You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) pioneered many of the techniques of the thriller genre, and remains highly influential to this day. He was, for example, one of the first directors to portray psychological processes in film narrative.
However, his films were initially more popular with audiences than with critics, and it was not until the latter part of his career, largely due to directors of the French New Wave, such as Francois Truffaut, that his genius was recognized. (…)
Hitchcock once remarked that “television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.” During much of Hitchcock’s career, Freud’s ideas were dominant, and although Hitchcock was skeptical of psychoanalysis (as he was of other explanations for human behaviour), Freudian concepts and motifs recur in many of his films.
Repression is one of the Freudian concepts which recurs in Hitchcock’s films. According to Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in the turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious”. Freud believed that traumatic memories, usually of childhood events, are repressed by the conscious mind; this is a defence mechanism which keeps the ego free of conflict and tension. These memories remain hidden in the subconscious, and manifest themselves in the neuroses and psychoses of the individual, when something induces the momentary retrieval of a repressed memory, triggering a neurotic or psychotic episode. One aim of Freudian psychoanalysis is the retrieval of these repressed memories from the subconscious, in the hope that confronting them will cure the patient’s neuroses. (…)
There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
From this quote, it is clear that Hitchcock had a profound understanding of the human psyche. He knew that the imagination was far more powerful than any image he could render on the screen, and this knowledge was key to his remarkable ability to manipulate his audience. Graphic violence was rarely featured in Hitchcock’s films; the audience instead used their imagination to ‘fill the gaps’.
Take, for example, the shower scene in Psycho (1960), which remains the most famous murder scene in cinema history. The scene, which lasts 45 seconds, involved 78 camera set ups and took one week to film. Not once do we see the knife penetrate the flesh of Janet Leigh’s character, yet the scene is one of the most shocking ever filmed.
