Eric’s Hitchcock Halloween — Frenzy
With this being the season of scares, I decided to focus on the work of my favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. I will provide some of my readings on three films of the Master of Suspense that I feel best work for Halloween.
*Providing a warning that this film does contain sexual violence*
Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film is a mix of all his favorite things. There’s murder, sex, black humor, and a man on the run.
With so little time left in his career and life, Hitchcock decides to play around with what we’ve become accustomed to in his work. There’s no mystery for us to work out. We learn quickly who the killer is. However, he plays the reverse with the two male leads. One is a perfect gentleman, and the other an ass. Having the ass be pinned as the killer when we know he didn’t do it gives us a different protagonist for Hitch’s man-on-the-run trope than what we are accustomed to with James Stewart, Cary Grant, or Robert Cummings. Familiar faces who we root for because they are familiar faces. Jon Finch’s Blaney isn’t the nicest of persons. Being a jerk doesn’t mean he’s a murderer, but it allows the film to cast its version of reasonable doubt. We, the viewers, just keep watching him hang himself and get into more trouble as he continues to bring suspicion to himself by not trying to act somewhat decent. He’s an angry, hurting…
