Alfred Hitchcock is the acknowledged master of the thriller genre, he was a brilliant technician, blending sex, humour and suspense. He began his career in 1919 and within three years became an assistant film director. In 1925, he directed his first film - The Lodger, a typical example of the classic Hitchcock plot - an innocent hero falsely accused of a crime, and who becomes involved in a web of intrigue. Known as 'Hitch', he established several trademarks which are visible in his films, the first being a 'cameo' player in most of his films. Other trademarks include close-up shots of womens hairstyle, and bathrooms which he often presented as places to hide, places to prepare for lovemaking, or as places for murder.

Hitchcock's films are complex examinations of the human mind and the way it works. He had the ability to prey on people's strongest emotion - fear. In a Hitchcock film, no one is innocent. Everybody is guilty of something.

As Alfred Hitchcock pointed out, the roots of all good film lie in melodrama - a very English eccentricity. Charles Dickens, England 's most famous storyteller, was a master of this form and he magnified everyday events thus simplifying them to show in some detail the darker, hidden underside of life where crime and strange events happen. That magnifying/simplifying, and the opposition of dark and light define melodrama, but also connected are comedy and a senseof life somehow like a dream.

Key themes in Hitchcock's films are troubled romances involving blondes. They form the prototypes for Hitchcock's good/bad woman which is featured in many of his films. Initially perceived or introduced as bad, she has to prove herself worthy of the hero, for example Eve Kendal, the character portrayed by Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, who turns out to be a government agent, who has really been on the side of Cary Grant all along.

At all times Hitchcock is in control of his films. The famous shower scene depicted in Psycho, where Janet Leigh is murdered is not so much an attack upon the victim, but an attack on the viewer. Hitchcock's obsession with psychoanalysis dominates most of his films and involves both the audience and the character portrayed. His artist's sense that murder shouldn't be gratuitous is often solved by surrealism. In the shower-murder scene in Psycho, the victim lies dying upon as Hitchcock described it, "blindingly white" tiles, underneath the shower nozzle which acts as a halo, thus alerting us to a picture of angels previously seen earlier on the wall, along with a stuffed bird whose knife-like beak is poised menacingly. With all these clues, the audience can clearly read the message.

The idea that a story can be told effectively and economically without a word being spoken defines Hitchcock's concept of 'pure cinema'. Of course, he allowed that sound including dialogue and music, should be included. He believed that a movie shouldn't just be "pictures of people talking", and the visuals just decoration...he believed that movies should be complementary pieces of film put together like notes of music make a melody.

A famous French film director, Francois Truffaut, summed up what made Hitchcock so unique..."it was impossible not to see that the love scenes were filmed like murder scenes, and the murder scenes like love scenes...it occurred to me that in Hitchcock cinema to make love and to die are the same."