The Hitchcock Murders

by PeterConrad (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.25

  Alfred Hitchcock remains the most famous of film-makers. Why was he so successful in enticing us to share his fears and desires? Cultural critic Peter Conrad can date the start of his Hitchcock obsession to his first boyhood viewing of Hitchcock's Psycho, one afternoon in Tasmania some forty years ago. The master's grip upon his imagination has never slackened since. Now, Conrad explains how Hitchcock's mastery of the mechanical art enabled him to unnerve us, shock us, in ways that no artist had previously managed. He shows how Hitchcock made the ordinary world seem fantastically fraught, and how his recurrent themes tapped our common fantasies. Thus Conrad proposes Hitchcock as 'the greatest of the twentieth century's surrealists, wickedly expert at erasing the border between actuality and our haunted, licentious dreams'.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.25

  Alfred Hitchcock relished his power to frighten us and believed the shocks he administered improved our psychological health. But he could never satisfactorily explain our curiosity to see forbidden things or the perverse desire to experience anxiety and dread that made his work so popular.
  In The Hitchcock Murders, Peter Conrad, one of Hitchcock's eager victims, undertakes the task on the master's behalf. At the age of thirteen, Conrad snuck into his first screening of Psycho, and he's been wary of showers and fruit cellars ever since. Thanks to Hitchcock, he's also suspicious of staircases, seagulls, and crop-dusting planes. Now he sets out to analyze the nature of Hitchcock's appeal to both himself and the millions of moviegoers for whom Hitchcock is cinema's foremost auteur. Examining Hitchcock's use of religion, morality, conscience, culpability, and literary symbols, Conrad unveils a chilling Nietzschean universe-one in which there is no God and no moral standard, where humans are petty and disposable and the neutral hand of fate can take a life in the blink of an eye. A timid, respectable man with the imagination of a psychopath, a chubby jester whose practical jokes took merciless advantage of human insecurities, Hitchcock is revealed here as the man who knew too much-about all of us.