The Wrong House - The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (second edition)

Having worked as a set designer in the early 1920s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films, which feature a remarkable collection of Victorian manors, suburban dwellings, modernist villas, urban mansions, and posh penthouses. In addition, Hitchcock emphatically used architectural motifs such as stairs and windows, transforming the house into a place of anxiety or disturbance. Particularly his gothic melodramas of the 1940s such as Rebecca, Suspicion, or Shadow of a Doubt, present the house as an uncanny labyrinth and a trap. Last but not least, some remarkable single-set films, such as Rope or Rear Window, explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen.