To celebrate the upcoming 20-film retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock, Edmund Lee offers a beginner’s guide to the works of the legendary master of suspense.

A is for Auteur
From the ‘Vertigo zoom’ to the turn of a doorknob, Hitchcock’s signature style has made his films so eminently recognisable that he’s proclaimed by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics from France, such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, as the perfect model for their auteur theory.

B is for Bernard Herrmann
The great modernist composer Bernard Herrmann provided the score for every major Hitchcock movie from 1957 onwards. His relentless violin-stabs for Psycho’s (1960) murder scene remain one of the most violent sensory assaults in cinema history.

C is for Cameo
Watch out for that fat guy waiting for the phone, missing a bus, or just leisurely strolling past your screen. Making a total of 36 onscreen cameos beginning with The Lodger (1927), it’s fun to see Hitchcock squeeze in a walk-on in the most limited of sets, as in Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948).

D is for Doubles
The thin line between good and evil is sometimes blurred by Hitchcock’s intriguing dual characterisations. “We are like twins. We are both alike,” says niece Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) of her Uncle Charlie; except one of them is a lurking murderer. You can say the same about Strangers on a Train (1951).

E is for Edgar Allan Poe
Poe cast a long shadow over Hitchcock with their shared concerns of fear and obsession. Is it any accident that in both Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) a character named Madeleine dies in baffling circumstances before returning to haunt the protagonist?

F is for Family
Mother is “a boy’s best friend” in Hitchcock’s oppressively maternal world, an autobiographical reflection that ultimately sees the director unleash a series of bad mothers in Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train, The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), and, in a more uncomfortable way, Psycho.

G is for Gothic
Occasionally, Hitchcock delved into the darkest corners of the neurotic mind with his domestic gothic tales. An exemplary illustration of this is the award-winning gothic woman’s film, Rebecca (1940), which chronicles an entrapped young bride’s adaptation to the rules of her husband’s dead wife in a stately home.

H is for Humour
“Every film I make is a comedy,” Hitchcock once wrily remarked; and – his earlier films’ happy romantic endings aside – how can you argue with the sheer absurdity of his ‘black comedies’ when an innocent chap like Cary Grant, in North by Northwest (1959), finds himself hunted by a biplane on a bare Midwest prairie?

I is for Identity
Mistaken identities and false accusations permeate the films of Hitchcock, whose protagonists are often too busy clearing their names, as in Young and Innocent (1937), The 39 Steps (1935), Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest; although, it has to be said, these frantic occasions do often provide the perfect settings to meet your perfect woman.

J is for Janet Leigh
Undoubtedly one of the most iconic images in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Janet Leigh’s screaming face in Psycho capped a 45-second shower-murder sequence – consisting of 70 separate shots – that marked the unusually abrupt end to a major character, while spelling out the director’s slanted view on crime and punishment.

K is for Knowledge
In the world of Hitchcock, you don’t want to know too much. Shrouded with an acute sense of paranoia, his ordinary heroes are frequently put in great peril as a result of what they know. Ironic, of course, considering that the old lady who just had tea with you, in The Lady Vanishes (1938), is actually a spy who knows everything.

L is for Landmarks
Hitchcock loved the spectacular. In a pre-CGI universe, that means throwing Cary Grant into a deadly chase scene across Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest, aka The Man in Lincoln’s Nose). More set pieces happened at the British Museum (Blackmail, 1929), the Golden Gate Bridge (Vertigo) and the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur).

M is for McGuffin
The fancy name for a plot device made popular by the director, referring to an unspecified object that is nonetheless highly sought after by characters, thereby setting the story in motion. Examples range from the melody in The Lady Vanishes to the microfilms in North by Northwest.

N is for Necrophilia
For starters, it may be rather startling to learn that Vertigo, widely considered Hitchcock’s very best film, is interpreted by many scholars to be a story of necrophilia, in which James Stewart attempts to re-create the image of a dead woman through a live one.

O is for Oscars
Despite being one of the greatest directors to have worked in the Hollywood studio system, Hitchcock was never awarded an Oscar for Best Director. The five nominations he garnered were for Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho.

P is for Periods
The career of Hitchcock can be divided into two halves: the British years, which began with 1925’s The Pleasure Garden and ended with 1939’s Jamaica Inn, and the American years, which began with 1940’s Rebecca and ended with 1976’s Family Plot.

Q is for Queer
The homosexual undertones of Hitchcock’s pictures have long fascinated scholars of queer cinema. Implicit homosexual relationships are laden in The Lady Vanishes and Rope; while the name of Norman Bates, according to Psycho’s original author Robert Bloch, indicates that the killer “is neither woman nor man”.

R is for Remakes
Hitchcock recycled themes, shots, and even everyday objects throughout his career, so it felt almost natural when he remade his 1934 British film The Man Who Knew Too Much with James Stewart and Doris Day in 1956. Several of his films, such as Psycho and The Lady Vanishes, have been remade by other directors.

S is for Suspense
As Hitchcock famously explained to François Truffaut in an interview, “shock” is when a bomb suddenly explodes underneath a table where two people are sitting; while “suspense” is when a bomb is there, the audience knows it, and the two people keep on sitting there and chatting for the next 15 minutes.

T is for Tippi Hedren
Hitchcock was notorious for his infatuations with – and sadistic treatment of – his lead actresses. The charge came to a head with his infamous collaboration with Tippi Hedren on The Birds, and worsened with Marnie, when he reportedly made sexual propositions to his muse. They didn’t speak to each other again for the rest of the shoot.

U is for Unconscious
Partly to capitalise on the popularity of psychiatry at the time, and partly – you suspect – to tap into his own sense of guilt as a result of his religious upbringing, Hitchcock took the Freudian route for several titles, most notably Spellbound, a waking nightmare supplemented by Salvador Dalí’s surrealist imageries.

V is for Voyeurism
Movie viewing is often about satisfying the audience’s repressed fantasies, but no one has so openly legitimised the voyeuristic practice quite as Hitchcock did in Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window, which, as your film snob friends will tell you, are “films about watching”.

W is for Women
Taking his fetish for sophisticated blonde ladies – who, as he told Truffaut, “become whores once they’re in the bedroom” – to extremes, Hitchcock has been regularly condemned as a misogynist. Or maybe he just liked to watch blonde women in handcuffs.

X is for Xenophobia
Although the director had studied the art of cinema by watching films from Germany and Soviet Union, his films displayed traces of the prevalent war-time mentality, with his 1940s anti-Nazi films (The Lady Vanishes, Saboteur, Notorious) and his 60s anti-Communist films being prime examples.

Y is for Youth
Hitchcock liked to tell the childhood story of being locked up in a prison cell by his father at the age of five. His cinema, however, mostly operated in the adult world. Among the few titles featuring young people in important roles, Young and Innocent happened to be the director’s favourite among his British films.

Z is for Zoology
Given the animalistic emotions that simmer under the surface of Hitchcock’s cinema, you’d be surprised to find that animals, usually dead (Psycho), played only one star turn, in the quasi-supernatural thriller The Birds; even though, judging by Sean Connery’s turn as the quasi-zoologist in Marnie, women are the director’s wild animals waiting to be tamed.

The Alfred Hitchcock retrospective runs from September 10 to November 28. Visit here for full programme schedule. Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.