The Master Of Suspense In Alfred Hitchcock's Film

Alfred Hitchcock, the film director commonly identified as “The Master of Suspense”, was once quoted as saying, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it”(“Alfred Hitchcock”). The name Hitchcock has continued to evoke a feeling of expectation for the macabre, as both his personality together with his films, played upon audience’s nerves. Hitchcock created narratives that had audiences waiting at the edge of their seats awaiting the crashing cymbals to hide an assassination during a concert in both the 1934 and 1956 films, The Man Who Knew Too Much, or bite their nails as the audience followed a child carrying a bomb through the city in the 1936 film Sabotage. Hitchcock’s legacy has remained powerfully tied to his life-long

The reserve Hitchcock maintained in his films made audiences invest more in the emotional core of a piece, and less on the increasing amounts of violence in the wave of gangster and western films that continued to come out alongside his own films. Known for his deterrence of violence, not only in his films, but also by his perceived character, is supported by instances such as a statement Hitchcock once made at a press conference on his final film Family Plot in 1976, that stated “I’ve never been a believer in violence, for example, when I made the film Psycho, I deliberately made it black and white to avoid showing blood running down the bathtub. I’ve never been one for violence unless the story called for it” (Schickel). Hitchcock’s films maintain their allure not because they display buckets of fake blood modern day films seem to rely on to entertain audience, but the suspense of films that revealed Hitchcock’s style to tell stories like Rebecca that exhibited little violence, but kept audiences considering the twists and turns of the story by not showing the grisly death of the character Rebecca, and in that choice Hitchcock attempted reach adult audiences through the craftiness of suspense, and mystery to the very