Alfred Hitchcock

Career in horror

Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899 above his parents' greengrocer's shop in Leytonstone, then in Essex, and died in Los Angeles in 1980. In between he became the most recognizable director in the world, a man whose profile drawn in a few lines was a trademark and whose name was shorthand for suspense. He is usually filed under thriller rather than horror, but two of his late films, Psycho and The Birds (1963), changed what horror could look like for a mass audience.

His career has three phases: silent and early sound films in Britain, an American period under a Hollywood producer's contract and then increasing independence, and a final stretch in which he ran his own productions and television empire. Across all three he kept the same obsession, which was control over what the audience knows, when they know it and how long he can make them wait.

Signature traits

• Suspense through information: the audience is told more than the characters know, so a quiet scene can become unbearable.
• Extensive storyboarding, so that the film was largely designed before the cameras rolled.
• Ordinary places turned dangerous, such as a motel, a schoolhouse or a landmark used as a backdrop for a chase.
• The MacGuffin, a plot object that drives the characters but matters less than the tension it creates.
• Point-of-view editing that makes viewers share a character's gaze, and sometimes feel guilty for it.
• Close collaboration with composers, designers and editors who shared his precision.

Key horror titles

• Psycho (1960), the black-and-white shocker made outside the studio system
• The Birds (1963), an ecological horror film with no conventional music score
• Vertigo (1958), a psychological thriller later ranked first in a major critics poll
• Rear Window (1954) and Rope (1948), thrillers built on confinement
• The Lodger (1927), the silent film that first made his name
• Frenzy (1972), a late return to British murder stories

From Leytonstone to British stardom

Hitchcock grew up in a Roman Catholic family and attended the Jesuit school St Ignatius College from 1910. After his father died in 1914 he took a job as a technical clerk at a telegraph and cable company. In 1919 he found work designing title cards at Islington Studios, which an American company was opening in London, and he moved up through the Gainsborough studio as an assistant director from 1922. He directed his first film, the British-German silent The Pleasure Garden, in 1926.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) was his first real success, and it contains his first cameo appearance. Blackmail (1929) is usually called the first British talking picture, and it began a habit of staging climaxes on famous landmarks, in this case the dome of the British Museum. In December of 1926 he had married Alma Reville, an editor and screenwriter who worked on many of his films; the critic Charles Champlin later wrote that the Hitchcock touch had four hands, two of them hers.

The move to Hollywood

Producer David O. Selznick persuaded Hitchcock to cross the Atlantic, and in 1939 he began a seven-year contract. His first American film, Rebecca (1940), won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The statuette went to Selznick, but Hitchcock received the first of five nominations for Best Director, an honor he never turned into a win. Over the next two decades he made Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and North by Northwest.

Most of these films are thrillers rather than horror, yet their techniques fed directly into the genre. Shadow of a Doubt puts a murderous visitor inside a sunny small-town family. Rope was staged to look like a few unbroken takes. Rear Window confines its hero to one apartment and turns watching into a moral problem. Each exercise taught him how to make a viewer complicit, a skill he would use at full strength in Psycho.

Making Psycho outside the studio

Psycho began as Robert Bloch's 1959 novel, loosely inspired by the Wisconsin killer Ed Gein. Hitchcock bought the rights for a reported $9,500 and hired Joseph Stefano to write the screenplay after an earlier draft by James P. Cavanagh disappointed him. Paramount called the book too repulsive and refused his usual budget, so Hitchcock offered a deal: he would finance the picture through his company Shamley Productions, shoot at Universal with the crew of his television series, and let Paramount distribute it.

He gave up his customary $250,000 fee for a 60 percent stake in the negative. The budget was $806,947, and shooting ran from November 1959 to February 1960. Black and white saved money and, according to accounts of the production, also softened the shower scene's gore. Lead actress Janet Leigh took a reduced fee of $25,000 and Anthony Perkins received $40,000. The bargain made Hitchcock rich: Psycho became the second-highest-grossing film of its year, behind Spartacus, and the most profitable of his career.

Strings, silence and the shower

Composer Bernard Herrmann wrote a score for string orchestra only, in part because the music budget had been trimmed. The shrill, stabbing violins became one of cinema's most imitated sounds, and the choice shows how a limitation can become a signature. For more on how scores and effects carry fear, see how horror uses sound. Graphic designer Saul Bass storyboarded the shower sequence, which is built from many short cuts so that the audience feels violence it never quite sees.

Hitchcock also marketed the film like an event. He imposed a policy of no late admission, unusual at the time, and theater owners who first objected later saw lines around the block. Reviews were sharply divided and many British critics were negative, but the picture earned four Oscar nominations, for Hitchcock, for Leigh, and for black-and-white art direction and cinematography. In 1992 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. The character at its center is covered in Norman Bates.

The Birds and the end of the studio years

The Birds (1963) was loosely adapted from a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier, with a screenplay by Evan Hunter, who was told to invent new characters and a fuller plot. Tippi Hedren, signed to a seven-year contract in 1961 after Hitchcock saw her in a television commercial, made her film debut. Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette co-starred. Many exteriors were shot in Bodega Bay and Bodega, California, and while most of the birds were real, more than $200,000 went into mechanical ones.

Special effects chief Ub Iwerks supervised roughly 370 effects shots, including work with the sodium vapor process, a method for combining live action and separately filmed elements. There is no traditional score: Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann created electronic bird sounds, with Herrmann credited as sound consultant. The budget was about $3.3 million and the film earned about $11.4 million. Reviews were mixed at first and its reputation grew, and it reached the National Film Registry in 2016. Hedren has publicly alleged mistreatment during the production. It sits within the tradition of the creature feature, though it never explains its attackers.

Late career and television

From 1955 to 1965 Hitchcock hosted and produced the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which became The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962. His dry introductions made him a celebrity beyond the film audience and gave him the crew that would shoot Psycho. In 1962 the French director François Truffaut interviewed him; the resulting book, published in 1967, did as much as any review to persuade critics that he was a serious artist.

The later films were uneven. Marnie (1964) and Torn Curtain (1966) disappointed, and the latter ended his twelve-year partnership with Herrmann after Hitchcock replaced the composer's score. Topaz (1969) was shot with three alternate endings. Frenzy (1972), a return to murder in London, was his first film to include nudity. His last picture was Family Plot (1976). He died of kidney failure on April 29, 1980.

Reputation, honors and influence

Hitchcock received 46 Academy Award nominations for his films across their casts and crews, with six wins, but never an Oscar for directing. He was given the British Academy's fellowship in 1971 and the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979, and he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1980 New Year Honours, shortly before his death. In 2012 a worldwide critics poll run by the British Film Institute placed Vertigo ahead of Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made.

His influence on horror is structural. The idea that the audience should fear because it knows something the character does not, the willingness to kill off a star early, and the use of everyday places all pass through the psychological horror and the slasher. Janet Leigh's daughter Jamie Lee Curtis went on to star in Halloween and, in Halloween H20, shared a scene with her mother. John Carpenter's own suspense owes a clear debt, and the earliest era of the genre is placed in context in the timeline of horror cinema. For his place among colleagues, see John Carpenter.

Verified details

• Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, and died on April 29, 1980, in Los Angeles.
• Blackmail (1929) is usually described as the first British talking picture.
• He appeared briefly in many of his own films, beginning with The Lodger.
• The term MacGuffin, which he popularized, was coined by screenwriter Angus MacPhail and is often illustrated with The 39 Steps.
• Psycho cost $806,947 and Hitchcock took a 60 percent stake in the negative instead of his usual fee.
• Psycho opened in New York on June 16, 1960, and went wide in the United States on September 8.
• The Birds has no traditional score; its sound was created with electronic instruments.
• He hosted Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955 to 1965.
• Nine of his films had been chosen for the National Film Registry as of 2021.
• Vertigo was chosen for the registry in 1989, in its first year of selections.

Sources and further reading

• Alfred Hitchcock, Wikipedia
• Psycho (1960 film), Wikipedia
• The Birds (film), Wikipedia
• Vertigo (film), Wikipedia