Psycho(1960)

POOPER: (Thanks Curt, The Grand Pooop-Bah)
Norman’s (Anthony Perkins’) mother is only alive in his imagination.

Long Ending
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is in a secret relationship with divorcee Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Although the pair would like to make their relationship public, Sam lacks the money necessary to provide for them. When Marion goes to work for her real estate company, a slimy old man is there and gives them $40,000.00 in cash that he intends to use to buy his daughter a house. The boss tells Marion to take the cash to the bank, but she ends up stealing it instead. Her boss sees Marion leaving the city and soon discovers that the money is gone too. Marion hopes to get to California (where Sam lives) before she is caught so that she and Sam can start a new life together.

A late night storm forces Marion to take shelter at the empty Bates Motel. There, she has dinner with a seemingly nice young man who is the Motel’s proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). They discuss Norman’s mother who lives in the house neighboring the motel. She has grown infirm in her old age and is verbally abusive to Norman. When Marion suggests that Norman consider putting his mother in a sanitarium, he becomes angry, saying he will never abandon his mother. After returning to her room, Marion reconsiders her actions and vows to do the right thing and return home with the money. Norman secretly spies on Marion getting undressed through a hole in the wall before returning home. Later, as Marion showers, a female figure barges into the room and stabs Marion to death. The figure returns to the nearby home where Norman soon screams out “Mother, what have you done!” Norman then cleans up the murder scene, submerging Marion’s corpse and all of her belongings (including the cash that she’d hidden inside a newspaper) into a swamp on his property.

Meanwhile a private investigator named Arbogast (Martin Basalm) is hired to find Marion and the money. Arbogast tracks down Sam, who happens to have also been tracked down by Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) who is also trying to find out what happened. Sam and Lila convince Arbogast that they have no idea what happened to Marion, and Arbogast is sympathetic to their concerns. The investigator eventually tracks Marion’s trail to the Bates Motel. He eventually forces Norman to confess that Marion was there and that they interacted with each other, but Norman swears Marion left early after spending the night. Arbogast calls Sam and Lila to tell them that Marion was at the Bates Motel and that he noticed Norman’s mother’s silhouette in the window and intends to return to the motel to interrogate her. The investigator breaks into the home. As he climbs the stairs to the mother’s bedroom, the woman runs out and pushes him down the stairs. She then stabs Arbogast to death, and Norman later dumps his body in the swamp.

Concerned about Arbogast’s lack of communication, Sam and Lila go to the sheriff. The sheriff refuses to investigate, saying Norman is a good person. The sheriff also notes that Arbogast must have been lying to them because Norman’s mother died years earlier. The mom murdered her boyfriend and then died by sucicide. They eventually convince the sheriff to check out the Motel, but he finds nothing out of the ordinary.

Sam and Lila remain suspicious, so they go to the Motel themselves to investigate. Sam distracts Norman in the Motel while Lila breaks into the house. When Norman catches on to their plan, he knocks out Sam and runs to the house. Meanwhile, Lila has made her way to the basement where she sees the back of an old woman – Norman’s mother – sitting in the cellar. She turns the woman around to reveal that the body is a skeletal corpse. Lila screams before being attacked by Norman, who is dressed in his mother’s clothes and wearing a wig (revealing that he was the female figure that killed Marian and Arbogast while pretending to be his mother). Sam, who recovered, arrives just in time to incapacitate Norman and stop him from killing Lila.

Later on, Lila, Sam, and the police are addressed by a psychologist that interviewed Norman. The psychologist says that Norman has multiple personalities – one his own (nice and docile) and the other is the personality of his dead mother (murderous and full of rage). Norman’s mother abused him his entire life and they became completely co-dependent. When the mother began dating someone else, Norman killed them both and staged it as a murder/suicide. But this act itself drove Norman mad and caused him to manifest the mother’s personality. Norman dug up his mother’s body to live with it. The mother personality was particularly triggered whenever Norman became aroused, and the psychologist notes that Norman probably never realized he was really the murderer. The psychologist ends by saying the mother’s personality has taken over permanently, and that Norman’s personality is forever lost.

The movie ends as Norman talks to himself in his mother’s voice, and a freeze frame of the mother’s corpse face superimposed over Norman’s own.