| Director | Gus Van Sant |
|---|---|
| Budget | $60 million |
| Box office | $37.2 million |
During a Friday afternoon tryst in a Phoenix hotel, real-estate secretary Marion Crane and her boyfriend Sam Loomis discuss their inability to get married because of his debts. Returning to work, she decides to steal a cash payment of $400,000 entrusted to her for deposit at the bank and drive to Sam's home in Fairvale, California. En route, she hurriedly trades her car, arousing suspicion.
Running into bad weather, Marion stops for the night at the Bates Motel and uses an alias. Proprietor Norman Bates invites her to dine with him. After he returns to his house atop a hill overlooking the hotel, Marion overhears him arguing with his mother Norma about her presence. Norman returns and apologizes for his mother's outbursts. He discusses his taxidermy hobby, his mother's "illness" and how people have their own "private trap" that they wish to escape from. Marion, remorseful of her crime, decides to return the stolen money, unaware that the aroused Norman is watching her through a hole in the wall. As she showers, a shadowy figure brutally stabs her to death. Horrified upon finding Marion's corpse, Norman places her body and the hidden cash in her car, and sinks the car in a swamp nearby.
Marion's sister Lila arrives a week later and tells Sam about the theft. Private investigator Milton Arbogast says that he has been hired to retrieve the money. He questions Norman and finds him suspicious; when he asks to speak to Norman's mother, Norman refuses. Arbogast enters the Bates home, where a figure resembling an elderly woman fatally stabs him.
Hearing no word from Arbogast, Sam and Lila grow curious about the Bates Motel, Arbogast's last stop. Al Chambers, the local sheriff, tells them that Norman's mother died in a murder-suicide ten years earlier. Convinced that something happened to Arbogast, Lila and Sam check into the Bates Motel posing as a married couple, and infiltrate Marion's room, finding a missing shower curtain and a paper indicating that Marion subtracted an amount from her cash payment. Sam distracts Norman in the office, while Lila sneaks into his house. Norman becomes agitated and knocks Sam unconscious. Lila hides in the fruit cellar, where she discovers the mother's mummified body. She screams, and Norman, wearing his mother's clothes and a wig, tries to stab her. Sam subdues him, rescuing Lila.
At the police station, psychiatrist Dr. Simon Richmond explains that Norman jealously murdered Norma and her lover by poisoning them with strychnine ten years earlier. He mummified her corpse and began treating it as if she were still alive, going so far as to recreate her in his mind as an alternate personality, as jealous and possessive as she was while alive. When Norman is attracted to a woman, "Mother" takes over: he had murdered two other women before Marion, and Arbogast was killed to hide "his mother's" crime. "Mother" has now completely taken over Norman's personality. Sitting in a jail cell, Norman hears his mother saying that the murders were all his doing, as Marion's car is retrieved from the swamp.