With Rebecca, the "Hitchcock touch," which has previously been merely a distinguishing feature, becomes a vision of the world. Spontaneity submits to a system. This is a critical moment for an artist, for he must not develop tics, a pedagogical fury. Hitchcock was to avoid these traps. From now on, the two poles of his future work—because we can now talk of a body of work—are clear. One is fascination, moral captation—in other words, depersonalization, schism: in psychoanalytic terms, schizophrenia; in philosophic terms, amoralism; in Baudelairean terms, the assumption of evil, damnation. The other pole is its opposite: knowledge—or, more exactly, reknowledge—of self, unity of being, acceptance, confession, absolute communion. (p. 58)

Alfred Hitchcock's stories come from a great variety of sources, but very early on, he began to alter them in his own way, setting to work on the double job of purifying...