Suspense master Alfred Hitchcock paid homage to a basic law of cinema: what the audience sees on the screen is not window-on-the-world but a skillfully engineered world that the filmmaker has created. He famously swore that "film is life with the dull bits cut out," but his genius went far beyond the cutting technique. The cut and the splice between two extremes of shots were his scalpel to strike at the nervous system of the viewer directly, demonstrating that horror is not what you see but what you must imagine. Editing to him was more than constructing a story; it was a great psychological technique for manipulating a crowd's emotions, dictating their line of vision, and creating unacceptable suspense.

The foundation of Hitchcock's approach was his theory of pure cinema. The strength of the film was in image contrast, not stage action or dialogue, according to him. A face, a threat, and a reaction, if presented in a certain sequence, generate an idea and an emotion in the audience greater than what their parts add up to. He equated it to the composer setting out notes to compose a melody. To Hitchcock, the editor was the conductor of the symphony of people's fear. He pre-storyboarded all the scenes, and filming itself was a dull necessity, he would frequently say, while creative work was done in the editing room. This gave him complete control over the rhythm, focus, and emotional pace of his films.

One of his biggest assets was point-of-view manipulation. Hitchcock was a genius at getting the audience to identify with his characters, particularly those in danger. And he did so by adopting the very simple and brutally effective editing style: a look of a character looking at something. Their eyes go wide, their faces twist in horror or fear. That's the reaction shot. Then it cuts to what they're looking at. That is the point-of-view shot. And then it cuts back to what they're reacting to, re-establishing the feeling. It's a three-step process that feels pretty transparent, but in Hitchcock's skilled hands, it is a trap. By first showing us what the character fears, he primes us to be afraid ourselves. When he subsequently informs us what they're looking at—a black silhouette, a hidden bomb, a suspicious package—we're not being presented with it objectively. We're demonstrating it through the character's fear. We're not being indicated a fearful character; we are the character, and we feel his fear and his powerlessness.

The Psycho shower scene is a classic example of this process, but for another reason. Here, the point of view is shattered and chaotic. We catch sight of the figure of the killer, we catch sight of the frightened face of Marion Crane, and we catch sight of the slashing blade. And still, most of all, we never even glimpse the knife hitting the body. The violence is in the mind of the viewer, constructed out of the frenzied chain of 78 separate shots in 45 seconds. The slashing is so wild and revolving that it makes us overwhelmed with sensations. We glimpse things in flashes: a knife, a face screaming, a body, blood going down the drain. Our mind, whirling to comprehend the violence, adds the gruesomeness. Hitchcock knew that the viewer's imagination would always create something worse than anything he could ever show on the screen. The editing doesn't depict murder; it leaves us with the sensation of having endured one.

Aside from point of view, Hitchcock employed editing to manage the audience's information, crafting his classic suspense. He famously distinguished between surprise and suspense. Surprise is a brief, instant shock, such as a jack-in-the-box. Suspense is an extended, miserable state of suspense. To generate suspense, Hitchcock would alert the viewer to a danger not visible to the characters. The prime example is in Rear Window, when we, and L.B. Jeffries, observe Thorwald leave his apartment and subsequently sneak a sleeping Lisa into the courtyard. We know the killer is coming back, and she's sitting in the middle of harm's way. It's not a question of what, but when. The editing rhythm is studiously slow. From Jeffries' concerned face, to Lisa's tranquil sleep, to the corridor where Thorwald walks. Tightening the tension screw with each cut. By giving the viewer inside information, Hitchcock engaged passive spectators to become active participants, frantically and literally yelling in their own heads at the screen.

Another essential function that Hitchcock's editing serves is playing tricks with time. In North by Northwest's suspenseful finale, Hitchcock edits a montage at Mount Rushmore to create the seamless, gasp-free illusion of danger. Crosscutting between Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and the bad guys is swift and unremitting. But in the bomb scene in Sabotage, Hitchcock famously made something incorrect that he later admitted. A child brings a time bomb onto a bus and doesn't know it is going to explode at 1:45. Hitchcock cut too much to scenes that had clocks counting down to the hour. Tension was suspenseful but overstayed its welcome. When the bomb eventually exploded and murdered the kid, the viewers were robbed and angry, not relieved. He realized that suspense was a fine balance point of falling over; one teased the viewer to the limit of his or her patience, but not past into annoyance. It was a lesson in rhythm control that an editor must impose on the emotional composition of the viewers.

Hitchcock also employed the lack of a cut with striking effect. The long take, where the camera simply keeps on and on and on, never cutting, can produce another type of tension. In Rope, the cutting is structured in such a way that it simulates one sole, unedited 80-minute shot. This induces claustrophobic real-time tension. The audience is not let off, no relief in the shape of a cutaway to something else. We are locked in the apartment with the murderers and their secret, stuck in the building tension with no relief. This strategy demonstrates that Hitchcock's brilliance was not the use of some particular kind of editing, but the use of the right type—be it frenzied montage or oppressive long take—to achieve the very psychological effect he intended.

Hitchcock's legacy is not a catalog of classic movies, but a film theory. He demonstrated that editing is the implied language of film. It is the grammar that tells one where to look, how to feel, and what to think. He was the puppet master, and the cuts between shots were his strings. Through directing the flow of visual information with such precision, he could get an entire audience to gasp, scream, or sigh en masse. He demonstrated that suspense is not destroyed by threat of violence, but by the suspense of waiting, and that the most effective instrument for producing that suspense is not a monster or a knife, but the simple, intentional, competent cut from one reel to another. He did not so much tell stories; he constructed emotional journeys, following the cut as his master guide to fear.

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