A good place to start is with the kinds of stories that Hitchcock tells. Without a story there is no movie and the typical Hitchcock film would have a very outlandish and exotic storyline. In Hitchcock's movies, all of a sudden relatively normal people find themselves involved with murder, assassination attempts, and espionage. In The Lady Vanishes, Iris, who is in search of Miss Froy, gets tangled up in a plot to smuggle international spy secrets back to England. In Shadow of a Doubt, l

Hitchcock uses these storylines to relay a number of themes to his audience. Over his career Hitchcock has explored many different themes through his work, but I would like to take a look a just two of the themes that we might well find in the typical Hitchcock film. The first theme that we would likely see is that "shit happens" for no reason whatsoever. The main character will likely become a part of the story through no fault of his/her own. For example, in Strangers on a Train, Guy Haines gets involved in a murder scheme because a stranger started a conversation with him on his way home. In both The Wrong Man and North by Northwest, the lead males' worlds are thrown into disarray when they become objects of mistaken identity. The epitome of this theme is in The Birds when the birds of Bodega Bay and subsequently elsewhere in California begin attacking the citizens for a reason that is never explained.

Something we would most definitely see in the typical Hitchcock film would be the way Hitchcock structures the film. A common theme in almost all Hitchcock movies is that we (the audience) start from far out and go farther and farther in, both literally and psychologically. In The Lady Vanishes Hitchcock opens with long shots of the snowbound town and then closes in on it. In Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock crosscuts between long shots of little and Uncle Charlie's respective towns getting closer and closer until he enters into their bedrooms. Rope begins with a long shot of a street and then turns and pans to a close-up of a window. We then cut to a close-up of a murder. Finally, in Psycho, the camera begins on long shot of the city and then the camera pans and closes in on a hotel room and enters it. This all has to do with Hitchcock's idea of movie going, which is that when we watch a movie we chose to go from being outsiders into the very intimate/psychological happenings of a person's life. The logical next step to this concept is what has earned Hitchcock the label of being a very subjective director: his use of point of view shots. Hitchcock does more than let his viewers watch the characters from a distance. He actually brings his audience inside the heads of his characters and makes the viewer an active participant in his films. We see a strong use of point of view shots in Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Notorious. Another way he does this is by placing the viewer in a position where they are forced to identify with the main character because we know as much as they do. This is the case in The Lady Vanishes, The Wrong Man, and Vertigo where in all cases neither the main character nor us know exactly what is happening. All of this has to do with Hitchcock's interest in taking us from outside his character's worlds and bringing us into their deepest psychological depths. The characters Hitchcock uses have patterns of their own.

Another character that would likely be found in the typical Hitchcock film is the domineering/sadistic mother. In Strangers on a Train,

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