How Alfred Hitchcock influenced queer cinema
There are few filmmakers who have had as big an impact on the wider world of cinema than the British director, Alfred Hitchcock. Considered for quite some time to be the greatest filmmaker of the 20th century, Hitchcock was able to create some of the finest films of the time, including Psycho, Rear Window and North by Northwest, working with the likes of Anthony Perkins, James Stewart and Cary Grant.
Adopting the nickname ‘the master of suspense’, Hitchcock became known for his stylish crime thrillers that kept audiences on the edge of their seats until a shocking climactic scene. As a result, his countless classics have gone on to inform the work of some of the finest modern filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Denis Villeneuve, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Brian De Palma and many more.
A curious area of the industry that the filmmaker directly influenced was queer cinema, with his influnence in this area being explored in the forthcoming Shudder limited series Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror. Taking the time to speak about the influence of Hitchcock on queer horror, executive producer Bryan Fuller and director Kimberly Peirce sat down with CinemaBlend to discuss this.
Speaking on the subject, Fuller stated, “The thing with Hitchcock is, he worked with so many queer actors, and so many queer writers. I think, over time, I feel like half the movies of his are made by queer writers. You have Rope. You have Rebecca. You have The Birds”.
Indeed, as Fuller asserts, gay screenwriter Arthur Laurents penned the script for the 1948 film Rope, whilst the stories of both Rebecca and The Birds were both layered with LGBTQ subtext. Such examples are present across the whole of Hitchcock’s career, however, with 1951s Strangers on a Train being written by the gay author Patricia Highsmith and 1939s Jamaica Inn also being adapted from the work of the sexually curious, Daphne du Maurier.
Discussing Hitchcock’s collaboration with such writers, Fuller adds, “These are all queer writers who were keying into something that Hitchcock was attracted to, which was his own otherness. That may not be queer sexually, but was certainly queer idealogically”.
Studies into Hitchcock’s queer tales have been operating for years, with several of his other films also being sprinkled with queer curiosity. Such can be seen in the sensitive, sexually obscurity of Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s horror classic, Psycho, a man with an unhealthy obsession with his mother, with such gay undertones being further explored in the prequel TV series Bates Motel.
Ambiguously planting gay codes into his movies, Hitchcock worked with several homosexual performers in front of and behind the camera throughout his career. For such a meticulous filmmaker, it’s clear that such collaborations were not accidental, but instead made intentionally to imply a deeper truth about the treatment of the LGBTQ community in the 20th century, before the LGBTQ term had even been popularised.
