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This paper was presented at the Alfred Hitchcock conference For the Love of Fear convened by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, held from 31 March to 2 April 2000. * * * Hermia: Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double… Demetrius: Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. A Midsummer Night's Dream, IV, ii, 192-197. Just about everything about Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) seems double, not least the film's critical reputation. On the one hand, Andrew Britton, not a man to equivocate, declares that "one can make no claim forSpellbound as an achieved work of art," citing, among its shortcomings, "the discrepancy between surface and implication, the grotesque uncertainty of tone (especially noticeable in the wildly clashing conventions of the acting) and the frequent banality of the script" (83). Many, even among Hitchcock's admirers, would agree.Spellbound is, in fact, not spellbinding, not one of Hitchcock's masterworks, not a Rear Window (1954) nor aVertigo (1958). On the other hand, though, it is, as Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague point out, the first of Hitchcock's films in which "questions of visualization and displacement, of guilt conjured up and denied - questions which will eventually inform such films as Rear Window and Vertigo - become overt subject matter"

The time: the early years of the 19th century. The setting an ancient manor house in an isolated valley in the west of England. A scientist is engaged in a very elaborate series of experiments with electricity. Outside the laboratory, copper wires suspended on poles run for more than a mile into the countryside. Inside, mysterious equipment - coils of wire, weirdly shaped jars, strange crystals, saucers of murky liquid - glows and pulsates. The few local people who dare to approach the mansion tell of explosions, of bolts of lightning that strike when no storms are near, and of the reclusive, secretive nature of the scientist himself.