Producer Jason Blum explains why Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO is such a scary thriller

Alfred Hitchcock1958 thriller Vertigo it is one of the director’s best films. The story follows a former police officer who suffers from an intense fear of heights and is hired to prevent an old friend’s wife from committing suicide, but all is not as it seems.

This is a disturbing and gripping film, and in a recent essay written by Blumhouse’s producer Jason Blum for Variety, explains what makes Vertigo one of the best and scariest thrillers. He explains that the film possesses it with “precision and skill and intensity” and says:

The fact that the film itself is about someone possessed by his strange obsession makes it all the more impressive. In fact, one of the things I admire so much about the filmmakers I’ve worked with, whether it’s Night Shyamalan, Jordan Peele or David Gordon Green, is the way they use the tools of cinema to show a character’s desire, even (and especially) when that desire is inscrutable to me personally.

I’ll never know what it’s like to, like, desperately need to get away from an abusive kid or desperately need to be a great drummer. But in “The Invisible Man” and “Whiplash,” with Leigh Whannell and Damien Chazelle using every cinematic tool at their disposal, I somehow understand this desire. Nor have I ever been obsessed with a remote, icy blonde. But it is, perversely, that longing that makes “Vertigo” and all the best thrillers so frightening: if an audience doesn’t understand the characters’ longings, they won’t be terrified by the frightening obstacles that block the path to the object of that longing.

By the end of “Vertigo,” desire piles upon desire and it seems that pretty much every character is obsessed with each other and none of them will ever have their desires fulfilled. Yet every time I watch “Vertigo,” my desire – to be moved, to be lost in another reality for two hours, to be scared – has been fulfilled better than by any other film.

Vertigo it is one of the Hitchcock films that I often see again, one of the things I love most are the interpretations, above all Jimmy Stewart’S. I appreciate Blum’s insight into the film, and if you haven’t watched it in a while, you should see it again!