7. Alfred Hitchcock had several peculiar habits and mental quirks, none more so than his hatred and deep fear of chicken eggs
The movie director Alfred Hitchcock had a complex relationship with food. He would binge on steaks and ice cream but then would wallow in intense bouts of guilt and self-loathing. But nothing was so strange as his relationship with eggs. Put simply, Hitchcock suffered from ovophobia. He had a fear of eggs – and chicken eggs in particular terrified him.
“I’m frightened of eggs,” he famously once told an interviewer. “That white round thing without any holes…have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breathing and spilling its yellow liquid?” Quite what caused this strange phobia remains a mystery. Certainly, Hitchcock himself never admitted to any egg-related past trauma. Nor did he have any bad experiences eating eggs – in fact, he hated them despite the fact he had never even tried to eat one.
While his phobia of chicken eggs might have been Hitchcock’s most bizarre fear, it was by no means his only one. The Englishman was famously afraid of many different things. In fact, he reveled in his fears and phobias, using them as a creative force. For instance, he was scared of sex, was terrified of heights and even had a lifelong fear that he might be mistakenly arrested and locked up for good – a fear that allegedly dated back to his childhood when his father would have him locked up in a local police cell in order to teach him a lesson if he misbehaved.