The Research on the Functions of Misleading on Suspense Setting -- Taking Hitchcock and the Psycho as Examples

Abstract

Hitchcock is considered as one of the most crucial film directors in history, since he has directed a series of successful suspense films and created many theories about them. Therefore, doing research on his film will help deepen the cognition in suspense movies in the field of movie studies. This article aims to explore Hitchcock’s suspense setting skills in film narratology. The author takes the Psycho, which is one of Hitchcock’s representative works as an example, and uses literature reading as well as some film theories to analyze the methods in suspense setting by Hitchcock. The article can be divided into four parts. The first part is the introduction. The second part is the introduction of Hitchcock and his Psycho. The third part shows analyses on Hitchcock’s suspense setting in Psycho. The last part is about Hitchcock’s effects on the following directors. Through the four parts’ analyses, the author discovered that Hitchcock’s suspense setting has a feature to use certain sounds or paintings to mislead the audience’s conjecture to the plot. The author calls this “misleading” and finds that there are still few system theories to describe it. The author makes some analyses about the misleading in suspense setting in Psycho in this article and hopes it can help following researchers when doing further research.