For parodies of the famous shower murder scene, see "Psycho" Shower Murder Parody.
- The title assassin in Crying Freeman waits with a dagger while the woman he's to kill is in the shower unaware. But as a courtesy, he lets her finish and shows himself after she steps out in a towel. He allows her a last request which she turns to her advantage.
- The Punisher: In one short story in Annual 1 of Volume 3, Frank Castle demonstrates some martial arts techniques to the audience (read: does Deadpan Snarker narration as he annihilates crooks). At one point, one of the goons (who is armed with a knife) charges Frank with said knife's arm held high and ready for an overhead swing. Frank calls that "pulling an Anthony Perkins", in reference to the way Norman stabbed his victim.
- Pin-Up, a Franco-Belgian Comic series, once has the main character, Dorothy, stay in a "Bates Motel", and while showering she's peeped at through a hole in the wall by the owner's son "Norman" (who's a kid). His mother catches him at it, which he's done many times, and begins punishing him for it again.
- A later chapter of this series has Dorothy working as a private detective in Hollywood and then happens to be hired by Hitchcock himself to investigate and even fill in for his latest film's missing lead actress. As the comic is set in an Alternate History, the film is titled "Schizo", and Dorothy and the missing actress are both redheads instead of blondes.
- Once in Bloom County, Opus the Penguin is in the shower and laughs at the readers being scared because of Hitchcock's film. At this moment though, lawyer Steve Dallas has to keep his clent — an elderly lady who ax-murdered her husband (Norman) — in his "temporary custody" in the same boarding house.
- Parodied in The Far Side a few times.
- One strip titled spoofs the shower scene with a hypothetical "Psycho III" in which a tank plows into a lady's bathroom.
- Another features "little Normy Bates", who "would always take a few extra minutes to yell at his 'dog'" before going out to play with his friends.
- Yet another cartoon captioned "What really happened to Elvis" shows the King staying at Bates Motel.
- Still another has a family of earthworms deciding to stay for the night at "Bait Motel".
- In "The Rogue Axolotl Anime Artist"
, Alternate Axol sneaks up on Melony with a knife while she's taking a bath. Interestingly, instead of trying to kill her, he tries convince her to join his harem of anime waifus.
- Finding Nemo: The familiar "Psycho" Strings play when Darla arrives.
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action has a scene where Kate walks in on Bugs taking a shower, causing him to go into a screaming fit (while the soundtrack indulges in "Psycho" Strings) before "fainting" and pouring chocolate syrup down the drain.Bugs: Doesn't anyone knock anymore?
- Aladdin: The Return of Jafar: At one point during Jafar's song "You're Only Second Rate" there is what looks like an old woman sitting on a rocking chair. She is facing a wall until Genie turns the chair around, showing that she has Jafar's crazed face. "Granny's gonna grab ya!" A Scare Chord is heard that reminds of the score in Hitchcock's film.
- Friday the 13th (1980) has the similar soundtrack, the woman who is set up to be the Final Girl is killed off first, and the killer reverses Norman Bates by being a mother who believes her dead son is talking through her and convincing her to kill people for having sex.
- Halloween (1978): Michael's psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis, has the same name as Marion's lover. And the scene where Laurie walks towards the house where Annie and Lynda are is filmed almost exactly as Lila's approach to the Bates home—cutting back and forth between her and the house.
- In Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, Janet Leigh makes a cameo driving the car she did in the original. If you listen carefully, you can here the theme music playing. One of Laurie's son Josh's friends also bluntly tells him "20 years from now, you'll still be living with her, running a motel somewhere", referring to how clingy and overprotective of him she is.
- Phantom of the Paradise has the Phantom use a toilet plunger to attack a man in the shower.
- High Anxiety, a pastiche of Hitchcock movies in general, features a parody of the shower scene where the stressed-out bellhop Thorndyke told to get the newspaper arrives and attacks him with said paper, his high-pitched screaming substituting for the strings."That kid gets no tip."
- Scream (1996): Billy's surname is Loomis, a reference to Sam Loomis. Billy also quotes Norman Bates when revealing his true nature.
- Tim Burton included a spoof of it in his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in a scene with the television-obsessed kid.
- Brian De Palma (it is one of his favorite movies):
- Carrie (1976): The school is renamed Bates High School and copious use is made of the "Psycho" Strings whenever the religious fanatic raised Carrie uses her powers.
- Phantom of the Paradise features a character being murdered in the shower.
- In Blow Out, the slasher film being made within the film features a knife wielding serial killer murdering a woman taking a shower.
- Dressed to Kill is a Hotter and Sexier homage to it. Marion's death scene is entirely recreated, although in an elevator and not in a shower. There's the Hitchcock blonde Dead Star Walking, who commits a "crime" (although Kate's isn't illegal, she's cheating on her husband) and then gets brutally murdered by a mysterious woman for her sexuality who actually turns out to "really" be a man with a female split personality - Bobbi is the psychiatrist's alter ego, though, not the Norman Bates character, killing off woman he is attracted to.
- In Pulp Fiction, the shot of Marcellus turning his head to see Butch in his car is identical to Marion's boss recognising her.
- In Snatch., when Mickey "wins" a new trailer van for his mother from Turkish, he specifically picks out "periwinkle blue" as the color.
- In Evil Dead 2, Professor Knowby's dead wife is said to be in the "fruit cellar."
- The Silence of the Hams: Half of this movie is parodying Psycho.
- The Suicide Squad: Because Polka-Dot Man can only bring himself to kill people if he imagines them as his abusive mother, Peacemaker mocks him by calling him "Norman Bates".
- In Naked (1993), when Johnny goes to Café Girl's apartment and she lets him use her shower, he asks if she's going to dress up as her own mother and try and stab him.
- A Boy Made of Blocks: When Alex kills a sheep with a pickaxe in Minecraft, he thinks, "It's like the shower scene from Psycho, if Janet Leigh had been a sheep made out of six white boxes."
- In Harmony (2016), the kids use cocoa powder as an ingredient for fake blood because Candy's heard that they used chocolate syrup in Psycho.
- In the gamebook House of Hell, you can choose between three pre-generated player characters, two of them which are named Norman White and Jack Bates.
- In There's More Than One Way Home, Anna remembers that with Val gone, his apartment felt like the Bates Motel.
- In Eye Contact, the kids speculate that Perry the introverted maintenance worker is the killer. One of them says, "I hear Perry lives with his mother. Like that guy in Psycho." June is surprised that not only has a fifth-grader seen the movie, he expects everyone else has too.
- Logan from Almost Perfect doesn't want to ask his mom for dating advice because it would make him feel like Norman Bates.
- Ultraseven X used a Psycho shout out as a major plot point in one episode, where the Monster of the Week is a murderous alien who writes "NORMAN" in blood at all his crime scenes, which is meant to be a cry for help from his split personality, who like Norman frames the crimes on a woman important in his life that he killed.
- After faking his death to escape prosecution for raping Lucy Cooper, Guiding Light's Brent Lawrence returned to town disguised as a woman named Marion Crane in order to befriend and begin stalking his unsuspecting victim. At one point, he even tries to kill her while she's showering (but ends up attacking a friend of hers instead). Throughout the entire storyline, he's tormented by the voice of his abusive mother—whose treatment of him is the reason he became such a misogynist—and at the storyline's conclusion, his mental breakdown is so complete that the female personality has taken over.
- Although the movie is never mentioned, the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Pique" borrows many key elements from the movie—an abusive mother, and incestuous relationship (though it's outright sexual here, whereas it may have only been emotional abuse in the film), a shy and mild-mannered guy who turns out to be a killer, and the fact that he uses a knife to represent his penis.
- When Anthony Perkins hosted Saturday Night Live, he reprised his role as Norman Bates for a sketch.
- In the Red Dwarf episode "Kryten", after the Nova 5 crew turn out to be a group of skeletons, Rimmer calls Kryten "the android version of Norman Bates".
- The Comic Strip Presents episode "Slags" has a character who is a parody of Norman Bates. The famous reveal of Mother is even parodied.
- Angel: In the second season episode "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been", Angel describes the Hyperion Hotel (which would become his headquarters the next three seasons) as having "68 rooms, 68 vacancies" in the same way Norman Bates described the Bates Motel. Also, Judy, a woman at the hotel in 1952 whom Angel tries to help has a similar backstory to Marion Crane in that she worked at a bank until she stole money from it, and a private investigator is after her (though the motives are different).
- Full House: In "The First Day of School", Uncle Jesse is about to give Michelle a bath, only to find Joey in the bathtub, dressed in a scuba diving/swimsuit getup. Uncle Jesse describes this experience as "the most terrifying shower scene since Psycho."
- The "Halloween Knight" episode of Knight Rider had Bonnie witnessing a murder from her apartment window. She and Michael spend the episode trying to prove that it happened in the first place (and that she wasn't hallucinating) and escape the killer, who's alternating between trying to make her think she's going crazy and trying to kill her before she catches him. Throughout the episode, the score from Psycho is heard, at one point, Michael and Bonnie are lured to a house that's clearly a replica of the Bates house—the two lampshade this by commenting on how familiar the place looks—and there's even a Red Herring character named. . .Norman Baines.
Music
- Busta Rhymes sampled the opening theme for "Gimme Some More".
- In episode 112 of Were You Raised by Wolves?, one of the listeners asks whether it's rude to tell her sister that her boyfriend reminds her of the serial killer in the movie played by Christian Bale. The answer is surprisingly that if her sister would get the joke then yes it's not rude to say this, unless she's in actual danger of being murdered, but then this isn't an etiquette question at that point.
- Hunter: The Vigil: Norman Bates is cited as an influence of the Psycho Undertaking of Scourges, representing "the overly chatty madman killer".
- The Survival Horror video game, Silent Hill, appropriately enough have a location named Norman's Motel.
- Final Fantasy VII: According to "The Distance: Making of Featurette", Nobuo Uematsu got the inspiration for Sephiroth's Leitmotif, "One-Winged Angel" from this film's theme alongside Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring".
- Super-Villain-Bowl! has a montage of various horror film villains killing each other in turn, one which is Norman Bates (he's even rendered in Deliberately Monochrome!).
- American Dad!: In "A Smith in the Hand", Stan secretly masturbates at the 'Bates Motel (note the apostrophe).
- Dexter's Laboratory: The ending to the episode "Pslightly Psycho" features Mom sneaking up on Dad in the shower Psycho-style to scrub his back.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show: The episode "Haunted House" has a scene where the ghost tries to kill Stimpy in the shower, the colors being muted for this occasion.
- Robot Chicken:
- "Especially the Animal Keith Crofford!" shows a Parody Commercial for Earl McGarry, the "horror handy man" who naively repairs cinematic serial killers' plumbing, which begins with Norman Bates asking Earl to unclog Marion's blood from the shower drain.
- "Spike Fraser in: Should I Happen to Back Into a Horse" ends with Bitch Pudding checking into the Bates Motel, and tormenting Norman by posing as his resurrected mother.
- One episode of Rocko's Modern Life had Rocko and Heffer looking for a motel to stay for the night. One of the places they declined had an expy of Norman Bates who "bragged" about the happenings at his motel before putting on a dress and happily crying out, "Coming, Mother!"
- The second segment of the Shrek Halloween Special Scared Shrekless, titled "Boots Motel", is a parody of this film.
- The Simpsons:
- The scene of Maggie hitting Homer on the head with a mallet in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" is based on the shower scene, complete with red paint going down the garage's drainpipe.
- A scene from "Brother from the Same Planet" has Skinner "speaking" to his mother while looking upon a creepy house looking much like the Bates Motel.
- "Cape Feare" has a scene where Sideshow Bob composes a list of methods to kill Bart while staying at the Bates Motel.
- The pop culture-heavy episode "Black Widower" features a nearly perfect replay of the scene in which Lila Crane discovers Norma Bates' corpse after Bart foils Sideshow Bob's plot to kill Selma. From the moment when Bart turns around in the chair, mimicking the discovery, to when Selma enters the room, poking fun at Sam Loomis entering the room.
- Tiny Toon Adventures: The episode "The Wheel o' Comedy" has a scene where Elmyra sneaks up on Dizzy in the shower to give him a scrubbing.
- The fittingly named episode "Psychoklahoma" of The Brak Show features the cast putting on a musical (kind of) based on the film to save the host of Brak's favorite TV show from freezing to death. Naturally Norman Bates is played by Zorak and it is glorious.
- Scooby-Doo! & Batman: The Brave and the Bold sees Scooby and Shaggy head off into Arkham's cafeteria and see a food item named "Bates Burgers", complete with knives looking similar to Norman's.
