Term Papers on Hitchcock Vs Poe

Term Paper Title	Hitchcock Vs Poe
# of Words	1154
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.62

Hitchcock vs  Poe

A comparison of
Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe

Fear, terror and suspense are the most vivid emotions created by Poe’s stories and by Hitchcock’s films.  Several themes are common to both:  the madness that exists in the world, the paranoia caused by isolation which guides people’s actions, the conflict between appearance and reality along with the double aspect of the human nature, and the power of the dead over the living.  Not only the themes are similar in both men’s work but also the details through which a story is written or shown.  The similar themes and narrative techniques can be seen clearly in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and in Psycho.
For both Poe and Hitchcock, madness exists in the world.  "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Psycho are two very similar studies in madness.  Roderick Usher and Norman Bates are both insane.  They have many common traits although they are also quite different.  They are victims of their fears and their obsessions.  Norman who seems agreeable and shy is, in reality, a homicidal maniac who has committed matricide.  He suffers from schizophrenia — he acts as both himself and his dead mother.  Roderick Usher appears strange from the beginning, almost ghost-like, with his "cadaverousness of complexion" — however, he is not a murderer.  He suffers from a mental disorder which makes him obsessed with fear:  fear of the past, of the house, of the dead.  He finally dies, "victim to the terrors he had anticipated."
The way in which madness is projected in both stories is quite similar as well.  The short story and the movie both take place in a dark and gloomy house, a "ghostly house" — "a mansion of doom," writes Poe.  In both houses there is the presence of a mysterious woman.  For Poe, the woman is Roderick Usher’s sister Madeline who suffers from an undefined illness, seems to die twice, and appears as Roderick’s double.  For Hitchcock, it is the mother who is at first seen as a murderer and tyrant, but who turns out to have been dead for years, and who lives only through her son’s insanity.  The death of both women is a source of mystery and horror.  In both stories the woman is kept in the lower section of the house — Madeline in a coffin and Mrs. Bates as an embalmed corpse.  Other narrative techniques tie the two tales:  the dark and stormy night in which death takes place, the dead birds which Norman Bates stuffed — Poe’s most famous poem is "The Raven" — the pond in which the House of Usher disappears and the pond in which Norman Bates entombs the cars and bodies of his victims.
It is fear or paranoia which guides the actions of the two madmen.  Roderick is a "bounden slave" to "an anomalous species of terror."  He does not understand himself what he fears, just as no one knows the nature of his sister’s illness.  It is this paranoia which made him insane and which causes him to die.  He is unable to react against the events.  His fear of insanity is the reason for his madness.  There is also a sense of predestination or of something supernatural controlling him.  He cannot escape his fate.  Norman Bates is also a victim of his fears which he cannot avoid.  "I think we’re all of us clamped in our private traps," he says.  He killed his mother and her lover, and then ...

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