My fellow Offenders Iris and Elaine have been blogging this month about the films they think should have been nominated for Oscars (see examples here, here and here). Of course there were also many deserving individuals who never won the gold statuette and I think none of the “losers” were more deserving than director Alfred Hitchcock. Known as the “Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock helmed such classic thrillers as Notorious, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Rope, The Birds and, of course, Psycho.
In fact, the shower-murder scene in Psycho may not only be the most famous sequence in all of Hitchcock’s films, but one of the most famous in all of cinema. In an era of extreme horror films like the Saw series, this scene may no longer have the same power to shock audiences like it did when it was released in 1960, but it still retains its power 50 years later. Hitchcock should have won a directing Academy Award for this sequence alone. But since he didn’t, I’d like to pay homage to it as part of our Oscar “flavah of the week” by examining what makes Psycho’s shower-murder one of the most effective moments to ever be captured on celluloid.
By 1958, 
