Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most renowned and influential film directors. His career ushered in two key periods of cinema history – the arrival of sound and the introduction of colour. He perfected his art in both disciplines, reverting back to black and white when he felt the need, and mastering not only silent pictures but sound and colour ones too. Hitchcock, surprisingly, never won an Oscar for Best Director but he did lose out to John Ford and Billy Wilder twice so remained in good company. For many, however, he is the greatest director who ever lived. The following ten films are my picks for his best work. What are your favourite Hitchcock films?

You could look back at the stalk and slash sub-genre of horror cinema (predominately known as ‘slasher’ film, or ‘teen slasher’) and cite the book written about serial-psychotic Ed Gein as the root of the genre. Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to the book and made the pivotal film Psycho in 1960. Along with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho was the major influencing factor that allowed Tobe Hooper and then later John Carpenter to define the sub-genre with their films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978).

JOE DANTE’S TOP 10 FILMS
1. Citizen Kane (Welles)
2. City Lights (Chaplin)
3. 8 1/2 (Fellini)
4. Les Enfants du paradis (Carné)
5. The Dead (Brakhage)
6. Rashomon (Kurosawa)
7. Psycho (Hitchcock)
8. Raging Bull (Scorsese)
9. The Searchers (Ford)
10. Once upon a Time in the West (Leone)