Renowned as the "master of suspense", in 1964 Alfred Hitchcock told the BBC why it was his skill at playing with the audience's emotions and expectations that kept them glued to the screen. "I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen," film director Alfred Hitchcock told the BBC in 1964, when asked how he perfected his uncanny ability to keep cinema audiences on the edge of their seats. The film-maker, who would have turned 125 this week, was explaining to the BBC's Huw Wheldon that his deftness at building and maintaining cinematic suspense was rooted in his intuitive understanding of human psychology.
Hitchcock had, by this time, already revolutionised the thriller genre with a string of classic films that played on their audience's psyche, such as Vertigo , Psycho and Strangers on a Train. A master at the art of slowly ratcheting up tension on screen, he believed the key to suspense was not merely shocking the viewers but subtly manipulating their perception and emotions. In his movie scenes, he would slowly build a mounting escalation of threat, stretching out the audience's anxiety that something terrible could occur at any moment.
Then when the pay-off finally happens, cinemagoers would be flooded with an intense feeling of relief. In a creepy sequence in 1963's The Birds, where the creatures suddenly start making bizarre and unexplained violent attacks on people, Hitchcock had demonstrated this art. In the scene, Tipp.