"The Hitchcock Murders" by Peter Conrad, Faber and Faber, $25; 362 pages. In the 20th century, the Age of Anxiety, there was one dominant English-language film director who was superb at putting peoples fears and dreams into his films — Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Australian-born Peter Conrad, who teaches English at Christ Church, Oxford, begins and ends his paean to Hitchcock with first-person narrative chapters on how his first viewing of "Psycho" affected his life. Sandwiched in between are chapters devoted to single themes. Consider that Hitchcock often used the concept of fear found in many human dreams. In his films, there are references to the fear of fire ("Rebecca," "Torn Curtain"); water ("Lifeboat"); heights ("Vertigo"); being chased by an unidentified pursuer ("North By Northwest"); homosexuality (" Strangers On A Train"); sex (the famous double-entendre scene, allegedly about jewels, where Grace Kelly tries to seduce Cary Grant in "To Catch A Thief"); being an invalid chased by a murderer ("Rear Window"), being kidnapped ("Family Plot"); rape (the graphic attack on the attractive woman in " Frenzy"); birds ("The Birds"); and at being accused of a crime which one did not commit ("I Confess", "The Wrong Man" and numerous other Hitchcock films). About the only fear that Hitchcock did not address in his films is the fear of being buried alive. Yet he slyly put this into "Psycho," for the 1960 horror movie begins with an aside to human fertility (Janet Leigh and John Gavin lie, half-dressed, on a hotel room bed) and ends with human rotting (the well-known shot of the over-ripe skull of the dead Mrs. Bates). Conrad mentions an often-forgotten, yet interesting note to Hitchcock's films — in the almost 60 movies that he directed, there are dozens of deaths but not one birth. On the subject of cycles of life, Conrad tells the famous story that Hitchcock once told Francois Truffaut (the French film director who wrote a valentine of a book about Hitchcock) that he wanted to do a film about how food is prepared for sale by grocers, cooked, eaten and processed by humans, and eventually finds its way back into nature. Hitchcock never made such a film, but he did make this idea into another filmed fear — of having to eat something which looks and tastes abhorrent. Alec McCowen, as the hard-working Scotland Yard detective chasing the Covent Garden rapist in "Frenzy," comes home to wife Vivien Merchant, who is experimenting with culinary delights. So "'Frenzy' examines the analogy between gormandizing and killing," explains Conrad. Different types of religions are also shown little respect by Hitchcock in his films, from sun-worshippers (the first version of " The Man Who Knew Too Much," released in 1934), Catholicism ("I Confess"), Islam (the remake of "The Man Who Knew Too Much," in 1956), Protestantism (in " Foreign Correspondent," the assassin who plans to kill Joel McCrea by shoving him from a bell tower is also implied to be a Protestant) and the Mormon Church ( William Devane, in "Family Plot," kills the devout Mormon couple who have raised him). Conrad's explanation for this is interesting: that is, Hitchcock saw himself as a sort of master movie god, having omnipotent power over every detail of his films. The author explains this point further by pointing out that as he grew older, Hitchcock hated to shoot on location ( such as the weeks that he worked in Bodega Bay, Calif., where Rod Taylor's character lived in "The Birds"). Shooting on location meant that Hitchcock would have to deal with things that he could not control, like the weather. Hitchcock's hatred of shooting on location was not always the case. "The Birds" was released in theaters in 1963. Twenty years earlier, Hitchcock greatly enjoyed shooting most of "Shadow of a Doubt" in Santa Rosa, Calif. Conrad's writing exhibits a well-layered depth of thought that one would expect from an Oxford professor. Hitchcock never understood this faddish analysis of his films by people in various professions. There is a well-known picture of Hitchcock sitting at a 1972 gathering at Columbia University in New York, where he received an honorary degree. Wearing a mortarboard with tassel and a graduate gown, he holds an event program in his pudgy hands and is looking slightly off-camera. The look on his face — half-smirk, half-frown — suggests he is thinking, " this whole thing is silly." Filmgoers often forget that Hitchcock was a master film technician. In "Psycho," one of his first directorial decisions on the film was to shoot it in black-and-white so as not to show "the mess made by Mrs. Bates," explains Conrad. At the end of the black-and-white " Spellbound," Leo G. Carroll, who is pointing a gun at Ingrid Bergman, swivels the pistol toward the audience, (indicating that he will commit suicide). It's shocking not so much for the fact that he pulls the trigger, but because the viewer sees the rest of the scene in frames of red "as a geyser of blood — his, and also ours, pours from the ruptured brain," writes the author. To make the pistol the focal part of the scene, Hitchcock used a mock gun three times the normal size. His greatest technical achievement was probably "The Birds," which took him three years to make — an eternity for a man accustomed to producing a film a year. Animation, sequences with stuffed bird puppets, shots employing matte painting and other forms of trick photography were used. "Of the 1,500 shots planned for the film (about twice as many for a normal film and almost three times as many as Hitchcock ordinarily used), almost 400 were difficult trick and composite shots," reported Donald Spoto in "The dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock" (De Capo Press, 1983). Hitchcock like to appear in his films, in wordless cameos, and his final one was a silhouette in "Family Plot." "Transformed into an inky shadow, he is already almost a posthumous presence, who warns that he will continue to haunt our dreams," reports Conrad.

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