Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho and the Question of Madness

On the 29th of April 1980, Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock died aged 80 in Bel Air, California. Justifiably crowned with the title of the master of suspense, he produced and directed some of the most iconic films in the history of world cinema. The magazine MovieMaker, for example, has described him as the most influential filmmaker of all time. Therefore, it is hard to believe that prior to the 1960s majority of American film critics and scholars refused to rank Hitchcock’s films as ‘serious art’, mostly for the fact that the ‘thriller’ genre had not been treated as artistically significant at the time. Since the 1930s until the early 1960s Hitchcock was perceived more as a master craftsman rather than a serious artist. Even such a memorable film as Vertigo, first released in 1958, had to wait for its much deserved reappraisal until the beginning of the…