbinder film Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), a character expresses her desire to get some sunglasses like the ones the cop wears in Psycho.

When he hosted the popular comedy show Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, Anthony Perkins spoofed his role in Psycho in a skit called "The Norman Bates School of Motel Management," in which he portrayed the character asking a series of multiple choice questions about ordinary decisions a motel manager must make in the course of a day to meet customers' needs. The correct answer option to each situation was "Hack her to pieces with a kitchen knife." Other allusions to Psycho abounded throughout the episode.

Psycho spawned two sequels, one in 1983, in which Vera Miles reprised her role as Lila Loomis, and another in 1986 directed by Anthony Perkins, who played Norman again in both movies. A prequel was made for television, Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), featuring Perkins one last time (the actor died two years later) and co-starring Henry Thomas as the young Norman and Olivia Hussey as his mother.

Gus Van Sant made a shot-for-shot tribute remake in color in 1998 with Vince Vaughn as Norman, Anne Heche as Marion, Julianne Moore as Lila, and Viggo Mortensen as Sam.

A made-for-TV film, Bates Motel (1987), featured Bud Cort as a former asylum roommate of Norman's who inherits the motel and tries to reopen it, only to face strange occurrences.

Janet Leigh previously played a young woman menaced in a remote, seedy hotel in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958). In that movie, Dennis Weaver played a nervous, twitchy motel manager.

Janet Leigh had a long and fruitful career in cinema that included 80 movies and television shows between 1947 and 2005, among them such notable and popular films as Little Women (1949), My Sister Eileen (1955), Touch of Evil, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), An American Dream (1966), and The Fog (1980). Her identification with this role and the fame it brought her was so overwhelming that when her obituary appeared in the New York Times on October 5, 2004, the headline read: "Janet Leigh, 77, Shower Taker of Psycho."

Leigh remarked that once the picture went into widespread television distribution, she began receiving piles of crank mail, some of them threatening her with the gruesome death of the shower scene. The letters were always turned over to the FBI. "I didn't get scared by the shower scene, but these cranks could haunt me the rest of my life," she said.

A Hitchcock attraction was installed at Universal Studios theme park in Florida, featuring the Bates house and an interactive shower scene. The Universal Studios tour in California drives past the original set of the Bates house.

Janet Leigh wrote about her experiences in making this film in the 1995 book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller (Harmony), co-authored with Christopher Nickens. Several book-length studies of the film have been published, and Robert Bloch's original novel remains in print and continues to sell.

Some film analysts have noticed a similarity between the close-up of Arbogast's murder to that of the bloodied woman with the lorgnette in the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin (1925).

In addition to Psycho and others mentioned above, many bands and musicians have taken their names or songs from the true life facts of Ed Gein's life.

by Rob Nixon