“Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.” Alfred Hitchcock
There’s a large maple tree in the centre of the circle I live on, and from time to time an unusual number of crows will gather on it early in the morning and caw ominously. It’s not predictable, or logical in any sense of the word – except perhaps in the birds’ minds. I should record it and sell it to Hollywood for a great sound effect.
Nothing happens. Eventually the crows reach some conclusion that makes sense to them and flap away. But in the great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s mind, what would happen if they didn’t go away? What if they were pissed off at humans for some reason and decided to swoop down and attack, violently, mercilessly?
Hitchcock answered that very question in 1963 in one of his most intense and terrifying movies, The Birds. I’ve loved his movies since I first began watching them, and since tomorrow is Alfred Hitchcock Day, I thought it would be fun to look at how The Master of Suspense perfected his craft.
Alfred Hitchcock was born in East London, England in 1899. He originally wanted to be an engineer, but after his father died at a relatively young age, Alfred took a job as a technical clerk at a telegraph and cable company. After World War I, he began writing stories, and worked on ad campaigns for the telegraph company. He also developed a keen interest in movies. When Famous Players–Lasky opened a film studio in London, he created drawings for the title cards, sent them to the studio, and was hired on as a title-card designer.
The British workers at the studio were encouraged to try their hand at various aspects of the industry, and Hitchcock worked as a co-writer, art director and production manager on at least 18 silent films. He took his first stab at directing with the 1925 film The Pleasure Garden, but it was his subsequent movie, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, in which a woman suspects that her new lodger is the madman killing women in London, that introduced a couple of his signature elements: an innocent man on the run, and making a cameo appearance in the film. It was a commercial success, and in 1940 Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. The rest is history, as he produced a great body of unforgettable mysteries, thrillers and horror films.
Hitchcock’s trademark was the ability to create almost unbearable suspense as audiences became voyeurs through each movie’s surprisingly intimate window into the lives of the troubled characters.
There were a number of early influences that gave him a deep appreciation of what scared people or made them uneasy. He remembered as a child waking up at night to find himself alone in a dark house. It shook him badly. When he was five, for some reason his father sent his generally well-behaved son to the local police station with a note that prompted the officer to lock him in a cell briefly, saying, “This is what we do to naughty boys”; it induced a lifelong phobia of law enforcement.
Later, he was sent to a Jesuit grammar school where discipline came via a flat, hard strap on the palm. Since punishment was always administered at the end of the day, the boys had to sit in dread all day through their classes.
These experiences created in him a fondness for scaring the hell out of his audience. He wanted that sense of control, maybe as a reaction to the lack of it in his formative years. It was said that while other directors typically fixated on the ‘art’ of film-making, Hitchcock thrived on manipulation.
How did he do it so well?
Hitchcock understood that that there are common fears and desires we all share. He turned fear into a reward. He let his viewers make assumptions about the characters, then turned those on their heads so that the audience became disoriented and unsettled, completely unsure of what was going to happen next.
In the movie Psycho, his most famous film, the movie begins with the top-billed star, Janet Leigh, stealing money and running away to join her lover. The audience assumes that the crime and its consequences will be the main story.
(spoiler alert!)
Then the main character stops in a seedy hotel and gets murdered. The killer, Norman, who runs the hotel, becomes the new protagonist, even generating sympathy because of his crazy and cruel mother. The audience has no reason to believe that she’s no longer alive, until in a mind-bending twist it becomes clear that Norman has lost his grip on reality and keeps her shrivelled corpse around to ‘talk’ to.
To achieve the complete immersion of his audiences into the lives of the characters on the big screen, Hitchcock used little dialogue, preferring to show his characters’ reactions to the horrible things they’re going through with their eyes, hands and even feet. He adopted a technique introduced by Russian Film-maker Lev Kuleshov, which used three distinct shots: a Close – up, followed by a Point of View, then the character’s Reaction. He loved to use montages – sequential clips spliced together. In The Birds, e.g., there’s a powerful scene as Tippi Hedren is trapped in an all-glass phone booth being bombarded by angry birds, and her reactions show her sheer terror.
Hitchcock believed suspense was created when the audience knew something the character didn’t. A scene would play out as if there was nothing wrong, but with reminders to the viewers that danger was looming.
The movie The Birds begins in San Francisco with a fairly unassuming ‘meet-cute’. Rod Taylor is an attractive, manly visitor who runs into cool, blond, somewhat notorious socialite Tippi Hedren in a pet store, wanting to buy a pair of love-birds for his sister’s birthday. He knows who she is, but pretends that he thinks she’s one of the staff, and she plays along. Eventually the truth comes out, and he leaves without making a purchase, but she decides to buy the birds and pursue him down the coast to the charming town of Bodega Bay, where he’s gone to visit his sister and string-clinging mother.
Hedren rents a boat to drop off the birds, but is attacked by a gull as she approaches the wharf. Taylor treats her wound, and invites her for dinner. Harmless enough, as we watch the growing romance between Hedren and Taylor, the suppressed jealousy of his ex-lover, who’s putting his new girlfriend up at her own home, and the disdain of his mother for the sophisticated newcomer who might steal her beloved son away from her.
But things begin to get strange. The mother’s hens start refusing to eat. A gull bombs a front door and dies. Birds attack the sister’s outdoor birthday party the next day. The bird attacks become increasing violent, and there’s a mesmerizing and unnerving scene where Hedren offers to pick up the sister at school and sits outside, unaware of the mass of crows gathering silently behind her. We the viewers know what’s coming but feel utter helplessness to prevent it. We have no idea more idea than the characters as to why this is all happening, why nature has gone berserk, and we struggle right along with them to make some sense of it.
If you haven’t yet seen the movie, I won’t spoil the rest for you, but the review by Rotten Tomatoes says it all: “Proving once again that build-up is the key to suspense, Alfred Hitchcock successfully turned birds into some of the most terrifying villains in horror history.” The movie’s bird-attack sequences earned it a nomination for Best Special Effects.
Hitchcock’s style was honed during the days of the strict censorship known as the Hays Code. He learned to tell his stories of obsession, sexual frustration and murder using innuendo and subtext, powerful tools that brought his audiences’ imaginations into play.
“I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen.” Alfred Hitchcock
In a 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock was asked: “You never watch your films with an audience. Don’t you miss hearing them scream?” His reply was, “No. I can hear them when I’m making the picture.”
I feel the same way when I’m writing something creepy – or funny, or sad. The reactions of my readers are in my head throughout. As my trilogy wraps up, it features some really intense moments, and I hope that I approach Hitchcock’s mastery in even a small way at gauging my audience’s response to it all.