25 things you didn’t know about your favorite horror movies

Psycho – An actor’s real-life eerily mimicked his character’s story

Psycho is not only a classic thriller, but it has gone down as one of the most iconic films in history. The shower death scene is arguably one of the most copied and parodied scenes ever, being mimicked in everything from The Simpsons to That ’70s Show.

Psycho is about an office worker named Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who embezzles $40,000 from her employer and skips town to start a new life. After checking into a quiet motel, the Bates Motel, run by a young man and his mother, she soon suffers the consequences.

One of the reasons Psycho is so iconic is because of the way it killed off the film’s biggest star early on in the film, despite her being a huge part of the film’s promotion. Marion is seemingly the central character until Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) kills her off while she’s in the shower.

This left audiences shocked, with no idea what to expect next. This was a trick employed by Wes Craven in the first Scream movie, too. He hired Drew Barrymore, and she was the face on all the posters and billed as one of the movie’s stars … but her character dies in the first scene.

It’s always creepy when a film’s plot unintentionally mirrors the real life of one of the actors starring in it. But that was the case for Anthony Perkins.

In the film, Marion and Norman (Perkins) are talking, and Norman explains how his mother had to raise him alone after his father died when he was five. In real life, Perkins was an only child, and also lost his father when he was five years old and was raised by his mother. How spooky is that?