Awakening from Hitchcock’s Nightmares

Delicious Nightmares

Even readers who have never seen a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock know that nightmares are integral to the Hitchcock brand. Beginning in 1941, and rapidly accelerating in 1957 following the success of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the publishers that produced the anthologies bearing his name, if not his direct editorial involvement, often announced that they were aimed to provoke nightmares in titles like Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories for Late at Night (1961), Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories Not for the Nervous (1965), and Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me (1967). The Introduction to Alfred Hitchcock Presents: More Stories to Stay Awake By (1971) begins:

In previous anthologies I have often begun my introduction with the words “Good evening.” In all good conscience I cannot do that now.

The contents of this volume are designed to give you a bad evening. A very bad evening indeed. And perhaps an even worse night. Not in any sense of dissatisfaction with the product herein. If you are an adventurous soul you have sampled my wares before. It will be a bad evening in the sense of wakefulness and delicious nightmare.

Now, that phrase—delicious nightmare—may sound like a contradiction of terms. Perhaps it is. Then again, perhaps not. A very large segment of the species Anthropos revels in just such a sensation. I know. For many years, purveying the ingredients of macabre enjoyment has been my livelihood and my pleasure.¹

These introductory remarks are ghostwritten, of course, but readers could readily accept them because they were so firmly rooted in a persona Hitchcock had been cultivating for thirty years. Dismissing the claims of wannabe actors who “are sure they could act for the film,” he had written as early as 1928:

They are entirely oblivious to the fact that the emotions from which they are suffering—I say “suffering” because they are temporarily abnormal— have been created for them by the camera, that before they came under the influence of the combined attack of the director, the artistes and the camera, their emotional nature lay dormant.²

A founding assumption of Hitchcock’s films since the beginning of his career is that the primary business of storytellers ever since Scheherazade has been to subject their audiences to suspense, “the plot device which has made the craft of story-telling an art from the beginning of time,” and Hitchcock’s brand of “Suspense . . . accompanied by danger” is surprisingly similar to “Suspense in the familiar boy-meets-girl plot” that keeps readers turning the pages of romance novels.³ And although Hitchcock maintained that “in real life I cannot stand suspense,” he counted himself as one of the “millions [who] seek it vicariously, in the theater and in the cinema.”⁴ The reason why audiences readily subjected themselves to the nightmarish sufferings of identification figures they would never want to experience in real life, he explained, was their enduring, if subconscious, certainty that “the price need not be paid—indeed, must not be paid.”⁵

Although Hitchcock may have embraced nightmares as essential to his brand, he was hardly the first storyteller to do so. There is a long history of nightmares written centrally into works of art, especially in traditions that Hitchcock himself identified as particularly important to him. In an essay first published in French in 1960, he acknowledged that “very probably, it’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.”⁶ In the same essay, he identified Romanticism and Surrealism as important influences “if only in the dream sequences and the sequences of the unreal in a certain number of my films.”⁷ Richard Allen has emphasized the impact of Grand Guignol fiction like Robert Louis Stevenson’s self-described shilling shocker “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Oscar Wilde’s more self-consciously aestheticized The Picture of Dorian Gray as “origins of Hitchcock’s aesthetic in late Victorian and early twentieth-century culture.”⁸ And of course the influence of German Expressionist cinema on Hitchcock has...