Cinematic Terror

This chapter discusses Alfred Hitchcock’s American films after he moved from England to Hollywood, and especially the ways in which they displaced transatlantic fears and anxieties of wartime onto cinematic and urban spaces as well as what Chris Marker called the “vertigo of time.” After considering the history of embodied suspense and terror from Thomas Hardy’s invention of the “cliffhanger” to Harold Lloyd’s comic dangling in Safety Last!, it focuses above all on Hitchcock’s Vertigo while also examining other key films from Rebecca to The Birds. In turn, it considers relations between history and geography, depth psychology and the built environment, and conceptions of memory, temporality, and contingency from Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust to Gilles Deleuze.