I salute your splendid website and your
continuing scholarship - DS
Welcome to the Alfred Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website!
This site is an extension of the Alfred Hitchcock newsletter/journal called 'The MacGuffin' which ran for 29 issues from 1990. Our regular visitors may prefer to start on (and bookmark) our 'Main Page' (formerly News and Comment page) - see tabbed link above.A lengthy profile of Hitchcock's life and work by the 'MacGuffin' editor has been published elsewhere on the Web. To visit it, click here: http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/great-directors/hitchcock/
Also, still a valued and comprehensive, and splendidly illustrated, critical introduction to Hitchcock and his 50+ films is Ken Mogg (ed.), 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' (Titan Books, London, 1999 and 2008). It contains much information on Hitchcock's films not available elsewhere, a lot of it distilled from the hardcopy 'MacGuffin'.
There have been four main Hitchcock biographies to date. Peter Ackroyd's relatively lightweight, but pithy, 'Alfred Hitchcock' (2015) surveys the life and work, making shrewd connections with the English style and culture on which Ackroyd is an expert. (Also, he provides a comprehensive, up-to-date listing of English-language books on Hitchcock.) Patrick McGilligan's 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light' (2003) is three times the length of the Ackroyd book, a must-read for scholars and fans who want detail, much of it based on first-hand interviews with people who worked with Hitchcock. Donald Spoto's 'Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius' (1983) is also authoritative, with special attention to the individual films as well as to Hitchcock's 'dark' psychology. John Russell Taylor's 'Hitch' (1978) was published in Hitchcock's lifetime, and, like the Ackroyd, is relatively short but full of solid insights.
Of course, François Truffaut's book-length interview with Hitchcock (English version, 1967) is a classic that has never been out of print (and is now complemented by Kent Jones's highly-regarded film Hitchcock/Truffaut).
A note on this site: it is currently being overhauled. Quite deliberately, it tends to exclude much of the generally-known, already-available things on Hitch. But new material is added on a regular basis, and our 'Main Page' (News and Comment) is updated at least once a week.
Links to our other pages follow: