The writing styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King are similar in a number of ways. Both writers exhibit a writing style in which we find suspense, sexual tension, the macabre, and inhibited or uninhibited characterizations. However, the main trait exhibited in the writing styles of both Hitchcock and King and perhaps the one that makes millions able to relate to the works of each is the preoccupation with everyman characters and stories that are loaded with the colorful details of living.
While Stephen King is a much more prolific writer than Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock collaborated with John Michael Hayes to write the scripts for some of his most successful films including Rear Window, To Catch A Thief and The Man Who Knew Too Much. In HitchcockÆs stories and scripts we are generally immersed in the life of an everyman, someone of daily life with whom we can relate. His stories and scripts also are filled with the stuff of everyday life. The screenplay for Rear Window and its characterizations readily illustrate this. In Rear Window we are privy to the voyeuristic, wheelchair-confined life of L. B. Jeffries (Jeff). In his review of the characterization, film critic Roger Ebert (2000) noted, ôThe hero is trapped in a wheelchair, and weÆre trapped too-trapped inside his point of view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options.ö Such empathy with characterization builds tension in this story of a trapped man who witnesses a murder; just as such a perspective of the hero in The Shining traps us inside his slow descent into madness. In The Shining the would-be writer who must maintain an abandoned hotel in winter is a family man with a wife and son. His condition might be our own. As Jeff is trapped inside his world, so Jack Torrance is trapped inside the Outlook.
Both characterizations, Jeff and Jack, share another similar trait in the writing of Hitchcock and King, both deal with men who are either ...