How Psycho’s terrifying music changed film forever

Particularly key is the knives-edge music that plays when blonde bombshell Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), not long after checking in to the Bates Motel, is attacked through a shower curtain by a shadowy killer, who later turns out to be the motel’s owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), dressed up as his dead mother. “That music is everything,” says Rachel Zeffira, a film composer and one half of art-folk duo Cat’s Eyes. “It’s the birds, it’s the bees, and it’s the voices in the back of your head.”