ABSTRACT

When I was 18, I saw the movie Dressed to Kill, and was so scared by it that I had to sleep with the light on for several nights afterwards. A few years later, I saw Jagged Edge, and the same thing happened – sleepless nights with the light on. When the shooting starts after the bank robbery in downtown Los Angeles in Heat, I can remember how deafening the gunfire sounded in the cinema. I could not watch Psycho through to the end, so terrified was I by the scene in which Lila approaches Norman Bates’s house. I walked out of Copycat, unable to bear the way the camera was being positioned to align the spectator’s point of view with that of the killer. I can vividly recall a scene in The Insider, in which the soon-to-be whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand enters the office of his former employer at a tobacco company: the scene’s sounds were so acutely rendered that I could hear Wigand’s shoes squeaking on the office floor as he enters and his employer’s pen scratching on the table.