Alfred Hitchcock: from silent film director to inventor of modern horror | Film | The Guardian

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Excellent article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian 
on the roots of Hitchcock's genius that can be found in his silent films.


Hitchcock: from silent film director to inventor of modern horror | Film | The Guardian:

From the article:


"The new BFI retrospective, The Genius of Hitchcock, is a chance to see how his phenomenal instinct for generating moving photographs that etch themselves on the brain and under the skin went back to his roots in the silent era. Alongside his better-known later work, from both Britain and Hollywood, the season features gala screenings of Hitchcock's nine silent features of the 1920s, which, thanks to valiant fundraising from the BFI, have been fully restored. The pleasures of silent Hitchcock cannot compare with those of the polished all-American studio pictures of the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, it is startling to observe that his sensibility and knack for unsettling imagery were already formed. TakeThe Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), about a landlady who suspects that her "queer" lodger is actually a homicidal maniac who targets blondes. With its mix of the domestic and the macabre, we are not too far from Strangers on a Train 24 years later. "Be careful – I'll get you yet!" the putative murderer smilingly warns the landlady's blonde daughter as they play a flirtatious game of chess. Hitchcock's final silent movie, Blackmail (1929), contains a murder with a hand thrashing out of a curtain, foreshadowing the shower scene in Psycho."


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