The first shot of THE PLEASURE GARDEN shows chorus girls descending a spiral staircase as they come on stage. The penultimate shot of FAMILY PLOT shows Blanche sitting on the staircase in Adamson's house and winking at the camera. Staircases thus frame Hitchcock's entire directorial oeuvre. They are also one of his more famous motifs, mentioned quite often in the Hitchcock literature. Equally, however, they are familiar features not just of the cinema generally, but of cultural forms which preceded the cinema – myths, folk tales, art, drama – so that one needs to look at Hitchcock's use of the staircase in relation to its typical symbolic associations in other contexts.

The traditional associations of the staircase are summarised in The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant:

In addition, the staircase has long been a feature of set design in the theatre. Apart from its potential for entrances, exits and visual staging generally, a staircase on stage also provides a ready-made setting for confrontations in which the positioning of the characters has symbolic significance. Hitchcock undoubtedly recognised the dramatic potential of creative set design; in his early years in the cinema, one of his jobs was as art director, and at least two of his sets – in THE PRUDE's FALL (Graham Cutts, 1924) and THE BLACKGUARD (Cutts, 1925) – have significant staircases. The expressionist influence is also relevant here: both The Blackguard and THE PLEASURE GARDEN were made in Weimar Germany. The prevalence of staircases in Weimar films has been well documented by Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen (Eisner 1973: 119-27).