I saw Psycho on a a bright Sunday afternoon, when I was 10 years old, at the Kingsway Theatre—Kings Highway and Coney Island Avenue—in Brooklyn, with my best friends Mitchell Siegel and David Pollock. During the justly famous shower sequence we gasped, we screamed, we squirmed in our seats. And after the movie was over we assured each other, with nervous laughter, that we weren’t that scared. But we were that scared. In fact, we were frightened out of our little yeshiva minds. And that night, when I took my shower before going to bed, I firmly locked the bathroom door, and took the fastest shower of my life. Because the world had changed. A little black-and-white movie had forever altered my consciousness about the power of stories—and the dark corners of human nature.
