Hitchcock's "Downhill" and the Origins of a Horror POV Aesthetic
HitchCon '23: Hitchcock Unbound
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15m
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 it with the first murder scene in John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978) to propose that perhaps Hitchcock could be credited with the establishment of the horror POV aesthetic half a century earlier.
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