HitchCon ‘25: A look back.
A CENTURY OF HITCHCOCK
One hundred years ago, Alfred Hitchcock launched a directing career that changed the course of cinema. Join an international lineup of authors, educators and filmmakers for a three-day festival of talks, panels, special screenings—all with audience participation. Let’s celebrate Hitchcock’s films and examine their impact then, now and on what lies ahead.
HitchCon ‘25 Speakers
For Elizabeth Bullock, movies are a “gateway drug” to a life of the mind. She is a cinema, art history and humanities instructor at the City Colleges of Chicago and at Dominican University, River Forest. Bullock earned her Humanities M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Cinema and Media Studies program. Her publications include: “Naughts and Crosses: Marital and Cinematic Gamesmanship in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith” in Hitchcock Annual (2021), “Imaginary Women in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman” in Vertigo 65 (forthcoming 2025) edited by Daniel Varndell, and “More Blessed To Give: Tracking the Reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)” in a forthcoming compilation edited by Robert Kapsis.
Steven’s approach to his work is rooted in the belief that every story reveals deeper truths about the human condition. His passion lies in uncovering these truths and inspiring others to see the world more reflectively. He is the author of Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. Steven has appeared on-screen in the documentaries Viaggio nel Cinema in 3D: Una Storia Vintage and The Master's Touch: Hitchcock's Signature Style; and in featurettes on the 4K/UHD releases of To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. He teaches cinema studies and screenwriting at Mercy University in Westchester County, New York, where he also coordinates their long-running International Film Festival.
Sidney Gottlieb is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut. He edits The Hitchcock Annual. His work on Hitchcock includes two volumes of Hitchcock on Hitchcock (1995 and 2015), Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews (2003) and, most recently, in collaboration with Donal Martin as co-editor, Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now (2021).
Joel Gunz believes that the search for meaning is among the highest of human pursuits, and it’s this impulse that drives his work. He’s a writer, filmmaker, host of the annual HitchCon International Alfred Hitchcock Conference and publisher of The Hitchcockian Quarterly. His recent publications include “Travels in Hitchcock’s Multiverse” (Re-viewing Hitchcock: New Critical Perspectives, Robert Kapsis, ed., forthcoming 2025) and “A Comparative Look at Hitchcock’s Murder! and Mary” (Hitchcock Annual, 2025, Sidney Gottlieb, ed.). His 2021 film essay Spellbound by L’Amour Fou was selected by several festivals and won Best Short Documentary at the Medusa Film Festival. He also hosts the salon-like MacGuffin Film Club, which features online film screenings followed by meaningful group discussions.
Elisabeth Karlin revels in the art of the movies and the life of the theater. She is an award-winning playwright who sometimes scribbles about film. Her plays have been seen on stages in New York and Los Angeles and have been published by Next Stage Press and Smith and Kraus. Her writing on Alfred Hitchcock includes Beyond the Blonde: The Dynamic Heroines of Hitchcock and Lamb to the Slaughter for the Hitchcock Annual; Things Left Undone: Crimes of Passivity in Vertigo for the Vertigo 65 Conference in Dublin. She has also been a frequent contributor to HitchCon and to The Alfred Hitchcock Geek blog on a wide range of themes inspired by The Master.
Pat McFadden looks at cinema as civilization's most wondrous cave drawings. Growing up in Manhattan, he scoured television listings and theater schedules in an effort to see every Alfred Hitchcock film, and many others that got in the way. After graduating from the High School of Performing Arts, he abandoned drama for film at Emerson College in Boston. His senior student film there, "Equilibrium-ness," earned both a Student Emmy and a regional Student Academy Award. He then transplanted himself to Los Angeles, where he worked several years as an Assistant Film Editor, notably on HBO tele-features. Ill-suited to feast or famine gig-employment, Pat switched to office work, and was an executive assistant at Walt Disney Imagineering for 23 years. Pat is honored to have been a contributing editor and creative consultant for Joel Gunz’s Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook Page, and an associate producer for Good Evening: an Alfred Hitchcock Podcast, where he was referred to as “The Man Who Knows Exactly Enough.” He’s author of “Sir Hitch and Uncle Walt: Feud? What Feud?” in The Hitchcockian Quarterly, 2023.
Says Walter Raubicheck, “I love to watch, think about, talk about, and write about movies! And I find the greatest satisfaction doing those things about Hitchcock's films.” Walter is professor of English at Pace University in New York. He is the co-author with Walter Srebnick of Scripting Hitchcock (2011) and co-editor, with Srebnick, of Hitchcock’s Re-released Films: From Rope to Vertigo (1991). More recently, he edited Hitchcock and the Cold War: New Essays on the Espionage Films, 1956-1969. A playwright, he debuted The New Norman, a play about the making of Psycho, at HitchCon ‘22. In addition to his work on Hitchcock, he has published essays on twentieth-century authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Dashiell Hammett and G. K. Chesterton.
