Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense Theory and Practice

Chapter Author(s): Richard Allen

Book Title: Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

Book Subtitle: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson
Book Editor(s): Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey
Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2003)
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Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense

Theory and Practice

Richard Allen

Suspense is a paradigmatic instance of the manner in which a spectator’s emo-

tional responses to narrative can be manipulated, and Hitchcock’s skill as a
film director has long been identified with his mastery of suspense. Narrative
suspense develops out of a basic and pervasive feature of storytelling – the
manner in which stories sustain our interest by encouraging us to anticipate
what happens next. However, narrative suspense is more than simply a ques-
tion of anticipating what happens next; it involves the generation of a state of
anxious uncertainty about what happens next. How is this anxious uncer-
tainty engendered? Noël Carroll argues that this state of anxious uncertainty is
created in a narrative where the question ‘what happens next?’ is dramatized
through the representation of two alternate narrative outcomes of a specific
kind. One is a moral outcome and hence, conventionally speaking, desirable,
yet it is unlikely. The other is an immoral outcome that is conventionally unde-
sirable, yet it is likely to happen.1 For example, in D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely
Villa (1909), villains pin down the heroine in her isolated house. Will the ab-
sent hero rescue her before they overpower her? It seems unlikely. On the one
hand, the villains are nearby and she seems defenseless; on the other, the hero
is a long way off and does not know what is going on. How is the hero going to
get back in time to rescue the heroine? Carroll puts forward his theory of sus-
pense in explicit contrast to the theory offered by Roland Barthes and, in a
slightly different form, by François Truffaut in his interview with Hitchcock.
Both Barthes and Truffaut argue that suspense is essentially generated
through the fact that we do not know the nature of the narrative outcome
whose resolution is deferred or delayed, and it is this ‘suspension’ of the narra-
tive outcome that causes suspense. In this paper, I shall argue through an in-
vestigation of Hitchcock’s theory and practice of suspense that Carroll’s the-
ory of suspense requires a two-fold qualification. Hitchcock’s practice not only
calls into question the moral underpinnings of Carroll’s definition of suspense,
as Carroll himself recognizes, but also Hitchcock’s theory and practice of sus-
pense require us to reconsider the theory of suspense as narrative deferral or
delay that is rejected by him. Furthermore, by investigating Hitchcock’s prac-

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164 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

tice in the light of the theory of suspense, I hope to derive a clearer understand-
ing of the nature of Hitchcock’s achievement as the ‘master of suspense.’

The Moral Structure of Suspense

It is a critical commonplace about Hitchcock’s work that he works almost

wholly within the genre of the thriller, a narrative idiom that usually involves,
amongst other things, the articulation of clear-cut moral co-ordinates that dis-
criminate the good guys from the bad through the commission of a criminal
action that usually involves murder. Suspense in Hitchcock’s works is broadly
structured around these moral co-ordinates and the allegiance they give rise to
in the spectator. In The 39 Steps (1935) Hannay is framed for a killing he did
not commit. Will he be wrongfully arrested or escape? In Notorious (1946)
Alicia Huberman is sent on a dangerous mission to penetrate a murderous
German spy ring that is working on a nuclear bomb in Rio. Will the spy she
marries in order to further the allied cause – Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) –
find out that she is trying to expose him, and what will he do? In Strangers
on a Train (1951) Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is caught up in a diabolical
plot in which the villain, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), kills his wife and
threatens to frame him for the murder unless Guy kills Bruno’s father. Will
Guy fall victim to Bruno’s web of blackmail or will he escape his snare?
Furthermore, in Hitchcock’s work, the suspense generated around the plot
involving the conflict between the hero (or heroine) and the villain or villains
is linked to the suspense generated by the romance plot. Hitchcock himself in-
sisted that suspense is as much a feature of the romance as it is of the pure
thriller, although, as Knight and McKnight point out, the emotional emphasis
of romantic suspense is different.2 In a thriller our concern lies with the threat
posed by the agents of evil and fear for the hero’s safety, whereas the emotional
emphasis of romantic comedy lies in our wish for a happy outcome and the
way in which that wish is frustrated by obstacles placed in the way of the ro-
mance. By combining the elements of the thriller and the romance in his
‘wrong-man’ and, sometimes, ‘wrong-woman’ narratives of the 1930s and af-
ter, Hitchcock augments the parameters of suspense, as they are outlined by
Carroll, and intensifies our emotional investment in the narrative outcome.
For the romance narrative adds to the anticipation of a fearful outcome that is
characteristic of the thriller or the horror film an intensification of the wish for
a happy ending that characterizes the romance narrative. The obstacles placed
in the way of the hero in a ‘wrong man’ narrative such as The 39 Steps – he is
wanted for murder – are precisely the obstacles that need to be overcome for

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 165

the romance to be cemented. For example, in Strangers on a Train, the

‘wrong man’ Guy must clear his name in the murder of his wife in order for his
romance with Ann Morton (Ruth Roman) to flourish. Notorious is a ‘wrong
woman’ narrative that focuses upon the notoriety and hence apparent
untrustworthiness of the woman who is required to prove herself to the man.
By risking her life as a double agent, Alicia atones for her past in order to win
the love of Devlin (Cary Grant).
However, while Hitchcock’s works invoke clear-cut moral co-ordinates,
those co-ordinates are also systematically undercut in a number of ways. The
‘obstacles’ that delay the realization of the romance often, paradoxically, in-
volve something that is desired by the hero or heroine or their would-be part-
ner. In a wrong man narrative such as The 39 Steps or To Catch a Thief
(1955), the hero is rendered desirable to the heroine on account of the fact that
he occupies a position outside the law. In Strangers on a Train, the murder
of his wife is something that Guy explicitly wishes for since she refuses him a
divorce and hence blocks his path to marriage. In Notorious, clearly part of
what attracts Devlin to Alica Huberman is her ‘notoriety’ even though it is a
source of resentment to him. Even where the ‘wrong man’ character threatens
the innocent heroine, she admires him, as in The Lodger (1926), Suspicion
(1941), or Shadow of a Doubt (1943). More generally, where a character is per-
ceived as a source of threat they are also rendered alluring or desirable because
they are endowed with the sympathetic traits of the dandy: flamboyance,
grace, charm, intelligence, wit, and gregariousness – traits that often contrast
positively with the dull, flat characters of Hitchcock’s nominal heroes who are
often policemen. Compare the Lodger (Ivor Novello) with Joe (Malcolm Keen)
in The Lodger, or Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) with Jack Graham (MacDon-
ald Cary) in Shadow of a Doubt, or Bruno Anthony with Guy Haines in
Strangers on a Train.
The moral inversion that renders villainy alluring in Hitchcock is further
sustained through systematic strategies of visual and narrative parallelism
and doubling between hero and villain that undercuts the ostensible moral op-
position between hero and villain in a manner that may upset our allegiance to
the romance itself as a desirable narrative outcome. What is wished for may be
feared, and what is feared may be desired. In Notorious the anti-hero, Alex
(Claude Rains) has many desirable qualities that the nominal hero, Devlin,
lacks. He is attentive, generous, and kind to Alicia, until he finally realizes that
she is a double agent and intends to kill her, and he has an endearingly vulner-
able, feminine quality that is registered in his tremulous facial muscles. The
‘perverse’ marriage he makes with Alicia is in some ways more wholesome
than the romance. Furthermore, his colleague, Dr Anderson (Reinhold
Schunzel), portrays qualities of concern with her welfare conspicuously lack-

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166 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

ing in the cold, affectless CIA operatives. At the conclusion of the film, along-
side the structure of suspense that engages our wish for Alicia and Devlin to
escape exists the knowledge this very wish will lead to the demise of Alex.
This knowledge complicates the suspense situation so that the situation itself
rather than the narrative outcome becomes the object of fascination. The rea-
son we are prepared for Alex to be ‘sacrificed’ is that he is plotting with his
Lady Macbeth-like mother to murder Alicia. Yet we also know that he finds
himself in this situation in the first place only because he has been manipu-
lated into marriage by another woman who is stronger than he is.
It is in the context of such pervasive narrative ambiguity that in ‘local’ sus-
pense situations Hitchcock completely subverts the moral co-ordinates that
Carroll argues characterizes suspense and we are encouraged to sympathize
with the devil.3 Consider the moment when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)
in Psycho (1960) pauses in momentary trepidation when the car that contains
the body of the dead Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) fails for a moment to sink into
the swamp. We do not, of course, know yet that Norman is the killer – we be-
lieve it is his mother – and Norman has been rendered quite sympathetic on ac-
count of the way he cares for her. The fact that he cleans up after her mess is an
extension of his helpless dependency, and we pity him. Nonetheless, Norman
is here trying to cover up a crime, and Hitchcock invites us to wish for the car
to sink, something that is at once morally undesirable and, momentarily at
least, improbable. In Strangers on a Train, the anti-hero Bruno Anthony
(Robert Walker), whom we know to have murdered the hero’s wife, drops a
lighter down a drain that he wants to use to implicate the hero in the crime,
and Hitchcock’s camera presents his desperate attempts to retrieve it in excru-
ciating close-up, in such a way as to render a morally undesirable event one
that is wished for by dramatizing its improbability. Again our alignment with
Bruno is fostered by the fact that Bruno displays the sympathetic qualities of
the dandy figure in contrast to the dull, wooden and rather self-serving hero,
Guy Haines. In Frenzy (1972), the mass murderer, Robert Rusk (Barry Foster),
tries desperately to retrieve a tiepin that will implicate him as a murderer from
the clenched fist of the naked murder victim in the back of a potato truck in a
manner that parallels the suspense situation in Strangers. In Frenzy, once
again, Hitchcock goes to great length to negatively contrast the qualities of the
nominal hero, Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) – he is egotistical, pusillanimous,
and full of sour grapes – with the endearing qualities of the smooth, savvy,
popular, and mother-loving villain. In each of these cases the audience is at
least temporarily encouraged to root for the successful completion of an action
whose success would contribute to an immoral outcome to the story by being
placed in sympathy with the predicament of a morally undesirable character
whose likelihood of success is presented as being improbable.

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 167

These examples are undoubtedly privileged moments of ‘local suspense’

within larger suspense structures that at least on their surface articulate more
conventional values. But there is at least one film in which this moment of ‘lo-
cal suspense’ occupies the entire film – Hitchcock’s ‘experimental narrative’
Rope (1948). In Rope the suspense is created in large part by the fact that the
audience is encouraged to wish for the murder to remain concealed to the ‘au-
dience’ of guests in order not to spoil the party; Hitchcock encourages us to en-
joy, alongside Brandon (John Dall) who orchestrates the party, the way in
which discovery of the body is postponed and deferred. Part of the reason for
the distinctiveness of Rope is that, like Psycho, it lacks the narrative armature
of romance to sustain conventional moral values. Indeed, in a sense, it is the
possibility of heterosexual romance that is killed off at the very beginning of
the film by the murder of Kevin, the suitor of the film’s nominal heroine Janet
Walker (Joan Chandler), just as this possibility is killed off by the murder of
Marion Crane in Psycho. Furthermore, like Strangers on a Train, Rope ar-
ticulates a suppressed counter-narrative to that of the heterosexual romance;
namely, the ‘perverse romance’ of the veiled homosexual couple that finds its
expression in the enjoyment of crime and its concealment. Since their adver-
sary in the film, Rupert Caddell (James Stewart) is a man who has tutored the
heros in their pursuit of perversity, the restoration of conventional morality is
tenuous at best. Furthermore, the fact that the narrative outcome turns out to
be a moral one doesn’t alter the fact that we are encouraged to wish for
Brandon to succeed, against the odds, in his enterprise.
Carroll himself points out that one way of accommodating this kind of sub-
version of the moral co-ordinates that seem to characterize the orthodox sus-
pense situation would be to simply modify the theory. Suspense is generated
not between an outcome that is morally desirable yet unlikely and one that is
morally undesirable yet likely, but simply between an outcome that is desired
yet unlikely and one that is undesired yet likely.4 However, while such a for-
mulation could fully account for these examples of suspense in Hitchcock, it
also fails to capture what is distinctive to them and by extension to Hitchcock
as a whole; namely, the manner in which Hitchcockian suspense is bound up
with the subversion of conventional moral co-ordinates, especially as they are
enshrined in the romance narrative. Carroll seems to appreciate the signifi-
cance of Hitchcock’s example in this respect. Hitchcock’s work gives the lie to
any theory of suspense that weds the question of whether or not an outcome is
desirable too closely to whether or not the outcome is moral. On the other
hand, it also suggests the importance of moral evaluation to the cultivation of
emotional response. For to the extent that Hitchcock’s films subvert conven-
tional moral options, they do so only by strenuously and self-consciously chal-

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168 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

lenging the customary moral assumptions that are embedded in the conven-
tional suspense structure anatomized by Carroll.

A Note on Suspense and Humor

The inversion of orthodox suspense in Hitchcock’s films is supported by the

way in which Hitchcock uses black humor to solicit our identification with the
figure of the dandy or anti-hero. For example, in Rope, our knowledge of crime
in contrast to the ignorance of the partygoers makes us complicit with wrong-
doing, but as Thomas Bauso points out, our complicity is fostered by the fact
that we are encouraged along with Brandon to take perverse pleasure in the
situation: ‘We may be appalled at Brandon’s “warped sense of humor,” but
since we can’t help getting the morbid jokes, we are compelled to laugh at
them, and our laughter implicates us in the act of murder.’5 As Susan Smith has
argued, the killing of Stevie in Sabotage can be understood in part in relation-
ship to the unacknowledged desire of Verloc, the saboteur, to get rid of his bur-
densome nephew. If Verloc functions partly as Hitchcock’s authorial surrogate
in the film, Verloc’s actions here serve to express Hitchcock’s own sadistic im-
pulses towards his audience. But arguably, Hitchcock also invites the audience
to sympathize with these impulses rather than to simply be victimized by
them. That is, perhaps he invites us to derive a certain sadistic satisfaction
from seeing the child blown to pieces rather in the manner that in Rope Hitch-
cock invites us to enjoy, along with Brandon, the irony of the dining over a
corpse.6 The potato truck scene in Frenzy begins with the killer, Rusk,
wheeling out the dead body of his murder victim and lifting it like a sack of po-
tatoes into the back of the truck. A series of jokes encourage our identification
with Rusk. Hitchcock puns on the idea of the body ‘weighing like a sack of po-
tatoes,’ which reflects the point of view of Rusk. Rusk’s sense of relief is echoed
in the number plate FUW on the truck and also by a melody that combines dis-
cordant strings with a playful trill on the piccolo accompanied by strangely
disconcerting laughter.
But, while black comedy encourages us to wish for a narrative outcome that
conflicts with conventional moral values, it also encourages the audience to
step back from an engagement with the content of the fiction and to entertain
an appreciation of its form. That is, Hitchcock uses humor to make the audi-
ence self-aware of his role as narrator in soliciting fearful anticipation and
shock and of the willingness of the spectator to enjoy not simply ‘negative’
emotions but a reversal of their customary moral allegiances. Thus, while
black humor encourages the audience to enjoy morally iniquitous deeds, it

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 169

also contributes to the diffusion of suspense. Smith, who explores this aspect
of Hitchcock’s work in great detail, points out that often a moment of incon-
gruous laughter, like the moment cited in Frenzy, has this effect. For example,
when Daisy laughs at the moment that the menacing lodger enters into the
boarding house in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, her laughter, while signaling her
vulnerability, also functions to diffuse the suspense by commenting on its self-
conscious melodramatic nature.7 Speaking of the scene in Sabotage after the
bomb explodes killing Stevie following a sequence of prolonged suspense,
James Naremore writes: ‘The sequence ends with a visual and sound dissolve
that takes us from the exploded bus to Winnie Verloc’s parlor, where the sound
of the explosion melts into polite, rather strained laughter among her guests –
a laughter that, in this context, resembles nothing so much as the sound of bro-
ken glass or shattered debris.’8 In practice, the line between the use of black hu-
mor that contributes to suspense and the use of black humor that detaches us
from suspense is a thin one. For in the sense that humor allows us to sympa-
thize with the anti-hero, it does so by detaching us from the moral conse-
quences of what we see, enabling us to find amusement in the absurdity of the
situation. It is linked, as it were, to the aestheticization of the moral question,
where murder is turned into a fine art or a joke, as it is in Hitchcock’s Rope.

Two Types of Suspense

According to Carroll suspense involves not only the postulation of alternative,

morally contrasting narrative outcomes, but also probability or relative likeli-
hood. Carroll argues that it is this dramatization of probability – of the relative
likelihood of a bad outcome versus the relative unlikelihood of a good out-
come – that is central to the aesthetics of suspense. A formalized countdown
system with a deadline set in place dramatizes the calculus of probability, be-
cause the closer we are to the moment of impending doom the more it becomes
unavoidable and hence fearfully anticipated. A deadline is set, say, for a bomb
to explode, and the time to the explosion is then registered by the ticking of a
clock, the ticking of the bomb itself, and by the rhythms of musical accompani-
ment. Even the less fearful suspense situations characterized by romantic com-
edy rely on narrative deadlines. For example, in Howard Hawks’s His Girl
Friday (1940), the drama of the situation turns on the fact that Hildy (Rosalind
Russell) and Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) are to depart on the 4:00 p.m. trai-
n to Albany and marry that very day. This looming deadline renders improba-
ble the fact that Hildy will stay to work on the paper and, hence, also remarry
Walter Burns (Cary Grant). The aesthetic of suspense that arises out of narra-

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170 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

tive deadlines entails an ever-increasing amount of information about what is

happening on a moment-to-moment basis, which is articulated in cinematic
terms through visual montage of the kind perfected by D.W. Griffith. Faster
and faster alternation between the position of the victim under threat and the
rescuer reflect the ever-diminishing time frame and the narrowing of the pos-
sibility of rescue to an ever-diminishing sliver of time.
This kind of classical suspense situation that builds up the pace of editing as
the threat becomes more and more inevitable against a looming deadline is il-
lustrated in the sequence that leads to the destruction of Stevie in Hitchcock’s
Sabotage. First Hitchcock establishes very clearly a deadline of 1:45 p.m. for
the bomb to explode. When Stevie sets out on his journey he is beset by delays
– he gets lost in the market-day crowds and is lured into being cleaned up by a
street peddler. To remind us of the imminent catastrophe, Hitchcock periodi-
cally intercuts close-ups of the bomb under his arm and superimposes the in-
structions written by one of the saboteurs, ‘Don’t forget the Birds will Sing at
1:45.’ But Stevie gets distracted again, this time by the Lord Mayor’s show, and
Hitchcock interposes a montage of a clock reading 1:00 p.m., the inner cogs en-
gaging in a manner that suggests the relentless momentum of time, and a min-
ute hand moves in fast-forward to 1:15. But Stevie continues to ‘dilly-dally’ at
the show. He gets onto the bus and snuggles a dog held by the neighbor bliss-
fully unaware; he looks around behind him at a clock outside and feels the
package next to him. His fidgeting registers his worry that he is late, but also,
ironically, evokes the much deeper anxiety of the audience. We pass a clock
reading 1:30, then again, 1:35. Hitchcock cuts at an increasingly frequent place
between shots of Stevie petting the dog and looking outside, shots of a clock
getting near the time of the explosion, shots of the bomb, shots of the conduc-
tor at the back of the bus that has a diagonal bar across the window that evokes
‘no entry’ or a barricade, and shots of the bus caught up in serial delays: it is
stopped by a policemen, then by a traffic jam, and then by traffic lights indicat-
ing ‘STOP.’ When the lights change to ‘GO’ Hitchcock cuts rapidly from Stevie
to ‘1:45,’ then to a close-up of the clock face moving to ‘1:46,’ then to three shots
in rapid succession of the bomb, and finally the explosion, as if detonated by
the montage. The salience of the temporal deadline and the accelerating tempo
of the sequence are underscored by an orchestration that features rhythmic
sounds like the ticking of a clock, punctuates the shots of the clock face with
ominous chords, and increases tempo with the accelerating montage. The en-
tire sequence is a lesson in the aesthetics of classical suspense and illustrates
Carroll’s rationale for the way it operates.
But Carroll claims that the explanation of suspense in terms of a ‘calculus’
of probability not only explains paradigmatic instances of suspense such as
this, but that it also argues conclusively against the alternative interpretation

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 171

of the aesthetics of suspense suggested by Truffaut and Barthes. In his conver-

sation with Hitchcock, Truffaut claims that ‘the very nature of suspense re-
quire[s] a constant play with the flux of time, either by compressing it, or, more
often, by distending it.’9 According to this theory, temporal retardation or de-
lay engenders suspense. The theory of suspense as temporal retardation or
‘suspension’ requires comparing the event that is presented to the spectator
the moment that a state of anxious uncertainty is generated with another event
– the delayed one. But what is the delayed event? One candidate for the event
against which the delay is measured is the event as it would have taken place
in real time. However, awareness of the real time that events take is not usually
invoked or called upon in suspense situations. It would seem to be an acciden-
tal side effect rather than a necessary feature of suspense. Furthermore, the dis-
tention of screen time in relationship to real events is not sufficient by itself to
generate suspense. Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship
Potemkin (1925) equally involves prolonging the massacre on the steps in
terms of screen time relative to actual time, but the sequence is not in the least
suspenseful, in part because the audience already knows the outcome and in
part because Eisenstein makes sure the audience knows the outcome by pre-
senting the conclusion of the action – the Cossacks cutting down the fleeing
citizens of Odessa – at the beginning of the sequence.
Barthes offers a more promising candidate for the delayed event in relation-
ship to which suspense is to be measured – the narrative event that would re-
solve the suspense situation itself. For Barthes, suspense involves a temporal
retardation or delay in narrative resolution. In terms of the question and an-
swer structure of narrative posed by both Barthes and Carroll, suspense, ac-
cording to Barthes, entails a delay in the answer of the question proposed by
the narrative: ‘Under the hermeneutic code we list the various (formal) terms
by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in sus-
pense, and finally disclosed.’10 Of course, delay in the resolution of narrative is
part and parcel of all narratives. Every story delays and defers its outcome and
thereby engages our interest in what happens next. To define narrative sus-
pense simply in terms of delay renders all narrative suspenseful and thereby
robs the definition of suspense of any distinctive characteristics. This is one of
Carroll’s motivations for developing an account of suspense in terms of a com-
peting answer to a question where temporal delay per se seems to play no role.
But does this mean that the idea of temporal retardation or delay has no inde-
pendent explanatory value in understanding the role of suspense and in
Hitchcock’s work in particular?
In his lecture to students at Columbia University Hitchcock contrasts what
he calls the objective aspect of suspense exemplified in the parallel editing or
cross-cutting that was perfected by Griffith and his own approach to suspense

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172 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

that adds a ‘subjective factor’ by which he means ‘letting the audience experi-
ence it through the mind or eyes of one of the characters.’11 But Hitchcock
wishes to get at something more, for he suggests that subjective suspense con-
trasts with objective suspense not simply through the presence of a character’s
point of view but also in presenting the spectator only one side of the suspense
situation and hence ‘making the audience suffer.’12 In other words, Hitchcock
is concerned to pinpoint the role of narrative suppression in generating sus-
pense. This is an idea that Hitchcock is usually assumed to have rejected.
When he makes his famous distinction between suspense and surprise, he de-
fines the difference as whether or not the spectator is fully informed about
what is going on in the scene. In the situation of suspense we are fully in-
formed about something the characters are unaware of, for example, that there
is a bomb about to explode under the table around which they are sitting. In
the situation of surprise we are as ignorant as the characters are about the
events that are about to happen. Furthermore, when Truffaut raises the idea to
him that suspense may rise out of a hidden danger Hitchcock directly contra-
dicts him: ‘To my way of thinking mystery is seldom suspenseful. In a who-
dunit, for example, there is no suspense, but a sort of intellectual puzzle. The
whodunit generates a kind of curiosity that is void of emotion, and emotion is
an essential ingredient of suspense.’13
How is it then that mystery generated by suppressive narration can be sus-
penseful? Hitchcock is undoubtedly right about the whodunit lacking sus-
pense, for what is involved here is less a sense of hidden danger that arouses
emotional response than an intellectual puzzle about which one of multiple
possible candidates for the murderer is the right one. However, the kind of
mystery Hitchcock has in mind when he speaks of subjective suspense is not
the intellectual puzzle of detective fiction but the situation that is created when
a character – and the spectator who is aligned with the character – is placed in a
state of uncertainty about the narrative outcome, and this uncertainty becomes
a source of fear and anxiety. The mystery contains something incipiently
threatening and we need to find out what it is. Something more is involved
than mere curiosity about the answer to a question; rather, what is posed in the
narrative is an enigma that the narrative situation demands us to resolve, for
something is fundamentally at stake for the character in the fiction and hence
for the spectator. Mystery is not inherently suspenseful, but it becomes sus-
penseful when uncertainty breeds anxiety that fuels the wish to resolve it. Fur-
thermore, in Hitchcock’s films, as we shall see, not only does a wish to resolve
the mystery arise from the fact that it is incipiently threatening but the fact that
the mysterious event is incipiently threatening may also be a source of allure. It
is for these reasons that Hitchcock’s description of this form of suspense as
subjective suspense is a good one, for it pinpoints the difference between the

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 173

intellectual uncertainty of detective fiction and the anxiety-provoking uncer-

tainty of the suspenseful mystery, where the lack of knowledge itself is in some
way threatening to the character and thus a source of concern to the sympa-
thetic spectator.
The use of suppressive narration that restricts us to the epistemic and often
to the perceptual point of view of a character in a state of anxious uncertainty
and that sustains suspense by restricting us to that point of view is ubiquitous
in Hitchcock’s work. For example, in Rebecca (1940) when the second Mrs. De
Winter (Joan Fontaine) arrives at Manderley, she has been primed to think of
Rebecca, her husband’s first wife, as a figure of awe and fascination, about
whom she both desires and fears to know more. By restricting us to the
epistemic viewpoint of the character, Hitchcock suppresses our knowledge of
who Rebecca really was and the nature of the ‘threat’ she poses until Maxim’s
(Laurence Olivier) confession scene late in the narrative. During the second
Mrs. De Winter’s first prolonged encounter with Rebecca’s housekeeper, Mrs.
Danvers (Judith Anderson), she experiences the overwhelming presence of
Rebecca in the house of Manderley. Leaving her bedroom on Danvers’ cue, she
enters diminutively, like a girl in a fairy tale, a hall filled with towering, bul-
bous (feminine) forms projected as shadows onto the curved white plaster
walls. And with Danvers following silently, as if her escort, Mrs. De Winter
glides, with her back to Hitchcock’s camera, through a long, cathedral-like cor-
ridor shimmering with watery light, echoed by mystical strains of tremulous
violins. They hesitate at the top of the stairs, framed from behind in two shot as
Danvers points out the doors of Mrs. de Winter’s room. First Danvers, then
Mrs. de Winter, peel off, leaving Hitchcock’s camera to venture, to be lured, a
little closer to the gigantic doors that look like the entry gates to some forbid-
ding Masonic temple until, as it were, stopped from approaching any closer by
Rebecca’s dog Jasper who stands guard. The suspense that is invoked here is
the fearful anticipation of something whose character is wished to be known
and it is registered as a delay or forestalling of the moment of narrative disclo-
sure. Vertigo (1958), in ways that parallel Rebecca, wroughts a massive de-
ception upon Scottie (James Stewart) and the spectator alike. Hitchcock’s sig-
nature use of a forward tracking point-of-view shot and backward tracking
reaction shot in this film provides a very precise evocation of the manner in
which mystery builds into suspense the force of a lure.
But if we are to recognize a form of suspense in which temporal delay has
an intrinsic rather than extrinsic or incidental role in the generation of anxious
uncertainty, what relationship does this form of suspense bear to the case of
suspense in which suspense is generated through the relative probability of a
bad outcome versus the improbability of a good outcome? In suspenseful
mystery or impure suspense, the anxiety-provoking situation takes the form of

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174 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

an enigma that we seek to resolve because it is incipiently threatening. We do

not know the relative probability of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ resolution to the enigma,
or alternatively, we might say that in this situation a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ outcome is
equally possible. Narrative delay postpones the resolution of the enigma and
thereby prolongs the initial condition of narrative suppression. In this way
anxious uncertainty, generated by the narrative enigma, is sustained and sus-
pense created. In this kind of suspenseful situation our state of anxious uncer-
tainty does not rise or fall but remains more or less constant until the narrative
enigma is resolved. However, in the case of pure suspense, with the narrative
possibilities resolved into a clearly defined good option and a clearly defined
bad one, the spectator is no longer simply placed in a condition of anxious un-
certainty about narrative outcome but is placed in a situation where their anx-
ious uncertainty is itself subject to manipulation and control. The suspense sit-
uation becomes one in which suspense can be increased or decreased
according to the ‘calculus’ of probability. Once the narrative options are posed
in this way, the factor of delay per se drops out of significance, for delay plays
its role as a suspense generator only when the nature of the narrative answer is
an anxiety-provoking, because incipiently threatening, enigma. In pure sus-
pense, since the nature of the threat is a known quantity, the delay in narrative
resolution is keyed to delays that are dramatized in the story, delays that serve
to increase the likelihood of a bad outcome as the suspense sequence from Sab-
otage exemplifies. Every time Stevie’s progress is hindered the chances of his
being blown up increase.
Carroll is right, I think, in identifying the contours of pure or objective sus-
pense but he fails to recognize the distinctive character of impure or subjective
suspense or suspenseful mystery. The distinctive character of this form of nar-
rative suspense lies precisely in the way in which a state of anxious uncertainty
is sustained by narrative delay. What lies in common to both forms of suspense
is the condition of anxious uncertainty generated by the possibility of a good
or bad outcome to a narrative. Where they differ is that in impure suspense,
whether the outcome will be good or bad is an equal possibility, since the na-
ture of the ‘threat’ encountered by the characters is an enigmatic one. In this
context, the relative probability of a good or bad outcome to the narrative is
not the distinctive suspense-generating mechanism; rather, suspense is gener-
ated by the withholding of narrative information that fails to bring clarity to
the narrative situation and thereby sustains at once the possibility of a threat
and our interest in finding out the nature of the threat.
One lesson of Hitchcock’s work, then, is that there are at least two aesthetics
of narrative suspense that correspond roughly to the objective and subjective
aspects of suspense that Hitchcock distinguished in his ‘Columbia Lecture.’
The first aesthetic corresponds to the pure suspense situation in which the

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 175

spectator is placed in a position of knowledge superior to that of the character

and elements of the scene are orchestrated according to a calculus of probabil-
ity that intensifies the likelihood of an undesirable action, relative to the likeli-
hood of a desirable action taking place. This kind of suspense is defined by a
relative emotional detachment towards character psychology and the fate of
character in favor of a logic of action and the calculus of probability. This aes-
thetic of suspense, in Hitchcock at least, often has a ludic, comic quality, dis-
playing self-conscious awareness of the artful manipulation of the spectator it
involves. The second aesthetic of suspense – ‘subjective suspense’ – corre-
sponds to the impure suspense situation of ‘suspenseful mystery’ where nar-
rative is suppressive about narrative outcome, and we are aligned to the psy-
chology of a character rather than being placed in a position that is superior to
them in the sense that we enter into the same sense of uncertainty about narra-
tive events. This form of suspense aligns us with character feeling as opposed
to detaching us from it, and typically, in Hitchcock’s films, this involves an
alignment with a female character, such as in Rebecca, Suspicion, or Shadow
of a Doubt, or with a ‘feminized’ male character – that is, a male character
who has been reduced to a situation of passivity or uncertainty such as charac-
terizes the situation of Scottie (James Stewart) in Vertigo. This subjective aes-
thetic is much more serious; it leads us, for example, to experience the lure of
perverse desire as in Rebecca, rather than making a joke out of it as in Rope.
Although Hitchcock’s career tends to involve an alternation between these
different aesthetics of suspense – for example North by Northwest (1959)
follows Vertigo – many of his works combine both aesthetics. I have already
described a paradigmatic case of objective suspense in Hitchcock’s Sabotage
but the same film also exhibits subjective suspense. After the death of Stevie
we are encouraged to identify with the suffering Mrs. Verloc, who has not only
lost her brother but also learns from her husband that he is responsible for
Stevie’s death. She wrestles with this knowledge as she begins to serve her
husband’s evening meal, and the proximity of a knife attracts her to the
thought of murder. The question, ‘What will she do?’ is posed, and suspense is
created through a delay of the answer. This narrative situation is particularly
instructive because, while we anticipate that she might kill her husband, we
don’t exactly want her not to kill him, given what he has just done. We just
want to know what will happen. Furthermore, what actually occurs defies our
expectations. When Verloc realizes that Mrs. Verloc has her hand poised over
the knife, he slowly edges around the table towards her, and the camera as-
sumes his point of view as it tracks forward towards Mrs. Verloc as if he is be-
ing drawn towards her, not to prevent her but to be killed by her. When he ar-
rives by her side he grabs for the knife, but she gets it first. The camera tilts up
to their faces as he advances upon her slightly, and she (out of shot) drives the

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176 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

knife in to him. The whole scene commences in silence – that itself generates
anxiety by cueing us to the overwhelming, inchoate emotions experienced by
the characters.

A Note on Suspense and Surprise

When mystery is entwined with suspense through suppressive narration, then

surprise becomes a corollary of suspense, rather than being opposed to it in the
manner suggested by Hitchcock’s own contrast between suspense and sur-
prise. Hitchcock’s suppressive narration emotionally engages us, in part, be-
cause it encourages us to anticipate a surprise. Surprise contrasts with ‘objec-
tive suspense,’ but it is complementary to ‘subjective suspense.’ Furthermore,
we also need to be careful to distinguish between surprise and shock. While
objective suspense excludes surprise it does not exclude shock, for an event
that is wholly anticipated can nonetheless be shocking when it actually oc-
curs.14 Shock is compatible with both objective and subjective forms of sus-
pense.
Psycho functions as Hitchcock’s tutor text in the relationship between sus-
pense and surprise. Indeed, it illustrates the three fundamental relationships
that obtain between them. The murder of Marion Crane comes out of the blue,
and at first sight, seems like the case of Hitchcock’s bomb suddenly blowing
up from the table; that is, a question of pure surprise. As Steven Schneider
points out, we do glimpse the murderer from a point of view inside the shower
that is not that of Marion.15 However, this moment of objective suspense does
not lessen the overall surprise involved in killing off the heroine in the first
reel, though it does allow us to anticipate the shocking event just before it oc-
curs. In the second murder, we now think we know the identity of the criminal,
and the case is one of pure suspense in which we fearfully anticipate the un-
happy end of Arbogast. The death of Arbogast, while shocking, is not surpris-
ing. The sequence that leads up to Norman’s attempt on Lila Crane’s life illus-
trates a third relationship of suspense to surprise, for while Hitchcock appears
to have revealed to us the identity of the killer, the narrative seems to be sup-
pressing something through the evasiveness of Norman and suppressive
strategies of the camera movement and placement. This suppression paves the
way for the surprising and shocking disclosure at the conclusion of the film.
Hitchcock combines objective suspense, subjective suspense, and surprise
in the famous sequence from The Birds (1963) where Melanie Daniels (Tippi
Hedren) sits in front of the jungle gym waiting for the kids to finish school. At
first she is oblivious to an alarming fact that the spectator is made aware of

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 177

from the beginning of the scene: birds are gathering on the climbing frame be-
hind her. Hitchcock cuts back and forth between Melanie nervously smoking
in the foreground and the birds progressively gathering in the background.
This classic rendition of pure or objective suspense is accompanied by the mes-
merizing repetition of the children’s song that serves to mark out the passing
of time. Then, Melanie notices a single bird in flight, and Hitchcock cuts from a
reaction shot of Melanie looking to a long point-of-view shot of the bird flying
that, in the context of the narration, serves to restrict our knowledge of what is
going on and inclines us to anticipate Melanie’s surprise and shock at what she
will see when the bird lands. What she does see turns out to be surprising and
shocking for the spectator also since, in the meantime, the birds have accumu-
lated in quite massive proportions. The film then reverts again to an objective
suspense structure but one in which the knowledge of the character is now, in
contrast to the earlier sequence, aligned with that of the audience, and we fear,
with Melanie, for the schoolchildren’s lives.

Voyeurism, Eavesdropping and Suspense

Thus far, I have discussed the moral ambiguity in Hitchcock’s work in rela-
tionship to his subversion of the moral structure of objective suspense. How-
ever, moral ambiguity is a factor that informs, and is indeed sustained by, ‘sub-
jective suspense.’ As we have seen, Hitchcock subverts our customary moral
allegiances by encouraging us to wish for an outcome that runs contrary to
what is morally desirable. Suspenseful mystery in Hitchcock subverts our con-
ventional moral allegiances in a different way. For while subjective suspense in
Hitchcock does not always disguise or conceal a corrupt or perverse content, it
invariably signals something that is perverse through the fact that suppressive
narration takes on the aspect of a prohibition or censorship that conceals some-
thing taboo and thereby renders the character and the spectator who is aligned
with him or her fascinated in the content of what the narrative conceals. Thus
in Rebecca, the second Mrs. de Winter’s fascination with the secret of Rebecca
takes on the lure of something that is taboo through the manner in which, for
example, the second Mrs. de Winter’s interest in her dead predecessor is gov-
erned and mediated by the figure of Mrs. Danvers who clearly harbors an
erotic attraction to her. As the second Mrs. de Winter approaches the door of
Rebecca’s chamber in the aforementioned scene from the film and pauses at
the threshold, her gaze at Rebecca’s door is overseen by Mrs. Danvers’s gaze at
her from off-screen.

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178 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

As Arthur Laurents, screenwriter of Rope, suggests, Hitchcock was fasci-

nated with ‘kink,’ that is, with sexual perversity or, more generally, with the
idea that sexuality is perverse.16 Sexuality is endowed with the aura of perver-
sity in Hitchcock, precisely by being forbidden or being rendered in disguise.
And by being disguised, sexuality is rendered as something alluring in a very
Freudian way. Hitchcock deploys strategies of narrative and representational
doubling derived from German Expressionsim in order to evoke the sense that
appearances are a surface phenomema that conceal perverse secrets. But there
is one strategy of conveying the core of perversity that lies within the mystery
that is privileged by Hitchcock because of the manner in which it contributes
directly to the staging of suspense through suppressive narration. Hitchcock
connects suppressive narration with scenarios of eavesdropping or spying on
something that is private or secret, taboo activities that, while they are not in-
trinsically wedded to a sexual motive or content, nonetheless often contain a
sexual motive or content and are connected to such content by the fact of being
taboo. The second Mrs. De Winter is consistently caught in this kind of situa-
tion, as, for example, when she is witness to the conversation between Mrs.
Danvers and her dandy cousin Jack Flavell (George Saunders). Often, as in
Rear Window (1954), eavesdropping or spying is represented itself as a form
of voyeuristic fascination that colors the mystery with the aura of something
that is taboo and implicates the spectator in the same prurient fascination as
the character. By placing within the scene a character who takes an illicit fasci-
nation in a mystery, the mystery is thereby lent an aura of perversity, over and
above the perverse connotations that it may already carry. But the significance
of the voyeuristic scenario is not limited to the perverse coloration it lends to
subjective suspense.
In his interviews with Truffaut and elsewhere Hitchcock fondly recounted
the scene from Easy Virtue (1927) in which the telephone operator eavesdrops
on a marriage proposal. Will the proposal lead to marriage? Hitchcock cites
this as a suspense situation involving romance that does not include fear. But
the context of his discussion with Truffaut also suggests this may be a case of
what he calls ‘suspense of situation,’ in contrast to the kind of suspense that in-
volves ‘what happens next.’ Of course, ‘what happens next’ is important to the
representation of suspense in the scene; nonetheless, Hitchcock’s idea of ‘sus-
pense of situation’ is suggestive. The content of the suspense here is neither
mysterious nor perverse; indeed, the situation presented is one of objective
suspense that is morally conventional in its structure. But the suspense is em-
bedded in a subjective situation that is one of eavesdropping on the private
lives of strangers. In this way our engagement with the suspenseful ‘narrative’
that we are privy to hear over the phone line is given an aura of naughtiness. I
have suggested that the depiction of a character as a voyeur can contribute to

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 179

subjective suspense by coloring mystery with the aura of something that is ta-
boo, thereby intensifying the character’s fascination with the content of the
mystery. But what is portrayed in the Easy Virtue example is a character
eavesdropping on a suspenseful narrative situation. The character’s fascina-
tion may color our own interest in the narrative outcome, but, equally, what
fascinates the spectator is the situation of a character being held in suspense.
That is, the presence of the character renders the spectator’s own relationship
to narrative suspense an indirect one.
By staging the lure of the taboo in this way, Hitchcock allows the audience
to experience the perverse pleasures of voyeurism vicariously in a position of
relative safety. The presence of the character in the situation is a way of at once
cueing the spectator to indulge in something that is taboo and ‘permitting’ the
spectator to entertain the character’s responses at a ‘safe’ distance. For exam-
ple, throughout Rear Window, Hitchcock represents L.B. Jeffries spying on
his neighbors in a manner that colors the nature of our interest in the evolving
mystery of the Thorwald murder, and what fascinates us is not simply the out-
come of the murder but the situation of the character being held in suspense it-
self. Consider, too, a scene from Hitchcock’s film The Lodger where the am-
biguously perverse hero who may or may not be Jack the Ripper, perched at
the top of a ‘Victorian’ staircase – an ubiquitous feature of Hitchcock’s works
with its own connotations of the sexual secrecy that pertain to the upstairs
rooms of the Victorian household – peers down, transfixed, at the heroine as
she struggles to free herself from her policeman boyfriend who has hand-
cuffed her at the culmination of a sexual chase. In staging the scene in this way,
Hitchcock authorizes the spectator to enjoy the scene as a displaced expression
of sexual perversity (sado-masochism) because we view it through the gaze of
a character who is perhaps ‘sexually perverted,’ while at the same time he al-
lows us to distance ourselves from this thought. In part, this distance is af-
forded by the very presence of the character of the lodger in the scene (we can
pretend the perverse interpretation of what we see is being made by the char-
acter rather than by us), and in part it is achieved because the motivation of the
Lodger himself is ambiguous (we can pretend that the Lodger’s motivation is,
like our own, actually quite innocent).
The staging of suspense in the context of voyeurism or eavesdropping func-
tions in a manner analogous to Hitchcock’s black humor. Both are ‘aestheti-
cizing’ strategies that introduce the audience to the pleasures of moral corrup-
tion by giving them a disguised expression. Black humor ‘allows’ the audience
to sympathize with the devil and wish for a morally pernicious outcome by
placing us at one remove from the character and the situation by detaching us
from our customary moral judgments. Hitchcock’s staging of suspense as a
scenario of voyeurism or eavesdropping allows the audience to vicariously ex-

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180 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

perience the thrill of something that is taboo, but again, in a manner that de-
taches the audience from responsibility for their alignment. In both cases
Hitchcockian suspense is characterized by a high degree of self-consciousness.
Hitchcock invites the audience not simply to enjoy suspense but to become
connoisseurs or aesthetes of suspense.
I have identified five aspects of Hitchcockian suspense that deviate from
the case of pure or objective suspense that is a central point of departure both
for understanding suspense and for understanding Hitchcock’s practice of
suspense. First, Hitchcock’s work is marked by the inversion of moral co-ordi-
nates, in such a way that he encourages the audience to take delight in the
thought of something that is morally undesirable. Second, this inversion of
moral co-ordinates may be supported by the use of black humor that fosters
our identification with the narrative situation of the dandy or anti-hero and
also serves to detach us from the suspense situation and encourages to take de-
light in the dastardly manner in which Hitchcock has subverted our custom-
ary moral co-ordinates. Third, Hitchcockian suspense is informed by mystery
created by a suppressive or restricted narration that renders the character and
spectator intrigued by what is, conventionally speaking, morally undesirable
and transforms the conditions of transparency that govern the orthodox sus-
pense situation. Fourth, narrative suppression in Hitchcock generates the
promise of incipient surprise or shock. When suspense is entwined with mys-
tery, surprise is its corollary rather than its antithesis. And fifth, fascination
with the wicked and incipiently shocking is fostered by Hitchcock through the
way in which his narrative secret is hedged about with taboos that inscribe
conventional morality as a set of prohibitions that it is desirable to breach. Fur-
thermore, the spectator’s engagement with a supenseful situation is itself rep-
resented as a form of eavesdropping or voyeurism and hence something that is
taboo. Thus, the suspenseful situation becomes a source of fascination and
pleasure in its own right.
Although Hitchcock invokes orthodox or pure suspense in its morally con-
ventional form, the defining characteristic of Hitchcockian suspense is its im-
purity that is in part defined by the inversion of the customary moral co-ordi-
nates that structure the pure suspense situation and in part by the suppression
of key information pertaining to the nature of the narrative situation. The posi-
tion that Hitchcock invites the spectator to occupy is one in which they are for-
ever at the threshold of something forbidden, that is just out of reach, and one
in which they entrust themselves to Hitchcock the narrator to orchestra their
access to the forbidden fruit whose content must remain elusive for the sus-
pense to be maintained. Within the anodyne public moniker of ‘Hitchcock –
the master of suspense’ is the wickedly playful persona of ‘Hitchcock – the
master of ceremonies’ who introduces ‘the public’ to taboo secrets, like a Dr.

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 Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 181

Caligari who threatens to expose the contents of his ‘cabinet’ to the shocked
and thrilled onlooker. Nonetheless, Hitchcock always sought to introduce the
public to those secrets in a manner that maintains their disguise and that re-
sists a lapsing into ‘bad taste’ or sheer exhibitionism – though, of course, his
whole career involved exploring the limits of what ‘the public’ was willing to
be exposed to.

Notes

1. Carroll first set out his theory of suspense in ‘Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,’
reprinted in Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996), pp. 94-117. He restates the theory in more formalized language in ‘The Para-
dox of Suspense,’ in Peter Vorderer and Hans J Wulff eds. Supsense: Conceptualiza-
tions, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explanations (Mahwah, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), pp. 71-92.
2. Deborah Knight and George McKnight, ‘Suspense and Its Master,’ in Richard Al-
len and Sam Ishii Gonzalés eds. Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), p.
108. For Hitchcock’s comments on suspense and romance see Alfred Hitchcock,
‘Lecture at Columbia University’ (1939), in Sidney Gottlieb ed. Hitchcock on Hitch-
cock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 272; François Truffaut,
Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 72.
3. Murray Smith draws attention to this aspect of Hitchcock’s work in Engaging Char-
acters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.
217-18.
4. Carroll dubs this morally neutral theory of suspense the ‘universal theory’ in con-
trast to the ‘general theory’ that is defined by moral parameters. See Carroll, ‘To-
ward a Theory of Film Suspense,’ p. 112.
5. Thomas M. Bauso, ‘Rope: Hitchcock’s Unkindest Cut,’ in Walter Raubicheck and
Walter Srebnick eds. Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films: From Vertigo to Rope (Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 233.
6. Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor, and Tone (London: BFI, 2000), p. 9. Hitch-
cock subsequently regretted blowing up Stevie because it offended the audience
who sympathized with Stevie. See Alfred Hitchcock ‘The Enjoyment of Fear’
(1949), in Gottleib ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock, p. 121. Clearly the audience were not
ready for Hitchcock’s black humor. By the time of Frenzy (1972), his audience ap-
pears to have caught up with him, even though he was again accused of lapsing
into bad taste. See Adam Lowenstein, ‘The Master, The Maniac, and Frenzy:
Hitchcock’s Legacy of Horror,’ in Richard Allen and Sam Gonzalèz eds. Hitchcock:
Past and Future (forthcoming, Routledge).
7. Ibid., p. 57.

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182 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

8. James Naremore, ‘Hitchcock and Laughter,’ paper delivered at ‘Hitchcock: A Cen-

tennial Celebration,’ New York University, 1999. Forthcoming in Richard Allen
and Sam Ishii Gonzaléz eds. Hitchcock: Past and Future.
9. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 72.
10. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p.
19.
11. Hitchcock, ‘Lecture at Columbia University (1939)’ p. 272.
12. Ibid.
13. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 73. Susan Smith’s useful discussion of suspense in Hitch-
cock is marred by her failure to reference sources other than the Truffaut inter-
views.
14. Steven Schneider notes the compatibility between shock and suspense in ‘Manu-
facturing Horror in Hitchcock’s Psycho,’ Cine-Action 50 (October 1999), p. 71.
15. Schneider, ‘Manufacturing Horror,’ p. 72.
16. See ‘Working with Hitch: A Screenwriter’s Forum with Evan Hunter, Arthur
Laurents and Joseph Stefano,’ Hitchcock Annual, (2001-2), p. 13.

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