I am a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan. His complex characters, intriguing settings and suspenseful scenes have kept me rapt for decades. In eighth grade I read Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, viewed the film and got hooked. One of my high school friends owned a reel-to-reel copy of The Birds, and we watched it over and over again, screaming on cue. In the mid-1980s many of his films were re-released and I had the delight of seeing them on the big screen. When they became available on DVD I bought all the boxed sets I could find.
After writing several drafts of The Black Velvet Coat one of my colleagues pointed out that Sylvia’s scenes reminded her of Alfred Hitchcock movies. To my amazement I realized that was true. Subliminally I had created a character in a San Francisco noir setting, a beautiful blonde heroine not unlike Hitchcock’s Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedrin or Kim Novak. The latter, even wore a French twist in Vertigo just as I had envisioned Sylvia’s hairstyle. Many of Hitchcock’s movies included policemen, wild car rides, train scenes, extravagant mansions, murder and psychological twists. In my novel, Sylvia is inhibited and addicted to shiny things because of a trauma she suffered as a child.
Do you have a favorite Hitchcock film? Don’t you just want to curl up and watch it all over again? Haven’t ever seen one. Well, you’d better get started!
Haha. I still think the silver camper was the coolest. Too bad it had to go.
Thanks for being along on the ride with me! At least your characters in “Moon Pies and Movie Stars”got to keep the Winnebago or did they?
It’s really fascinating what influences us and how it appears in our work, sometimes without our awareness until it is so obvious we say “ohhh, yeah.” Or sometimes a reader or someone in our writing group will point it out to us. I loved the Hitchcockian parallels in your book.
Thank you, Judy! That’s one of the fun things about writing intuitively. There are so many surprises!