The next time you watch the beginning of Psycho, as the camera slowly moves from a distant view of the cityscape of Phoenix into a close-up of the hotel room window, consider another even more famous film opening the dazzling crane and dolly shot that encompasses the first three minutes of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, made in 1958, just two years before Psycho. That shot, which travels several hundred yards across much of a town as we wait for the ticking bomb to explode, is so audacious that even today films like The Player explicitly refer to it.
 
Bron: brightlightsfilm.com

The Southwestern locales of the two films are another similarity, particularly the isolated, deserted motel settings. Dingy motels were, of course, common settings in the film noirs that were the main inspiration for the films’ look. But the motels create an especially powerful atmosphere of dread and alienation in these two films, perhaps because they seem to exist in a dreamscape, disconnected from the rest of the “normal” world. The use of the sordid motel as an instrument of psychological torture and an emblem of decay in Touch of Evil may have inspired Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel that Psycho is based on, to use a motel to capture an American environment suitable as a breeding ground for psychosis and random violence. His novel, based on the notorious 1957 case of Ed Gein, a reclusive Wisconsin farmer and mass murderer, was published in 1959, a year after Touch of Evil was released.
 
Bron: brightlightsfilm.com