Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho reputation, including "Rope", "Rear Window", "To Catch a Thief", "The Man Who Knew Too Much", and "North by Northwest". The project, which Hitchcock tackled in part to compete with financially successful, low-budget, youth-oriented horror movies, went on to astound many by becoming a cultural watershed, an international box-office success, a film classic, and a forerunner of the violent, disorienting films and real-events of the turbulent 1960s and '70s. "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" was initially distributed in hardcover print by W.W. Norton for Dembner Books on April 15, 1990 in the United States. A trade paperback edition was
Alfred Hitchcock for the CIA. During its opening two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056 (), setting a record in that theatre's non-holiday gross. "Time" magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining". "Psycho" (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film. Based on Robert Bloch's novel "Psycho" (1959), which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a constrained budget of $800,000 () and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, and the