HitchCon president Joel Gunz dishes the dirt on HitchCon '23 while dealing with a very annoying farmhand. More details and tickets at HitchCon.org.

Explore the multiverse of Hitchcock's imagination where love, sacrifice and the unknown await in every dimension. Combining special effects with impeccably researched analysis, Joel Gunz follows one seemingly recurring character through the director's film and television worlds to discover that a...

When two students are summoned to the office of their headmaster due to a sexual impropriety in "Downhill" (1927), Hitchcock uses the sequence to establish an innovative approach to visual storytelling. Playwright and NYU graduate student Jeff Hughes analyzes this important sequence, juxtaposing...

Joel Gunz—President & Host, HitchCon & MacGuffin Media and Publisher, The Hitchcockian Quarterly—explains the meaning behind this year's International Alfred Hitchcock Conference theme.

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In this sensitively developed talk, U. C. Berkeley professor Marilyn Fabe examines the psychological themes of J. M. Barrie’s play that Hitchcock tried and repeatedly failed to adapt to the screen. She argues compellingly that the director’s failure to make "Mary Rose" into a film was due not onl...

The struggle to survive intensifies as a motley group of castaways seek rescue in Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" (1944). When they inadvertently bring an enemy soldier aboard, tensions rise, challenging their capacity for trust and their sense of morality. In this talk, Katy Coakley explores their...

Alfred Hitchcock's "I Confess" (1953) is a mixture of Hollywood melodrama and sublime Christianity, and as secrets unravel and moral dilemmas unfold, Hitchcock's camera traces the intersection of faith, morality and human frailty. In this talk, City University, Hong Kong, professor Richard Allen ...

Alfred Hitchcock once confessed to Francois Truffaut that "Rebecca" (1940), is a Cinderella story. In fact, as HitchCon Advisory Board member and instructor at City Colleges of Chicago and Dominican University Elizabeth L. Bullock here engagingly argues, fairy tale motifs radiate through the film...

"You know the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts." Alfred Hitchcock often talked about audiences in this way, like puppets under his control. In this talk, professor Todd Berliner speaks from the University of N...

Alfred Hitchcock's enduring artistic greatness partly lies in his films' capacity for self-critique. Through character dialogue and self-reflexive structures, he challenges superficial conventions, inviting viewers to question societal norms. In this talk by Drexel University English Professor Pa...

In "Psycho" (1960), several characters break "Arbogast’s Law" that a story, like a proper aspic, must jell. U.C. Santa Cruz Professor H. Marshall Leicester explores how these figures mistakenly expect the others to behave according to genre fiction conventions. Such derailments of the narrative c...

Inspired by a cruise he took with friends and family, Alfred Hitchcock’s "Rich and Strange" (1931) was to be his most original, expansive and personal film to date. HitchCon Advisory Board Member Pat McFadden argues that, while it doesn’t always hit all those marks, "Rich and Strange" is a treasu...

In casting all-American war hero James Stewart as Rupert Cadell, the bookish schoolmaster and central authority in "Rope" (1948), Hitchcock creates the expectation that he will be the hero of this film as well. However, Cadell proceeds to upend those presumptions. This talk by Rebecca McCallum, h...

No other director is more strongly associated with storyboarding than Sir Alfred Hitchcock. These preproduction artworks were essential to his storytelling art. Ahead of the publication of his new book, “Alfred Hitchcock: Storyboards,” author Tony Lee Moral takes us through the highlights of Hitc...

Sophocles’ Oedipus the King informs Hitchcock’s "I Confess" (1953). Both works feature priests, an investigator and government officials and share themes concerning sight, walking, human knowledge and taboo sexuality. Join Christopher Newport University classics professor Mark W. Padilla for this...

Pace University Professors Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick—a.k.a. The Two Walters—joined screenwriter Evan Hunter (“The Birds,” 1963) at an Italian restaurant in New York City and recorded the whole thing. In this interview with HitchCon host Joel Gunz—and interspersed with clips from those...

William Rothman, author of "Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze" examines Thornton Wilder's screenplay for "Shadow of a Doubt" to ferret out the great playwright's impact on the film.

Learn more about William Rothman.