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A Beginner’s Guide to Hitchcock

By Jason Bailey on

It’s a very big fall for fans of Alfred Hitchcock. First and foremost, Universal has released Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection, a fabulous 15-disc limited edition Blu-ray set featuring several of Hitch’s masterpieces (including Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho, and North by Northwest) in gorgeous HD transfers, with copious bonus features. And while his work is available for fresh consumption, there are a pair of new biography treatments as well — on the small screen, we have HBO’s The Girl (with Toby Jones as a rather skeevy Hitch and Sienna Miller as ‘Tippi’ Hedrin), while next week brings the theatrical release of a marvelous new big-screen biopic, Hitchcock (focusing on the production of Psycho, with Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, Helen Mirren as wife Alma, and Scarlett Johannson as Janet Leigh).

That’s a lot of Mr. Hitchcock to take in at once, but we’re here to help. If your knowledge of Hitch is confined to a shower scene and a flock of diving seagulls, you’re in luck; we’ve put together a Beginner’s Guide to Hitchcock, earmarking his major motifs, significant films, and relevant facts. Check it out after the jump. … Read More

Film

10 Classic Horror Stars’ Spooky Grave Sites

By Emily Temple on

It’s rather fitting that Bela Lugosi, the legendary Hungarian horror villain, whose image is synonymous with Dracula (at least in our minds), was born just eleven days before Halloween. Today would have been the actor’s 130th birthday, but being a human, and not truly an undead night walker, of course, Lugosi is no longer with us. To honor the man and the month, we’ve put together a collection of classic horror stars’ grave sites, from well-maintained headstones to simple markers to unmarked drawers in private crematoriums. Click through to take a spooky tour of the final resting places of some of your favorite scream kings and queens, without any of the dangers that attend wandering graveyards in late October. … Read More

Film

Hitchcock’s 10 Most Desirable Leading Ladies

By Jason Bailey on

Last weekend marked the 112th birthday of the great Alfred Hitchcock — as if you had to be told, what with all those birthday parties across the nation. To mark the occasion, we considered profiling several elements of the Hitchcock filmography: his technique, his influence, his cameos. But we ultimately settled, as we so often do, on sex.

Over the course of his 60-some feature films, Hitchcock worked with a dazzling array of beautiful women, most of them fitting what became the archetypal image of the “Hitchcock blonde” — smart, sexy, and sophisticated, yet icy and cool. Theories abound as to how and why this specific type of woman was so often his cinematic object of desire (Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius offers some of the more intriguing ones), but the man knew what he liked. After the jump, we’ll run down his ten most alluring muses. … Read More