"All of Hitchcock — I don’t think I can even identify a particular film. After I transitioned out of the art world into film, I was doing a graduate degree at Columbia University and I took a class with Andrew Sarris, who I think is one of the treasures of the film world. We looked at an overview of Hitchcock during the two-year course, starting with his silents. And there are some extraordinary silent movies of his; I’m not sure how readily available they are, but there’s a phenomenal film — I think it’s called Murder! — and it’s silent, but it’s as tense as Psycho or The Birds or Notorious or Rear Window. [Editor’s note: Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder! was one of his first talkies, but his 1927 silent, The Lodger, is one of his most celebrated. Both were released jointly to home video in 2002.] It’s a silent film, but it’s Hitchcock. All of his signatures, all the signifiers, everything we’ve come to know and love about Hitchcock, they’re all in play."

"I was twenty years old when I first saw it. It terrified me then, and still does.
 The preacher, played by Robert Mitchum, is the most frightening
 psychopath I’ve ever seen depicted. This is the only film directed by Charles Laughton, and its haunting, over-the-top storytelling is reminiscent of Laughton’s own character portrayals. The poetic, expressionistic images are by Stanley Cortez, a true American master who I fortunately came to know many years before his death. Stanley photographed, among others, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Three Faces of Eve, in which his lighting is equally unique. The disturbing orchestral score is by Walter Schumann, who also wrote the Dragnet theme and whose music underlines and drives the horror the way Bernard Herrmann’s does in Psycho. This is one of James Agee’s rare screenplays—another was The African Queen—and it captures America in the Depression as
 well as did his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans. The film’s story is an American equivalent of the Brothers Grimm."

"Ranks with the best of Hitchcock, who wanted to make it but Clouzot beat him to the rights. It was made in the same year as Night and Fog and The Night of the Hunter, 1955—what a year, what a decade for world cinema. The penultimate scene had the same effect on me as Psycho. Though it no longer holds surprises for me, I watch it for its mastery of suspense and the performances of Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and
 Véra Clouzot. But I confess that the nine-minute scene without words where 
Véra hears noises from her bedroom, goes down the hall to check them out, and is literally scared to death still nails me. You can bet I thought 
about how it was shot and paced when I sent Ellen Burstyn up to that attic in The Exorcist. No nudity, no sexuality, no violence, just pure, slow-building suspense that escalates to terror. The original novel was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote Vertigo."