The Egyptian Theatre is proud to present HITCH! The Original Cinema Influencer, a summer screening series - series extended, with additional showtimes announced through August 7.

As horror and thrillers continue to dominate the box office, spawning ever more lucrative franchises, it’s worth tracing the roots of this enduring appeal. Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, didn’t single-handedly invent the horror genre, but the influences he drew from and the techniques he pioneered during his career still cast a long shadow over modern audiences’ ever-growing thirst for thrills and chills.

HITCH! The Original Cinema Influencer charts the chronological progression of Alfred Hitchcock’s technique and influence, beginning with his early films made in England. These include spy thrillers like Sabotage, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes. We’ll also showcase films by some of the German expressionist masters, including F.W. Murnau (The Last Laugh) and Fritz Lang (M), whose work Hitchcock studied during his time in the German film industry and informed his technique and style. Their inventive approach to visual storytelling—relying less on title cards or excessive dialogue—became a guiding principle in Hitchcock’s own filmmaking.

Hollywood would soon come calling for Hitchcock, pairing incredible star power with his increasingly virtuosic directorial style. This era would see him win his only Best Picture Oscar - for 1940’s Rebecca - and would be heavily influenced by World War II, seen clearly in spy thrillers like Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat.

The 1950s saw Hitchcock in peak form, with internationally beloved movie stars like Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Montgomery Clift, and Marlene Dietrich all lining up to headline some of the director’s most universally praised classics – from the pulse-pounding thriller Rear Window, to the psychological labyrinth of Vertigo, which frequently polls as one the greatest films ever made. But despite acclaim and success, Hitchcock’s appetite for grit, experimentation and boundary-pushing never waned, well into the 1960s where he completely upended audience expectations and helped launched horror as the popular genre it is today with the legendary Psycho, and delivered a vision of apocalyptic doom with The Birds. 

The later years of Hitchcock’s career saw the rise of films and filmmakers heavily influenced by the cinematic language and style he’d perfected. We’ll show films dripping with Hitchcock inspiration by master filmmakers like Francois Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black), Martin Scorsese (Cape Fear), Brian De Palma (Body Double), David Fincher (Gone Girl), Robert Zemeckis (What Lies Beneath), and more.

Be sure to catch as many of these enduring classics as you can - series extended through August 7.

Plus, a collection of classic Hitchcock films is now available to stream on Netflix in the US featuring some of his most iconic works. 
 

Part 2 of HITCH! The Original Cinema Influencer has been announced, including encore presentations of Dial M for Murder, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, and Suspicion, plus 35mm presentations of The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, Roman Polanski's Frantic, and Robert Zemeckis's What Lies Beneath.