This shower scene in Hitchcocks’s Psycho is one of the best-known murder scenes in all of cinema. It was filmed over 6 days in December 1959 using 77 different camera angles. The finished scene is three minutes long and includes 50 straight edits. Most of the shots are extreme close-ups, except for medium shots in the shower directly before and directly after the murder. The combination of the close shots with their short duration makes the sequence feel more subjective than it would have been if the images were presented alone or in a wider angle, an example of the technique Hitchcock described as “transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience”.
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