15. Alfred Hitchcock created an atmosphere and style which bears his name
The term Hitchcockian is applied to film, television presentations, literature, and real life circumstances, though it is a term that defies definition. Or at least it defies limitation. It can refer to atmosphere, and in doing so it can mean frightening, ironic, tongue-in cheek, terrifying, lightly humorous, dramatic, melodramatic, whimsical, preposterous, improbable, one can select whatever mood one wishes and the term can be made to apply. He made movies in his younger days in England, many of which became classics, after which he moved to the United States and remade several, turning them into classics again. Hitchcock created scenarios where the borderline between sanity and insanity became indistinct, others in which it couldn’t be more clear, and still others where it didn’t seem to matter.
His influence on filmmakers of later generations is immeasurable. Unlike most filmmakers, Hitchcock often chose to shoot his films by recording the scenes in the same order in which they appeared in the final edit of the movie. He was so hands-on regarding his work and its presentation that he went so far as to work with the designers creating the advertising posters for his films, his input being submitted to designers he insisted on hiring since they were among the best of the time. Hitchcock often used well-known icons as settings in his films – the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore – for example, and in the process became an icon himself, one of the world’s most recognizable figures from the late 1940s onward, including decades after his death in 1980. He is credited with creating a camera angle which bears another use of the term Hitchcockian, one in which it appears that the view of the camera is one of the audience, allowing film-viewers to become, temporarily at least, voyeurs.