Another icon of the silver screen has taken her final bow. This time, it’s Janet Leigh, a fine actress who will forever be remembered for a single scene in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-remembered films, Psycho. Leigh died on Sunday after a year-long illness, age 77.

Sadly, I don’t think it’s possible for a modern audience to fully appreciate Psycho, especially the renowned shower scene, because of everything that happened after that movie’s release. By becoming the mother (obvious joke) of the slasher cycle that followed in the late 1970s and ’80s, Psycho is, in a sense, a victim of its own influence on its descendents. With each entry in the Halloween and Friday the 13th series — not to mention all the lesser shockers such as Prom Night, Child’s Play, and Psycho‘s own inferior sequels — audiences became a little more jaded, a little more inured to the idea of knife-wielding maniacs carving up helpless women. In other words, Norman Bates became Old School. As far as I’m concerned, the slasher genre is over, finally driven into its grave by the self-consciousness of the Scream movies and the loopy comedy ripoff Scary Movie. It’s just not possible to shock or frighten the average moviegoer with this particular motif anymore, because it’s been done so much; the best you can hope for is to startle an audience or gross them out, neither of which Psycho can manage to do in a modern context. By modern gore standards, the film is downright tame, and the shocks are difficult to come by because the film seems so familiar, even to people who haven’t seen it before. Like Star Wars, its story has become such a part of our cultural tapestry that everyone has a pretty good idea of what Psycho is about before they ever push “Play.” And that’s too bad, because it’s an amazing movie when taken on its own terms.

It begins in the usual film noir territory, with Janet Leigh as a good girl pulled into a bad situation. (A film historian could argue that the movie is anything but usual in its for-the-time frank depiction of Leigh having a lunch-time affair with a man who isn’t her husband, but I maintain that old movies were a lot sexier than is commonly acknowledged, especially the noir stuff.) Around the 40-minute mark, however, we experience that infamous, ground-breaking shower scene and Psycho suddenly becomes something quite different, something that was, in 1961, the year of the film’s original release, entirely new and unexpected. And, for audiences of that time, it was absolutely terrifying. Never before had a murder been so graphically depicted on-screen. Remember that in ’61, the convention was to have people who’d just been shot clutch at their curiously unbloody shirts and fall over like a freshly cut tree. This was also a time when women were very rarely killed in the movies at all — most cinematic murder victims were male.

But in Psycho, Hitchcock pushed the boundaries of his time and showed audiences something new and very unnerving: a naked woman, caught off-guard in the most vulnerable position imaginable — literally with her back against a wall and nothing with which to defend herself or even cover her nakedness — attacked by a knife-wielding lunatic.

What’s brilliant about the shower scene, however, isn’t what it depicts, but how it does it. If you break the scene down frame-by-frame, you’ll realize that you never really see what you think you see. The knife never touches Janet Leigh’s body. We never see wounds or blood, aside from that little trickle down the drain at the end of the sequence. (Trivia note: that “blood” was actually Hershey’s chocolate syrup.) It’s all accomplished through editing and the viewer’s own imagination. (The first Halloween film, made nearly twenty years later and starring Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, works in much the same way; you don’t really see much blood or violence, but everyone who sees the film believes that they do.)

Even more interesting is how Hitchcock has lured the audience, through point-of-view shots and other tricks, into identifying ourselves with Leigh. When that shower curtain gets ripped back, we’re not just voyeurs passively watching a pretty woman meet her end (which is how most of the successive slasher films functioned). It’s us in that shower. The scene shocks because we can imagine ourselves in the same position. We feel the surprise of being suddenly disturbed in the midst of a normally intimate activity, the shame of being seen uncovered, the terror of a faceless something coming at us again and again, and the final, pathetic moments as life drains away one slow, shuddering heartbeat at a time. And it’s awful to feel those things. As it should be. (I have little patience for those who condemn Hitchcock as a misogynist because of this scene, or, more logically, the slasher films that followed it. Such nonsensical charge just tell me that they haven’t really been watching the movie, or else they don’t have as much empathy as they think they do.)

The thing that really sells the shower scene — for me anyway — is Leigh’s final, unblinking stare. Hitchcock held the camera close on her eye for an uncomfortably long time, long enough that the viewer knows she should have blinked… and yet she didn’t. We’ve seen a lot of corpses on the movie screen in the years since, but rarely have they been so effective, so creepy. The unblinking eye makes me shudder every time.

It’s a strange thing to be remembered for, perhaps, getting carved up in a shower. But when you consider that Psycho singlehandedly invented an entire genre of filmmaking and remains one of the most imitated, parodied, referenced, and beloved movies of all time, well, that’s not such a bad thing to have on the resume’, is it? Janet Leigh, you will be remembered…

UPDATE: Here is a nice rememberance of Janet Leigh by Roger Ebert, the only mainstream film critic who actually seems to know anything about movies.