Halloween with Hitchcock: Rear Window

By Lizzi

I complained yesterday that my problem with most horror films is the fact that they don't really try. Basically, you pick your terror: zombies, vampires, werewolves, killers, ghosts, or some combination of the two (an example being Freddie Krueger, who is both a ghost and a killer, since he's less transient than a ghost but more...dead...than a killer). Once you have that down, all you need is the basic formula to make that type of movie. After that, you're good to go, and you can scare millions without having to try hard.

But not if you're Alfred Hitchcock. There's a reason why many think he's one of the greatest directors: It's because he is. And so, it would not be fitting in a set of Halloween movies to not mention his greatness. He's is the king of thrillers because he is brilliant and he most definitely DOES try. Someone that can take something as simple as birds and make people terrified of them deserves recognition.

In Rear Window, Hitchcock manages to use the first shot to set you up for the tone of the movie and introduce you to the protagonist without any dialogue. The camera pans across an apartment building in the city so you can meet the neighbors. A man's alarm goes off, a couple wakes up on the balcony outside their apartment and wander in, a woman changes bras and begins to set up breakfast. We then pan into the apartment of L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart, and we can figure out his name because of a cast that reads, "Here lies the bones of L.B. Jeffries). He is asleep in a wheelchair and is wearing a cast on his leg. The camera then pans to a broken camera sitting underneath a black and white photograph of a car crash, which we infer to be how this man broke his leg. We then see more black and white photographs in picture frames. This man must be a photographer. The camera ends on a beautiful picture of a beautiful woman and a stack of magazines where her picture is on the cover. We will learn that this is Jeffries girlfriend, Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly).

We find out that we are correct, that Jeffries is a photographer who has been injured on a job. He has a week left in his cast, stuck in his house. He has been passing the time by looking out his window and watching his neighbors. The two visitors who frequent are his nurse (Stella) and Lisa, and both of them now know the stories of his neighbors that have entertained Jeffries for so long. One night, while he is watching, he hears a woman's scream, but cannot see anything that produced the scream. While he doesn't think much of this at the time, he begins to notice a neighbor's wife missing, and since she is extremely sick and on bed rest, he believes that her husband may have killed her.

There are two amazing things about this film. One is that almost the entire thing takes place in Jeffries' apartment. You see things through his eyes and only enter the other apartments from his view. The other is that the movie does not immediately start trying to scare you. The thriller part of the film does not really begin until the last half hour of the movie. The rest is building the story, letting you get to know the characters, and this allows you to feel even more terror, as you feel for these people.

The ultimate point of the film can be summed up in a line by Jeffries' nurse: "What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change." Throughout the film, Lisa wants to marry Jeffries, but Jeffries is undecided. As he looks at the lives of others, he is able to see the different relationships they have and analyze them all. While doing this, he is in the process of analyzing his own and deciding whether or not he could marry her. The real question becomes why is he watching the lives of others instead of focusing on his own?