Alfred Hitchcock never traveled to Iran. There is no photograph of him walking the streets of Tehran, no account of his presence in Shiraz or Isfahan, nor even any evidence that he devoted part of his life to the direct study of Persian literature. He was an Englishman, born in London at the close of the nineteenth century, raised in a Catholic environment, and later became one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the history of Hollywood.
Yet every time I return to his films after years of watching cinema, I feel more strongly that an invisible thread connects his world with the world of Iranian literature and philosophy. It is a thread woven not through direct influence but through shared human concerns. Most books written about Hitchcock focus on his cinematic techniques—from camera movement and editing to the concept of suspense and his methods of storytelling. This book does not overlook the importance of those achievements, but its purpose lies elsewhere.
The central question is this: Why do so many of Hitchcock’s concerns feel strangely familiar to an Iranian audience? Why is it that when we follow the destinies of his characters, we sometimes feel as though we are reading a modern retelling of the very questions that Ferdowsi, Hafez, Khayyam, and Rumi explored centuries ago? The answer may lie in the fact that Hitchcock was less a filmmaker of crime than a filmmaker of existential anxiety.
For decades, Western critics called him “the Master of Suspense.” The title is accurate, yet incomplete. Suspense in Hitchcock’s films is never the destination; it is the instrument. Behind every chase, every murder, and every mystery lies a deeper question. Who is the human being? How well does one truly know oneself? Is reality really what we see? And are we genuinely in control of our own destiny?
These are questions that occupied Iranian culture a thousand years ago. In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, great heroes often become victims of forces beyond their own will. Rostam does not realize that the young warrior standing before him is his own son. Siavash cannot foresee that his innocence will lead him not to salvation but to death. Esfandiar does not know that the mission he accepts to prove his loyalty will ultimately cost him his life.
Each believes that he controls his own fate, yet destiny has already written another script.
The same pattern repeatedly appears throughout Hitchcock’s work. Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest is merely an advertising executive. He is neither a spy nor a hero. Yet a single case of mistaken identity is enough to transform his ordinary life into an endless nightmare. He never chooses to enter that dangerous world. Destiny chooses him.
It is this vision that brings Hitchcock remarkably close to many Iranian thinkers. In our classical literature, human beings are never the absolute rulers of their own lives. They exist suspended between free will and destiny—neither completely free nor entirely condemned. The same struggle appears in the poetry of Khayyam, who repeatedly speaks of humanity abandoned in an unknowable universe, a world whose laws remain hidden and whose final destination is beyond comprehension.
Hitchcock’s characters often inhabit precisely this condition. They perceive only fragments of the truth, while the rest remains concealed in darkness. That darkness becomes the source of their anxiety.
Perhaps this is why his films remain so alive decades after they were made. They are not fundamentally about the technology or politics of their own era. They are about the permanent condition of humanity—a creature living forever between knowledge and ignorance, certainty and doubt, freedom and destiny.
Among the memories that have always stayed with me is a conversation I had many years ago with my late friend and mentor, Farrokh Ghaffari. One of the pioneers of Iranian film culture, Ghaffari once referred, during a discussion about Hitchcock, to The Trouble with Harry. He believed that the narrative structure of the film bore a striking resemblance to one of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights—a story he called “The Tale of Fawzi.”
According to Ghaffari, the recurring movement of a corpse from one place to another, each relocation creating a new complication, echoed an Eastern storytelling pattern that had existed centuries earlier in the tales of One Thousand and One Nights.
Today, I cannot present this claim as established historical fact. We simply do not know whether Hitchcock ever read that particular story. Yet the importance of Ghaffari’s observation lies not in proving influence, but in recognizing resemblance. He wished to demonstrate that invisible connections sometimes exist between the storytelling traditions of the East and some of the greatest works of Western art.
The more I reflected on his idea, the more convinced I became that he was right. Great stories rarely remain confined within geographical borders. They travel from one culture to another, adopting new forms and new voices wherever they arrive.
Perhaps Hitchcock never consciously adapted One Thousand and One Nights, yet the spirit of some of those narratives can still be felt within his cinematic universe—a world where the smallest misunderstandings grow into overwhelming catastrophes; where people believe they possess the whole truth while seeing only its shadows.
And it is precisely at that point that Hitchcock’s London meets the Shiraz of Hafez and the Nishapur of Khayyam.
(The text above is the introduction to a book on Alfred Hitchcock that I am currently writing.
— Bijan (Hassan) Tehrani)
