Hitchcock’s The Lodger has been transformed into a precise, vertical drama. What’s next – Psycho on Snapchat? | film

‘SAlfred Hitchcock said: “Some films are slices of life, but mine are slices of cake.” Who knew that anyone would take the knife to one of his beloved silent films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and turn it into a vertical mini-drama?

Tattle TV has announced that it will stream serial killer drama The Lodger on its mobile-friendly vertical platform, telling Deadline that it is “one of the first known examples of a classic feature film being completely reworked for vertical, mobile-first consumption.” Will it set the trend? If so, how can we stop it?

I’m just kidding, of course. There will always be those who view archival cinema as simply much larger content that can be reappropriated in new forms. And there will always be old guard fundamentalists – who am I? – who winced at the thought. However, Tattle TV, you have my attention, so let’s talk about it.

We won’t be able to see this “mini-Hitch” in the UK, or in the EU, due to rights, but lucky American viewers will be able to see the film that Hitchcock deemed “the first time I did my style” in a format that largely ignores that style. The Lodger will be offered with its 4:3 square image either stretched or cropped to fill the vertical phone screen. So there are often parts of the image missing, which presents a problem.

The opening shot of The Lodger is a chilling close-up of a screaming woman, her head tilted so that her entire face fills the frame, backlit to emphasize her blonde hair. Hitchcock told Truffaut that in The Lodger, he presented “ideas in purely visual terms.” This close-up represents the terror spreading across London as a serial killer targets young, golden-haired women. Is the idea sound even if the picture is not? Hitchcock, a known adherent of carefully drawn frames, might not agree. I would like.

In the form of a “microdrama”, The Lodger’s 90-minute running time is divided into chapters (the first two chapters are free, but to watch the entire film, you have to pay). Hitchcock asserted that the ideal length of a feature film “is directly related to the endurance of the human bladder,” and most people could sit still for an hour and a half, especially in the hands of a master of suspense. People complain about three-hour running times, but Hollywood has long tried to produce short dramas, with only limited success. Remember Quibi?

It’s true that there are always compromises to be made in filmmaking, as Hitchcock knew all too well. Because the leading man in The Lodger was Ivor Novello, perhaps the biggest star in British cinema at the time, Hitchcock was forced to make his ending more nuanced and less ambiguous than he would have preferred.

It is also true that Hitchcock happily adapted to new forms. He launched Britain’s first talkie programme, Blackmail (1929), and embraced television. But if you look at the differences between the silent and sound versions of Blackmail, for example, you’ll see that Hitchcock understood that new technology required new techniques. He probably would have made an amazing little drama, but since he’s not there to do it, the format is best left to filmmakers creating original vertical content in the here and now.

“By repurposing British classics like The Lodger, Tattle TV aims to introduce iconic cinema to a whole new generation of viewers, bridging the gap between cinema history and contemporary mobile audiences,” Deadline reports. Commendable, although the cynical soul might say it’s an eye-catching ad that will rile up the aforementioned old guard purists into angrily slapping their keyboards and thus promoting the app. Ooops.

But if you really wanted to fill that gap, you might remake, not just remake, some of the classics of early British cinema, such as The Endless Trick of Burning and Dismemberment, The Mary Jane Incident (J. A. Smith, 1903), or The Big Swallow, which were at least designed to run for only a few minutes at a time, and as part of a mixed bill. Perhaps continuous performance was the original solution.

What really amazes me is that there is no shortage of ways to watch The Lodger: on disc, or online, at a variety of prices and quality. For American viewers, I recommend the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, with music by Neil Brand. We used to put up with pan-and-scan images on DVDs, for example, because there was no other way to watch movies at home, but that’s no longer the case. The Lodger is an audience favourite, being shown on the big screen regularly, so you can actually watch it in the cinema with live accompaniment, as it was meant to be seen.

Tattle’s Lodger announcement comes after research by the University of Sussex found that browsing social media is “the activity that brings us the least amount of happiness”. Another study conducted by the British Council discovered that young people consider films and television to be more influential than digital content. In fact, social media may be wrongly thanked for encouraging Generation Z to return to the big screen – and many credit review platform Letterboxd with kickstarting young people’s movie-going habit.

Now, Tattle has given The Lodger a dose of digital Ozempic and scaled it down to TikTok size, and that might provoke a few of us to put down our phones and see the full cinematic masterpiece – on a screen big enough to handle.