“People talk about Hitchcock all the time being so influential,” director Brian De Palma said of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock in the 2015 documentary De Palma. “Here’s a guy that developed those incredible visual storytelling vocabularies and it’s going to die with him. I was the one practitioner who took up the things that he pioneered and built them into different forms and a style that I was evolving. It’s like a whole modern form that he created!”
De Palma, perhaps the most violently innovative cinematic visual stylist of the 20th century’s second half, has long been critiqued for copying the style of the English filmmaker and “the Master of Suspense”. However, what many critics deride as plagiarism is, in fact, evolution. Hitchcock, across more than 50 films spanning six decades and such varied genres as psychological thrillers, spy films, horror, film noir, comedy and gothic romance, invented an entirely unique visual language; why, De Palma asks, should we let an entire artistic language die with its creator?
It’s a question many other directors have also asked and answered with their own films, both during and after Hitchcock’s long lifetime, using his thrilling cinegrammar as a means to develop their own: artists as diverse as De Palma, John Woo, Jonathan Demme, Pedro Almodóvar, Park Chan-wook, Curtis Hanson and Bette Gordon. To celebrate that visual grammar, those films and Hitchcock’s 127th birthday, here are twenty watchlist-ready films (excluding direct remakes; apologies to A Perfect Murder and Psycho ’98 fans) that all explore what it means to be “Hitchcockian.”