Alfred Hitchcock’s Missing Children: Genre, Auteurship, and Audience Address

Abstract

The title of this essay is provocative, seeming in some respects to run against the prevailing themes and inflections of this book. In what sense are children “missing” from Hitchcock’s films? Most obviously, in a purely literal sense, children appear prominently in a mere six Hitchcock films: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage (1936), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Birds (1963). To these six films we could add the highly suggestive cameo appearances in The Manxman (1929), Young and Innocent (1937), The Wrong Man (1957), and Marnie (1964). Finally, more abstrusely—but also more significantly in their centrality to the story—we should include the unseen, implied children of Psycho (1960), Frenzy (1972), and, to a lesser extent, Spellbound (1945). Altogether, this amounts to 13 films, from a total of 54 that Hitchcock directed in his long and illustrious career.