How They Became Famous Alfred Hitchcock will forever be tied to one particular type of cinema. The suspense thriller. But it is more than a film genre he has become associated with, it is a feeling or technique, a sense of dread that has since been termed 'Hitchcockian'. The term can be dropped into conversation with any film lover and they'll know basically what you're talking about. The effect depended on an editing technique which cut away from extreme violence in imaginative ways, leaving the true horror of what was happening in the film to play out in the viewer's imagination, rather than on screen. This was exemplified in Psycho, a horror movie which includes the murder of several different characters without technically showing any violence, while still leaving the audience in no doubt as to what had happened. What They Did Next Hitchcock had built a career on this technique, if not in Psycho, then in more suspenseful pieces such as Vertigo and Rear Window. Frenzy, however, was a complete departure, or rather, an abandonment of these principles. While Hitch had spent decades criticizing directors for gratuitous sex and violence this film released towards the end of his career in 1972 was gritty and brutal, as the title suggests. Every act of sex or violence appeared on screen for the first time in the director's career. It was by no means a bad movie, but it paled in comparison to Vertigo, North By Northwest and Psycho. Whether it was late-career experimentation, or a final effort to regain relevance in an increasingly violent, 70s cinematic landscape is difficult to say.
