Sometimes, when you finally watch some great, important, landmark film for the very first time, the experience of actually sitting down to absorb it doesn’t quite live up to all the hype. Maybe you can appreciate its place in cinema history or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually all that entertaining (I kind of felt this way about Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights). With the disadvantage of time and the advancement of modern pacing and filmmaking techniques, some classics just don’t hold up.

Especially for a first-time viewer, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror masterpiece is still wildly entertaining and keeps you on your toes throughout the entire picture, which is why, if you’ve never seen it before, it's worth finally watching while it's on Netflix.

Psycho begins with a Phoenix woman named Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is in love with a deeply indebted man from Fairvale, California, named Sam Loomis (John Gavin). She has only brief encounters with him while he’s on his business trips to Phoenix, despite them both yearning for more. As long as Sam has so many money problems, he won’t marry her.

Working at a real estate office, Marion sees an opportunity when a rich man comes in and pays for a house in cash ($40,000, representing one of the few things about the movie that does age poorly thanks to inflation). Marion has been instructed by her boss to bring the cash to the bank, but she pockets it and goes on the run, determined to pay off Sam’s debts and live happily ever after with him.

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