'Psycho': Inciting Incident and Major Plot Points

The structure of Hitchcock’s suspenseful 1960 horror film Psycho contains the use of an inciting incident and two major plot points for the artful organization of the film’s events.

At the start of the film, the inciting incident can be categorized as both situational and action-based as the viewer is shown the troubling plight of two lovers kept apart by their responsibilities to their jobs and families. The situational aspect of the inciting incident is instantly established during the couple’s (i.e., Marion Crane and Sam Loomis) tryst in the film’s opening scene.

Both characters are in conflict between their financial and social duties and their desire to be together in a respectable, non-secretive manner. Later on in the film, the viewer follows Marion, who works at a bank, and her encounter with a large, unguarded sum of money. The action-based quality of the inciting incident begins when Marion, deviating from legal conduct, decides to steal the money and, as the film suggests in a later scene, return to her lover. This dual-natured inciting incident lasts until Marion arrives at Bate’s Motel, about twenty minutes into the film when the plot takes a most unexpected turn.

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The first major plot point of the film occurs when Marion is brutally murdered in her motel room shower by a mysterious figure. This action propels the viewer into the second act of the film with many intriguing questions and a concern over the direction of the story since the main protagonist has now been killed.

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After various attempts by the new protagonists of the story to uncover the mystery behind the recent disappearances around the residence of Norman Bates and his motel, the second major plot point occurs when Norman Bates is dramatically stopped from carrying out his third murder in the film. Simultaneously, a bizarre revelation is made regarding Norman and his mother that leads to the closing act in which the strange, unlikely nature of Norman’s psychosis is revealed.

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The inciting incident and two major plot points serve an important part in the structure of Hitchcock’s suspense-heavy Psycho. The inciting incident propels the viewer’s interest in the story by providing an engaging situation of conflict and an audacious, exciting action taken by the protagonist. The subsequent major plot points in the film serve to initiate a major mystery and then resolve it in an organized way that leaves no questions unanswered regarding the cause of the unsettling, mysterious events in the body of the film.