In closing the "Introduction" to Hitchcock, his book of interviews with the "master of suspense," Francois Truffaut suggests that "Hitchcock belongs...among such artists of anxiety as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Poe" (15). While Truffaut notes a connection between Hitchcock and Poe, as have others, Truffaut fails to develop this somewhat obvious link between the two artists who, before the advent of Stephen King, were most identified in the public mind with horror and suspense. The purpose of this study is to present a preliminary exploration of the mostly overlooked and generally underestimated influence of Poe on Hitchcock. While not Hitchcock's only influence, Poe has contributed significant and unmistakable impulses to Hitchcock's work.[1] After examining similarities such as their common concern with audience response as a central aesthetic guide and their obsession with the irrational, I will demonstrate Poe's particular influence on what many consider Hitchcock's greatest masterpiece, Vertigo. This will lead finally to insights about Hitchcock's peculiar uses of Poe.

Perhaps because the French have long admired Poe, they were the first to see his influence on Hitchcock, another of their foreign culture heroes. In addition to Truffaut, Rohmer and Chabrol, for example, briefly note that in Strangers on a Train related imagery connects Bruno's Oedipal compulsions with Poe's fascination with Berenice's teeth. They also spot connections between the runaway carrousel in Strangers and Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (108-09). More recently, general thematic links are lightly touched on by Donald Spoto, who finds Hitchcock's theme of the dead's influence over the living reminiscent of Poe (Art 122), and Gabriel Miller, who sees Hitchcock's old houses, like those in Poe, as reflections of their inhabitants (36). Charles Thomas Samuels, on the other hand, mentions similarities between the artists in order to point out what he considers Hitchcock's cinematic offenses: "Like Poe, the writer he most resembles, Hitchcock is obsessed by a small stock of situations which we can mistake for themes" (297).[2] Even in Poe criticism, the connection has been made, though again undeveloped. Stephen Railton suggests that Hitchcock's brand of manipulative cinema descends "lineally" from Poe (138). While no single critic discovers a significant pattern of influence, taken together these insights convincingly establish Hitchcock's debt to Poe and establish a need for further exploration.

That none of these commentators have remarked on the implications of these connections between Poe and Hitchcock is surprising considering Hitchcock's own frank confession of Poe's importance to his artistic development, particularly on his decision to make films:

At sixteen I discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. I happened to read first his biography, and the sadness of his life made a great impression on me. I felt an enormous pity for him, because in spite of his talent he had never been happy....

When I came home from the office where I worked I went straight to my room, took the cheap edition of his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and began to read. I still remember my feelings when I finished "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." I was afraid, but this fear made me discover something I've never forgotten since: fear, you see, is an emotion people like to feel when they know they're safe....

Very likely it's because I was so taken with the Poe stories that I later made suspense films. I don't want to seem immodest, but I can't help comparing what I've tried to put in my films with what Edgar Allan Poe put in his novels [sic]: a completely unbelievable story told to the readers with such a spellbinding logic that you get the impression that the same thing could happen to you tomorrow. (qtd. in Spoto, Dark Side 39)

Notably, Hitchcock discovers Poe's significance for his own art in his focus on audience, satisfying its desire for a fearful yet safe cinematic experience. He also notes Poe's method of manipulating audience reactions to fear through "spellbinding logic," a practice that Hitchcock took so seriously in creating tight narratives that his techniques are considered pre-eminent. Interestingly, his mention of "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" and "The Gold Bug"--neither of which, in fact, was included in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque-suggests that his interest in Poe went beyond that single volume of tales. Hitchcock further remarks that he was particularly taken with Poe's mysteries, discovering in them lessons about audience response and the joy in safe terror that became the origins of his desire to make suspense films. In fact, a great many of Hitchcock's films are structured as mysteries. In addition to more traditional mysteries like Murder and The Lady Vanishes, even Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo are structured as mysteries laced with his own brand of horror and violence.

Hitchcock reveals the depth of his thought on Poe and further indirect dimensions of his influence as he speaks of other sources of his style through what he identifies as the Poe-inspired surrealism of filmmakers Bunuel, Clair, Epstein, and Cocteau: "I was influenced by all this, as you can tell by certain dream and fantasy sequences in some of my films."

In addition to surrealism, Hitchcock traces his interest in suspense to Poe:

But both Poe> and I are prisoners of the suspense genre. If I made Cinderella into a movie, everyone would look for a corpse. And if Poe had written Sleeping Beauty they'd be looking for a murderer! (qtd. in Spoto, Dark Side 40)[3]

Unsurprisingly, Hitchcock learns much from Poe about creating and sustaining narrative suspense.[4] Likely from Poe Hitchcock learned to focus audience attention on significant objects. The key in Notorious, the glass of milk in Suspicion, the knife in Sabotage are for Hitchcock what the eye in "The Tell-Tale Heart," the letter in "The Purloined Letter," and the teeth in "Berenice" are for Poe. Plots thicken and revolve around these objects as they assume significance for characterization and force audiences into states of increased tension. Another technique for building suspense used by both artists is allowing the audience to know more than the protagonists. We know, for example, in "Ligeia" and "House of Usher" before the principals that Ligeia and Madeleine will rise from the dead just as we know in Rear Window that Thorwald has entered his apartment before Lisa becomes aware of it. In such situations Hitchcock often adds the entertaining twist that the audience only thinks they know more than the character on screen. Hence, Lila Crane enters the fruit cellar to a dead rather than a living Mrs. Bates, while the sound of Marnie's shoe dropping falls on deaf ears only.

Additionally, unbearable predicaments that threaten characters with physical violence are mainstream suspense situations for both storytellers. In Poe's ouvre we find decapitation by the hands of a clock ("The Predicament"), premature burial, slicing in half ("The Pit and the Pendulum"), and drowning in a whirlpool ("A Descent into the Maelstrom"). Compare such situations with Roger and Eve hanging from Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest), Guy Haines fighting for his life on a speeding carrousel (Strangers), and Melanie being attacked in an upper room in The Birds. For both Poe and Hitchcock, the development of such suspense sequences depends heavily on tightly controlling audience attention and reactions. In a recent article on Poe's manipulation of reader response in his poetry, James Postema describes how Poe circumscribes reader interpretive freedom, concluding that "readers do not interpret here; they simply read" (68-75). The same could certainly be said of Hitchcock, whose tight rein on the actors as well as the camera limit subjective responses that might dilute the suspense.

Despite Hitchcock's confession of the importance of Poe's work on his own concern with suspense, that influence lies not so much in specific techniques or images as in a continued and lively interest in realizing his own theories and techniques of audience manipulation. Hitchcock was never satisfied with merely translating Poe's techniques to the screen. For instance, he discovers for himself the value of avoiding traditional Gothic settings as a means of upsetting audience expectations about where and how terror can strike (the broad daylight attack of the small plane in North by Northwest is perhaps the definitive instance of this). He also discovered early on that, contrary to Poe, suspense could be increased by giving away the nub of the mystery before the end of the story so that the audience can experience both the pleasures and horrors of knowing more than the protagonist.

Nevertheless, even this innovation reveals a very basic lesson Hitchcock learned from Poe--the importance of focusing on the audience in the creation of "effect," the central principle around which every other element of a text becomes subservient ("Philosophy of Composition" 13). It is interesting to note in this context that Poe himself conceived of his carefully planned writings in theatrical terms:

Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--and ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes... at the wheels and pinions--the tackle for scene-shifting--the step-ladders and demontraps--the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio. (qtd. in "Philosophy of Composition" 14)

Hitchcock learned this lesson so well that as Truffaut notes, he is "universally acknowledged to be the world's foremost technician" (11). His pre-cut productions are planned to the point that, as Hitchcock himself said, "I can hear [the audience] screaming when I'm making the picture" (qtd. in Harris and Lasky 18). Both artists recognized the necessity of a sublimely crafted art in order to involve and manipulate audience emotions and create suspense.

Their mutual obsession with the irrational provided a subject matter that further created audience unease and provided infinite possibilities for building suspense into their narratives. For both Hitchcock and Poe, people were often motivated by irrational obsessions, guilt, and what Poe would call the "Imp of the Perverse." In several stories by Poe and Hitchcock, characters are obsessed with murder or love, often seeking to kill that which they love (Poe's "The Assignation" and Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt are two examples). Again in the work of both, guilt leads to irrational behavior ("William Wilson" and "Usher" in Poe and The Wrong Man and Spellbound in Hitchcock). Finally, Hitchcock learned of the terrors of self-destructive imps of the perverse from Poe. From the narrator's pounding the wall in which he had buried his wife in "The Black Cat" to the narrator's marrying a woman he hates in "Ligeia," Poe describes human beings who irrationally do the opposite of what would benefit them, simply because they "feel perverse."

Hitchcock also explores this darkly fascinating aspect of humanity in several films, including Marion Crane's crime in Psycho, the thrill murder in Rope, Alicia's waywardness in Notorious and Alice's in Blackmail.

For both Poe and Hitchcock, articulating the remote nightmares of consciousness is the central concern and activating reality of their works in one way or another. Both document the disintegration of the mind--Poe with his insane narrators ("Ligeia" and "William Wilson") and Hitchcock with his psychiatric patients and homicidal maniacs (Spellbound and Frenzy). Most important, however, is how they each use these characters to challenge audience complacency. In Poe, the cool logic and suave intelligence of many of the mad narrators seems meant to unsettle our own mental quietude. On the other hand, Hitchcock takes us a step further into dangerous territory by duping us into rooting for the criminally in-sane--hoping Norman can successfully bury Marion Crane's car and that Marnie will elude the cleaning woman. Such occasions force viewers to question their own character, and perhaps to doubt their own stability.[5]

Arguably Hitchcock's most effective study of the irrational, Vertigo, is based on a French novel titled D'entre les morts (1954, translated into English as The Living and the Dead). The co-authors, Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau, were theorists of the detective novel (and admirers of both Poe and Hitchcock) who put their ideas into action by collaborating on their first novel, Celle qui n'etait plus (1952), brought to the French screen as Les Diaboliques. Thinking that D'entre les morts might interest Hitchcock--in fact Truffaut claims that it was "especially written so that [Hitchcock] might do a screen version of it"-they sent him the book, the rights of which he had Paramount buy immediately and soon prepared a treatment for the screen (183). The intimate connection between Poe and Hitchcock is fully realized in D'entre les morts, in which the French authors ingeniously synthesize elements from both masters of suspense. Within its murder plot are displaced elements from Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia" and "Man of the Crowd," as well as thematic and structural borrowings from Hitchcock's Spellbound, Dial M, and Rebecca.

In its most general outline, the following plot summary applies equally to "Usher" and D'entre les morts: a mysterious woman named Madeleine, who has a strange and incurable illness, dies. However, she continues to function as an irrational obsession for the protagonist until she finally returns from the dead, only to die once more. Plot and thematic details that link "Usher" to D'entre certainly suggest conscious reference. First, both the "Usher" narrator and the D'entre protagonist, Roger Flavieres, are summoned by old school friends with whom they have not had recent contact. Second, there is in the book, as in Poe's tale, an early sequence wherein Madeleine walks by Roger without apparently seeing him. Third, in both stories the plot hinges around the extraordinary mind diseases of Usher and Roger. Usher's insane physical sensitivity causes him to hear or imagine Madeleine clawing her way out of the tomb while Roger's nervousness and acrophobia prevent him from saving Madeleine, providing the key to a clever murder plot. Finally, death is precipitated in both by falling. In "Usher" the house sinks into the tarn while the first half of D'entre is climaxed by the falling death of Madeleine from a church tower.

D'entre is also reminiscent of other Poe tales. The "Ligeia" aspects of the book are found in Madeleine's apparent possession by a dead woman and the emphasis upon the protagonist's all-consuming and dizzying obsession with Madeleine after her death, leading to his willing her back to life in a dramatic transformation sequence. Finally, the protagonist's incessant following of Madeleine in her apparently aimless wanderings reminds one of "A Man of the Crowd," in which the narrator follows a mysterious stranger through a city for days.

In addition to such obvious allusions to Poe, D'entre is also filled with classic Hitchcock concerns. Like Spellbound the novel is a psychological thriller centered around madness, guilt, a fear of heights and a love obsession with a person whose identity is in doubt. Also like the film, the novel ends with a surprising twist in revealing the underlying plot that explains many of the events in the story. The obsession with the dead and an elaborate scheme for murdering one's wife in D'entre have their precedents as well in Rebecca and Dial M. Even the book's situation of a basically innocent, if flawed, man lured into a complex web of intrigue echoes 39 Steps and Saboteur. Hitchcock would indeed have found such a combination of congenial Poe-esque and personal narrative patterns packed into one book irresistible.

In translating the Narcejac/Boileau book to the screen Hitchcock made a number of changes, some of which suggest Hitchcock's conceptual debt to Poe. First, in Vertigo, the fear of heights becomes a central issue as Scotty's acrophobia develops as both his fear of physical falling and his fear of falling in love uncontrollably, both fears foreshadowing and reflecting his fall from sanity.[6] In addition, moving the setting from Paris to the hilly San Francisco Bay Area enabled Hitchcock to support visually his increased emphasis on the theme of Scotty's fear of heights (particularly with shots of Coit Tower, the low-angle view f the Golden Gate Bridge, and the big trees of Big Basin). Further reinforcing this imagery, the film begins and ends with someone falling to their death. This visual and narrative emphasis on Scotty's vertigo which goes far beyond the original book's focus on Roger's neurotic nervousness--links the film more strongly than the book with "Usher." Like the Poe tale, wherein Usher himself and the family house are perpetually described as on the verge of crumbling to a fall, Scotty's deteriorating condition puts the audience on edge throughout the film, thus heightening its suspense.

Second, Hitchcock puts much more emphasis on the transformation from Judy/Renee back to Madeleine than is found in D'entre. Like Poe's "Ligeia," which ends with the dramatic and horrifying transformation/possession of the dead Rowena Trevanian into the Lady Ligeia, Vertigo builds up the piecemeal changes in clothes, make-up, and hair color as Judy turns back into Madeleine. When she finally emerges from the misty green light of her hotel room, fully transformed, she appears as one returned from the dead or walking into reality from a dream: "I wanted her to emerge from that bathroom as a ghost..." (qtd. in Spoto, Art 296). In both cases, the transformations are accompanied by the increased emotional instability of the protagonists. Hitchcock reveals his awareness of the resurrection motif in his stated reason for interest in the story--"I was intrigued by the hero's attempts to re-create the image of a dead woman"--which seems inevitably to have been stirred by his early keen interest in Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which included "Ligeia," "Morella," and "Metzengerstein," all of which involve the returning of the dead (Truffaut 184).[7]

A third difference between the original book and Vertigo is that Hitchcock echoes the reverse Christian imagery of Poe's tale. In "Usher," Madeline's death and "resurrection" become a dark inversion of the Biblical resurrection--a woman whose rising causes fear, insanity, and death rather than life and hope. In addition, the whirlwind, "blood-red moon," and "shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters" are apocalyptic images announcing the second coming. Finally, rather than ascending into heaven after her resurrection, Madeline descends with her brother and the house into the oblivion of the tarn (McMichael 957). In Vertigo, as Lesley Brill notes, the failure of redemptive love is also reflected in a number of inverted Christian images. In particular, punctuating Madeleine's part in a murder scheme and Scottie's naive and worshipful innocence, Hitchcock associates her ironically with Christian images--including her leading Scottie to two churches and floating with her arms in the form of a cross in her decidedly unredeeming baptism in San Francisco Bay (Brill 211-12). A final divine irony occurs with Judy's death at the appearance of a nun.

After reviewing the influence of Poe's artistry on Hitchcock and comparing Vertigo to its Poe-esque antecedents, it is interesting to speculate as to why Hitchcock was influenced so significantly by Poe. Perhaps there is an important clue in Hitchcock's pity for Poe: "the sadness of his life made a great impression on me." Inevitably the young Hitchcock would, like so many others, have associated Poe with his tortured narrator/protagonists, learning valuable lessons in converting private pain into artistic structures. In tales such as "Ligeia" and "Usher" Poe meditates on the character of the artist which reflects his own inextinguishable sense of loss at the death of his mother.[8] In "Ligeia," the narrator is studying under a muse figure who inspires and directs his transcendental learning. His longing for this ideal figure after her death, leading to his grotesque dream bowers with their untraceable interior style, is analogous to the reaching for realms "out of space and out of time" that Poe claims is the province of the poet. Similarly, Roderick Usher paints, strums, and writes with inspired abandon as he slowly deteriorates toward the oblivion of his submerged dreamland. Art then, for Poe, can be a window through which to either glimpse or escape this world.

Perhaps even more than Poe, Hitchcock expressed and ordered his own chaotic psyche in his art. In his pity for Poe's sad though artistic life, Hitchcock hints at frustrations and fears that his own talent and wealth never seemed to alleviate. Often these took the form of fears of uncontrollable behaviors, what Poe would call "imps of the perverse." Hitchcock was filled with terrors, romantic and otherwise. As Truffaut characterizes him, he was a "vulnerable, sensitive, emotional man" (9). Since boyhood he had a phobia of policemen and jails, both of which he incorporated in films like Murder, The Paradine Case, and The Wrong Man. And like Poe, whose alcoholic imp eventually did him in, Hitchcock contended with his own demons. Besides his intense sense of vulnerability, Hitchcock particularly suffered from romantic fantasies that twice left their mark. During the shooting of Under Capricorn he succumbed to the glory of casting Ingrid Bergman, admitting that he was "literally intoxicated" and that his behavior was "stupid and juvenile" (qtd. in Truffaut 135-56). While filming Marnie he again lost his carefully protected surface of self control by throwing himself shamelessly at an embarrassed but resistant Tippi Hedren. Like Scotty, Hitchcock became disoriented and dizzy in his obsessions, finally allowing his life to imitate his art.

BothPoe and Hitchcock included innumerable images of falling in their work, suggesting other nameless fears around which they could create and express themselves artistically. Thus, as earlier mentioned, in "Usher" and Vertigo being spellbound by a mental disease--based on the fear of death and of falling--serves as a metaphor for artistic creativity. Following Marnie (1964), in a literal fall, Hitchcock would not regain his cinematic form for eight years until Frenzy (1972). For Poe and Hitchcock, art became the one medium in which control could be asserted over emotions that could hardly be controlled in real life.

Hitchcock, too, is well-known as a self-reflexive filmmaker who often creates his characters as artist stand-ins for himself. In Rear Window, for example, he posits himself in the film as the voyeuristic L.B. Jeffries, seeing in his neighbors' windows a series of cinematic vignettes through the high-powered keyhole/lens of a camera. In Vertigo he depicts through Scottie's recreation of Madeleine his own obsession for visual realization, particularly his careful creation of blonde female stars by personally overseeing every detail of their clothes, hair styles, shoes, make-up, etc. The recreation of Madeleine is an allegory of what Hitchcock did with Grace Kelly and foreshadows his Svengali-like work with Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren. As with Poe's troubled narrators, these artist figures seek escape from the press of ordinary and painful realities.

In summary, for both Poe and Hitchcock process and story meet in their art as self expression. Their links go beyond any conscious influence Poe may have exerted over Hitchcock, and is also traceable to Hitchcock's conscious and unconscious sympathy with Poe's sad lack of fulfillment. For Hitchcock, Poe's craftsmanship became the impetus for developing his own theories and style. In the works of each, art empowers self expression, becoming the route through an "ultimate dim Thule" into dream worlds of contentment and of control denied both writer and director in their own peculiarly tormented lives.

Notes

1 In addition to Kafka and Dostoyevsky, whom Truffaut notes as influences, Donald Spoto mentions Chesterton and Flaubert as forces in Hitchcock's artistic development (Dark Side 40-42).

2 In addition to those mentioned, the following works make mention of Poe in connection with Hitchcock's work: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1992): 114; Tom Ryall's Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986): 120; Theodore Price's Hitchcock and Homosexuality (Metuchen. NJ: Scarecrow P. 1992): 239, 264; and David Sterritt's The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993): 107.

3 In this connection it is interesting to realize that Hitchcock actually did make several movies that are variations of the Cinderella story, including Under Capricorn, Rebecca, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, and Marnie--all about victimized females who must be rescued by a handsome prince figure.

4 On another occasion, when being interviewed by Otis Ferguson in 1939, he reiterated his interest in the short story (which he later compared in format to films in the Truffaut interviews), hoping to create a format for short pieces like "the Poe thrillers, the horrific stories." He of course fulfills his ambition years later with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a series of television short stories with O. Henry's twists and Poe's horror (Spoto, Dark Side 182).

5 See Thomas M Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991): 33. He describes how Hitchcock relates with his audience with "invitations to interactions."

6 See Leitch's discussion of Scotty's fear of a relationship he cannot control and his inability to fall in love (197205).

7 Interestingly, in the same discussion of the film, Hitchcock summarizes Scotty's desire to change Judy into the dead Madeleine: "To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who's dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia" (186). It is perhaps not unlikely that Hitchcock is recalling Poe's famous poem "Anabelle Lee," about a man who sleeps with his dead lover in her grave.

8 Poe's sense of loss and its major influence on his work and his tortured life is the thesis of Kenneth Silverman's Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991 ).

Works Cited

Brill, Lesley. The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

Harris, Robert A., and Michael S. Lasky. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel P, 1980.

McMichael. George, ed. Anthology of American Literature, 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan, 1985.

Miller, Gabriel. "Beyond the Frame: Hitchcock, Art, and the Ideal." Post Script 5.2 (Winter 1986).

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Philosophy of Composition." In Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews. T.O. Mabbott, ed., New York. Library Classics, 1984.

Postema, James. "Edgar Allan Poe's Control of Readers: Formal Pressures in Poe's Dream Poems." Essays in Literature 18 (1991): 68-75.

Railton, Stephen. Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. Trans. Stanley Hochman. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979.

Samuels, Charles Thomas. "Hitchcock." The American Scholar 39 (Spring 1970).

Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976.

-----. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983.