If you have a sharp eye and watch enough movies and television, you may be able to spot some locations that are used over and over in films - a western town front, a homey brick residence, a haunted house. But one home is so recognizable that since its debut in the 1960 movie classic, "Psycho," it has become the symbol of evil and a parody of itself. Dramatically poised at the top of a hill, the two-story ramshackle Victorian Gothic home that belonged to Norman Bates and his mother will forever be etched in the movie-going conscience.

How did a house come to make such a significant impression on the American psyche? The movie Psycho, ushered in a new era of horror, jolting the American people with its frank look at murderous insanity. Shot in black and white, the movie was carefully planned to deliver a shock that the movie-going public had never seen before - the now infamous shower scene in which a beautiful woman is graphically and quite brutally knifed to death.

Although Hitchcock described the movie as "fun," it seemed to usher in an era of realism, putting an end to the idealized and stylized wholesomeness of the '50s.

Across the country, Americans were ready to explore the darker side of their psychologies. Sex became a natural focus. The Kinsey Report on sexuality had just been released, Masters and Johnson were at the peak of their research on the sex lives of men and women with surprising conclusions that emancipated both sexes. American was asking, "What goes on between men and women? What is natural and healthy? What is not?"

Although they wouldn't be called serial killers for another two decades, sexual killers were beginning to be taken seriously by the police. Instead of treating sexual predators as isolated nut cases, they began to catalog patterns of behavior, coming to the terrifying conclusion that repeat sexual killers were more common and more clever than ever imagined.

In fact, the Norman Bates character, was based by writer Robert Bloch on the most notorious killer of the era, Ed Gein. A seemingly harmless Wisconsin farmer who killed and dismembered women, Gein was among the first killers found to have kept "trophies" of his killings in his farmhouse. Gein was among the inspirations for another film, 1991's "Silence of the Lambs," directed by Jonathon Demme, in which another of his abnormal behaviors was showcased to a horrifying fare-the-well by one of the film's serial killers.

The adult elements of Hitchcock's Psycho - infidelity, theft, loneliness, ma dness, murder had never been combined in such a graphic manner before. For the first time, lead characters weren't painted in the black and white of good and evil. In Hitchcock's world, good people do evil things and bad things happen to good people.

A lovely young woman, besotted with a out-of-town married man of modest means, desperately steals $40,000 from her employer to finance what she hopes will be his divorce, and their new life together. She drives for a day and a night and finds herself off the main road at the Bates Motel, a deteriorating roadside motel with a few rooms overlooked by the imposing, shadowy Bates home.

The lonely but gregarious innkeeper, Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, is immediately attracted to the young woman, played by Janet Leigh, to the jealousy of his off-screen mother. All Leigh wants to do is get out of the rain, wrestle with her conscience about returning the money, and...take a shower.

Perkins, clearly under the thumb of his domineering and unreasonable mom, goes to the house on the hill and once inside, argues with her about the young woman. But the audience doesn't see the conversation take place. The house is all that is on screen, a curious stand in for the domineering mother we are never allowed to meet. The argument is accomplished in voice-overs as the movie -goer sits, longing to climb the steps and peer through the windows to see who is doing the talking. Meanwhile, Leigh, her decision to return the money made, enters the shower, turns on the water, the shower curtain is jerked back, and movie history was made.

To tell any more would spoil the story for those who are interested in seeing the homage paid to Hitchcock in the movie's 1998 remake by director Gus Van Sant. "Psycho" (1998,) will feature an all new cast, led by Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates and Anne Heche as the tragic young woman and is due for release December 15th. 1998.

The "Psycho" home still exists and is available for viewing via the Los Angeles Universal Studios' bus tour of its backlot property, which also features the harbor town built for the movie "Jaws," and numerous homes used in television and the movies.

Visitors will be surprised to learn that the house is a facade, built at a fraction of the scale of a normal residence. The home was designed to be photographed as if being viewed from a distance, as if it's character is forbidding and aloof, like Norman Bates' mother.

The movie posters of the 1960 "Psycho" focus on the strange, lonely house, with a screaming Janet Leigh faded into the background. The posters for the 1998 "Pyscho" focus instead on the shocking shower scene, so graphic that one city asked that the posters be removed from its bus routes.

That goes to show that generations do change, with one exception. Never again will a horror movie impact a nation the way "Pyscho" did, nor will a home become such a symbol for evil.