Marion's white 1957 Ford sedan is the same car (owned by Universal) that the Cleaver family drove on Leave It to Beaver.
Norman Bates is ranked the second greatest villain on AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains.
On February 8, 1960, exactly one week after he finished "Psycho," Alfred Hitchcock directed an episode of TV's Startime ("Incident at a Corner", #1.27), that also featured Vera Miles and much of the same crew that worked on "Psycho".
On the Interstate 99 that eventually turns into Pacific Ave. near the Fife/Tacoma boarder in Washington State, there are several older hotels up along the strip. One of the former owners of one of the hotels is a horror movie buff and puts on costume parties in his retirement. Being a fan of the horror movies, he renamed the motel, Bates Motel.
One of the reasons Alfred Hitchcock shot the movie in black and white was he thought it would be too gory in color. But the main reason was that he wanted to make the film as inexpensively as possible (under $1 million). He also wondered if so many bad, inexpensively made, b/w "B" movies did so well at the box office, what would happen if a really good, inexpensively made, b/w movie was made.
Parts of the house were built by cannibalizing several stock-unit sections including a tower from the house in Harvey. The house was the most expensive set of the picture but came to a mere US$15,000.
Ranked #1 on the AFI 100 Years... 100 Thrills film series.
Ranked #14 on the AFI 100 Years... 100 Movies 10th Anniversary Edition, up 4 places from #18 in 1997.
The Bates house was largely modeled on an oil painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The canvas is called "House by the Railroad" and was painted in 1925 by American iconic artist Edward Hopper. The architectural details, viewpoint and austere sky is almost identical as seen in the film.
The blood was Bosco chocolate syrup.
The car dealership in the movie was actually Harry Maher's used car lot near Universal Studios. Since Ford Motor company was a sponsor of Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show the car lot's usual inventory was displaced in favor of shiny Edsels, Fairlanes and Mercury models from Ford.
The film only cost US$800,000 to make and has earned more than US$40 million. Alfred Hitchcock used the crew from his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents to save time and money. In 1962 he exchanged the rights to the film and his TV series for a huge block of MCA's stock, becoming its third-largest stockholder).
The first scene to be shot was of Marion getting pulled over by the cop. This was filmed on Golden State Freeway (number 99).
The first U.S. TV station to show "Psycho" was WABC-TV (Channel 7) in New York, on their late-night movie series "The Best of Broadway" on 24 June 1967.
The last shot of Norman Bates's face has a still frame of a human skull superimposed on it, almost subliminally. The skull is that of Mother.
The license plate on Marion's first car is ANL-709. The license plate on Marion's second car is NFB-418. The latter could be a Québec reference. NFB stands for National Film Board of Canada, the famous office in which Norman McLaren, Claude Jutra, Michel Brault and many others worked, and 418 is the regional phone code for the region of Québec city. Although the real regional code of the NFB is 514 and not 418, this could have been mistaken by Hitchcock, as he shot I Confess in Québec years earlier in the effective 418 area.
The movie in large part was made because Alfred Hitchcock was fed up with the big-budget, star-studded movies he had recently been making and wanted to experiment with the more efficient, sparser style of television filmmaking. Indeed, he ultimately used a crew consisting mostly of TV veterans and hired actors less well known than those he usually used.
The movie's line "A boy's best friend is his mother." was voted as the #56 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).
The MPAA objected to the use of the term "transvestite" to describe Norman Bates in the final wrap-up. They insisted it be removed until Joseph Stefano proved to them it was a clinical psychology term. They thought he was trying to get one over on them and place a vulgarity in the picture.