Just as most Hitchcock films include at least one murder (or other violent killing) which in some sense involves the hero and/or heroine, so most of them include at least one corpse. This applies, of course, to many films, but Hitchcock's corpses are sufficiently important to the narrative to function as a motif: they are related to the characters and to the internal dynamics of the films in a patterned way. The importance of the corpse in Hitchcock may be gauged from its place in the repressed childhood traumas of the hero in SPELLBOUND and the heroine in MARNIE: when the incident is finally recalled, the dead body is the climactic image, a testament to the nature of the trauma. Yet even without the sense of such a founding trauma, an encounter with a corpse in Hitchcock is usually highly disturbing. The associations are however significantly different for the three principal figures: heroine, hero and villain. I will, accordingly, look at the functioning of the motif for each of these figures in turn.

The heroines

My main concern here – as with the heroes and villains – is with the impact of a corpse on a heroine. However, the fact that Hitchcock's work also includes some shocking corpses of a heroine should also be noted. These fall into a different category from the main examples on those occasions when the image of the corpse is shown to us without the mediation of a third party. There are three main examples: Marion's corpse in PSYCHO, Juanita's in TOPAZ and Brenda's in FRENZY. We see their murders, but then Hitchcock films each corpse so we experience its force directly, rather than through the eyes of the killer, even when, as in Topaz, he is clearly disturbed by it.

In PSYCHO, as Hitchcock's camera spirals out from Marion's dead eye, we are still numbed by the shock of her murder. Our reaction is very different from Norman’s, who is upset less by Marion's fate than by the revelation of what his ‘mother’ has done. Nevertheless, as Norman cleans up, he treats the corpse respectfully, and the shot of him carrying it wrapped in the shower curtain out of the cabin has a definite charge.