Trilogy: Scary Stuff (Dark)

Image by Lisa Careau

When I was 10 years old I saw my first horror movie. It was the classic thriller, “The Birds”, a 1963 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I suspect I was too young to see this movie because following its evening television presentation I went to bed in a greatly agitated state, as the movie’s ghastly scenes began to replay, again and again, in my mind. I begged my mother to send my teenage sister to bed with me, knowing her presence would be soothing, but, alas, my sister's protestations won out, and my mother, growing impatient with my carrying-on, dismissed my torment as childish imaginings and left me to white-knuckle it on my own. Over the course of the next several nights I continued to be plagued by restlessness and disturbed sleep, which time would eventually smooth away only the jagged edges.

That classic horror film first informed me about profound fear and loathing. It opened my mind to the notion that a normal day can easily and rather quickly devolve into a nightmare. Henceforth, when particularly troubled, my visceral response has often been similar to that elicited all those years ago by the movie. No doubt, Alfred Hitchcock possessed a keen intuition of how to effectively blend together the macabre and the prosaic so as to induce a long-lasting shattering effect.

Hitchcock apparently was also very good at inflicting torment of the enduring kind upon some of his leading ladies. Decades before the “Me Too” movement sounded the alarm concerning sexual harassment and abuse suffered by women in the workplace, a chilling harbinger involving Hitchcock and several of the actresses he worked with had occurred, but it didn’t become widely known until celebrity writer Donald Spoto published “The Dark Side of Genius” in 1983.

Allegations that Hitchcock utilized abusive tactics to control some of his female leads have been further substantiated by Tippi Hedren who played Melanie Daniels in “The Birds”, followed by “Marnie”, another psychological thriller directed by Hitchcock in 1964. She claims that in addition to isolating her from the sets’ cast members, Hitchcock sadistically demanded numerous, unnecessary retakes of the movies’ most grueling scenes, particularly during the climactic attack in “The Birds”, whereby Hedren almost succumbed to a total mental and physical collapse. She also claims to have suffered repeated, aggressive sexual advances from Hitchcock that escalated into a lewd proposition late into the filming of “Marnie”. At wit’s end, she angrily rebuffed him, and he, in turn, leveled threats against her of the career-ending kind (which he made good on). Likewise, the former film producer, Harvey Weinstein, inflicted eerily similar patterns of behavior upon dozens of actresses, including Rosanna Arquette, Ashley Judd, and Mira Sorvino, to name a few. These women say he subjected them to sexual harassment, and after being rejected, he disparaged them in ways that would limit their careers.

For Grace Kelly, who in 1954 starred in the iconic “Dial M for Murder”, she too suffered physical trauma during the strangling/murder sequence resultant of Hitchcock’s insistence, again, upon numerous retakes that involved lingering shots of the brutal attack scene. Kelly, however, never indicated Hitchcock was sexually inappropriate towards her during this film or the other two subsequent ones she made with him; in fact, she once had considered partnering with him on a production company endeavor.

While on the set of the 1958 film noir thriller, “Vertigo”, Kim Novak, who played Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster, later recalled that Hitchcock’s smile had a menacing effect on her because he wore it whether he was happy or angry. This peculiar characteristic left her guessing as to what he was ever truly thinking or feeling, causing her to experience a kind of psychological terrorism that continued throughout filming. Decades later, Novak, admitted "Vertigo" was the apex of her career, owing much to Hitchcock's brilliance, but, she also remembered that he was controlling, and she in turn, resisted, in subtle ways, allowing herself to maintain her autonomy without sacrificing her career. Nonetheless, the one aspect these actors each had a share in was Hitchcock's specter of terror, which held them all captive.

Hitchcock’s compulsion to cruelly dominate these and other female actors who worked for him was left unchecked in an industry predicated on a culture of silence. Perhaps one could even argue that in transposing his art, Hitchcock’s films became the perfect vehicle through which he could perpetrate acts of violence upon women, in varying degrees and manners, so that it was indistinguishable as such: it appeared acceptable to those who bore witness, and incontestable by those who endured it; it was, after all, just business. Then as now it’s mystifying that such obtuse attitudes could and do exist, but people believe only what they are willing to inwardly accept. And so it goes on…

In describing Hitchcock, Hedren asserted that he was “unusual, genius, and evil and deviant, almost to the point of dangerous because of the effect he could have on people who were totally unsuspecting”. For myself, that statement rings true (especially the "totally unsuspecting" part). I've never been able to muster the courage to watch “The Birds” again for old times’ sake—half-remembered dreams and unrequited peace will do that to you.

Suffice it to say, Alfred Hitchcock was, perhaps, the scariest thing about his scariest films; not the monster in the shadows, but rather the one lurking in plain sight.