ABSTRACT
Can fear be pleasurable? In February 1949 the director Alfred Hitchcock publishes an article in which he raises this extraordinary question. Writing in the magazine Good Housekeeping, of all publications, Hitchcock tackles the matter in an amusing and anecdotal way: “I was discussing this point with an old friend not long ago. ‘Fear,’ he said, ‘is the least pleasant of all emotions. I experienced it when I was a boy, and again during both wars. I never want my children to experience it. I think it entirely possible, if I have anything to say about it, that they’ll live their entire lives and never know the meaning of the word.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘what a dreadful prospect!’ My friend looked at me quizzically. ‘I mean it,’ I went on. ‘The boys will never be able to ride a roller coaster, or climb a mountain, or take a midnight stroll through a graveyard. And when they’re older’—my friend is a champion motorboat racer-‘there’ll be no speedboating for them.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, obviously offended. ‘Well, now, let’s take the speedboat racing, for instance. Can you honestly tell me that the sensation you get when you cut close to a pylon, or rough water, with a boat riding close on one side and another skidding across in front of you, is anything but fear? Can you deny that a day on the water without fear, without that prickly sensation as the short hairs on your neck rise, would be an utter dead failure? It seems to me that you pay lots of money a year for fear. Why do you want to deny it to your sons?’ ‘I’d never thought of it quite that way,’ he said. And he hadn’t. Few people have. That’s why my statement, made in all sincerity, that millions of people every day pay huge sums of money and go to great hardship merely to enjoy fear seems paradoxical.”3
