I Watched Psycho for the First Time at Junior High School!

Shôn Ellerton, March 26, 2025
Stuff the useless, infantile, and childish crap our junior high schools want to impose on our children. Challenge them with some horror classics!

Come on! Give the kids a good scare!

So, these days we’ve become skittish and overprotective as to what our kids should be watching.

I’m now at the age that my son is very close to becoming what is equivalent to seventh grade in junior high. His friends vary in age but he has his friends who are already in middle school in Australia, which is somewhat similar to that of junior high in the United States, a time I remember well back in the 80s.

I certainly remember back then, kids in the seventh grade were far more independent than they are now in many ways. The so-called ‘school run’ virtually did not exist as most made the trek to school by foot or bicycle. Others took the venerable yellow bus school service which worked diligently throughout the week to deliver elementary, junior high, and high school kids throughout the week.

But the event I remember so well just before I started seventh grade was the invitation to attend the school’s movie night, which took place at the main foyer cafeteria space at Sabin Junior High in Colorado Springs.

These days, I am appalled that we are showing kiddie movies like Moana, Sonic 3, and other such contrite animated useless pieces of garbage that have zero substance in its content.

Oh! To be so safe to our precious kids!

Bullshit.

Do you know what Sabin Junior High was showing that night?

It was the all-time black and white 1960s horror classic by Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho.

Oh man! What fun would it be to see this! After all, it was a school function!

It was to start at 7pm at the auditorium cum cafeteria at the school. There was to be free popcorn and soda, or otherwise known as soft drinks.

Us kids had no idea what to expect. My mother had exceptionally good taste for movies and I remember her saying that Psycho was a great movie but also frightfully disturbing. Having watched many black and white horrors on Channel 2 in the US at night, including such classics as The Haunting and Rosemary’s Baby, I knew that I was going to be in for a treat.

I was not wrong.

I turned up to school after my mother dropped me off and we got our helpings of popcorn.

Remember. This was a room full of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders.

Damn! We seemed so much more mature and more ‘worldly’ than today’s bunch. But perhaps, that’s just how we conceptualise our kids these days when we compare to yesteryears’ kids.

We had our big bags of popcorn and awaited for the film to be shown.

Now, in those days, all schools had access to film projectors. This was in the days when all our science and documentary films in class were shown on traditional film projectors.

We had a couple of exceptionally good projectors and we, somehow or another, had two to three reels of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Now, imagine a bunch of junior high students awaiting the movie. Just what is to be expected? Most here had been brought up on a diet of 1980s TV including such classics as The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Trek. Some of them might have watched the PBS classics and Channel 2 thriller offerings but I suspect that I was probably one of the few who watched these channels, while most others were watching ABC, CBS and NBC, the mainstream channels. Thanks to my mother, I had appreciated the more unusual offerings that were available on 1980s free-to-air television.

The lights went out and the movie started. It wasn’t a particularly big picture because of the limitations of the projector but it was enough. The audio was okay at least. The room was silent as us students were wide-eyed and curious as to what kind of movie this would be.

A couple of ninth graders were making out with their girlfriends in the corner, I remember that. Oh jeez, they were just so big and bad compared to us freshie seventh graders. But, we knew their game!

The movie started out slow with some blonde broad, played by Janet Leigh, in Phoenix, Arizona who decided that she steal some money from a rich tycoon and head out on a single-lane highway to escape the blue lights of justice. She ends up at the famous Bates Motel with that hideous and frightening looking house on the hill behind it.

The Bates house on the hill

I can tell you that the atmosphere in the auditorium was very very tense. Everything was dark save for the black and white picture on the screen. Even those passionate ninth graders making out were spellbound on the picture. Black and white can be quite captivating to the human imagination because it brings in a dimension of the unnerving unknown to its audience. Shadows look monstrously large and images and sharp and contrasting. It can be truly frightening.

We saw the infamous shower screen in which the schizophrenic psychotic madman Norman Bates, played by the amazing Anthony Perkins, decides it would be fun to stab multiple times the young and attractive blonde in the shower. Because ‘mother’ told him (or her) to do so. Even then, we knew that she wasn’t entirely innocent either. After all, she stole the money! But wow, we were confused about Norman. Was she him or her, being the mother?

The most famous stabbing scene in cinematic history

Many of us kind of knew about the infamous shower scene either through our parents or through some parody or another. But we didn’t know about the mansion lurking on the hill behind the motel. The film was beautiful in its portrayal of wonderfully crafted wooden panels complete with anaglypta and other such antiquated architectural features which we seldom see anymore these days. Parlour lamps in the Tiffany style. Elaborate folds of Victorian curtains bedecking the grand windows. Wonderful wooden oak pieces of furniture. And, of course, lovely oil paintings. A very cosy environment, but somehow, incredibly spooky at the same time.

Us kids, saw the deranged schizophrenic Norman Bates stabbing a detective walking up the stairs. It may seem commonplace to our standards, but the way Hitchcock directed this was sublime. The overhead shots. The long shadows. The deranged look on Anthony Perkin’s face dressed up as a woman stabbing the local detective as he stumbled down the stairs to his death.

Detective attacked by psycho

But the finale was the basement or cellar scene.

That was the one which made all the hair of our collective bodies stand on end. The shadows. The darkness. The music, by Bernard Herrman, was enough to creep us out thoroughly. The way the dead mother was swivelled around on a chair to reveal nothing but her skeletal corpse with the swinging shadow of the light going back and forth.

The famous last scene in the cellar

And behind. Oh my god, the deranged Norman Bates, donned with a woman’s dressed and holding a big knife about to stab the detective in the basement.

The horror! The horror!

It was simply awesome!

Us kids had much to talk about this epic classic the next week. And we were so pleased that we got to see this most immortal of all movies ever made. A movie made four decades ago which made most of the then modern movies made seem so insignificant.

And, now in 2025, Psycho remains to be one of the most potent horror movies ever made.

And please!

Let’s inspire our middle or junior high school students to enjoy such movies rather than the insipid, boring, and infantile movies which our helicopter parents these days are only allowing our kids to watch.

To this day, I remember with such vividness the recollection of watching that old horror classic at my old junior high school.