Paramount/Kobal/ShutterstockAlfred Hitchcock made commercial pictures — from the ‘40s onward, the English director of Psycho, Vertigo, and North By Northwest established himself in America as a sterling, reputable producer of terrific genre fare on the scale and timeline required by Hollywood studios. It doesn’t matter what type of classic thriller you’re in the mood for, be it wartime espionage, Gothic romance, devious wife murderers, or paranoid mysteries — there’s a Hitchcock version of it, each filled with his trademark wry, dark humor and psychosexual intensity that set it apart from the average Hollywood thriller.While many Hitchcock films saw success at their time of release, it wasn’t guaranteed: while Rear Window, North By Northwest and Psycho were smash hits, the classic that preceded them, Vertigo, was a flop. Hitchcock’s reputation of the “master of suspense” threatened to categorize him as a craftsman of scandalous, “lesser” cinema. But we can thank, in part, the work of the French New Wave critics at Cahiers du Cinéma for demanding that Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and a slew of other Hollywood directors were bestowed with the auteur status traditionally reserved for silent era theorists.This week, Netflix has begun hosting classic cinema on their global streaming platform (probably feeling sheepish for featuring no movie older than 1973), it’s fitting that they’re featuring Hitchcock, and not just because his films are ruthlessly entertaining. Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds have so heavily influenced today’s brand of stylized psychological horror that they are the classic films most likely to resonate with a streaming audience.Each film starts with an ordinary if peculiar premise: in Rear Window, a wartime photographer (Jimmy Stewart) sits immobile in a full leg cast and takes a perverse interest in watching his neighbors; in Vertigo, a former cop (also Stewart) who’s afraid of heights is hired to follow an old friend’s wife around San Francisco; in The Birds, a suave, snappy socialite (Tippi Hedren) follows a lawyer to his California hometown and discovers his tense relationships with women there. Like any good thriller plot, each films soon escalates into abject paranoia and terror: snippets of unusual behavior convinces the photographer his neighbor murdered his wife; after the cop fails to save the life of his friend’s wife, he meets her impossible doppelganger; as the socialite settles into her new beau’s coastal town, waves of native, docile birds stage violent airborne attacks on the sleepy town.These sudden escalations into thriller territory don’t feel natural. Rather, the intrusions of extreme voyeurism and panic belong to a deeper, almost subconscious realm of urges and anxieties that the camera wants to pull violently to the surface. All three films favor drawn-out, incremental suspense sequences that are reluctant to confirm what we’re watching is actual horror (as opposed to something ordinary exaggerated by our imagination) before bursting into a dangerous, inevitable bloodshed.Hitchcock’s influence is incontestable. | Universal/Kobal/ShutterstockThe influence of Hitchcock is incontestable — filmmakers like Brian De Palma, M. Night Shyamalan, and Park Chan-wook have ensured the legacy of Hitchcock lives on, and his formal command of dread and mechanical suspense craft has remained in the bones of long-running franchises like Mission: Impossible and Final Destination. But beyond representing the director’s sharp method, these films are clear predecessors to the psychological horror and thriller films of the internet age. Watching Men, Saint Maud, Midsommar, It Follows, Smile, or Enemy, you’re left with an uneasy feeling that horror is coming from both their individual subconscious and the world’s looming impersonal chaos that diminishes their agency. They have little control over their fight for survival, and some off-screen presence is the only person with a total understanding of the events and logic that is inflicting them with paranoia and fear. In other words, Hitchcock’s camera watches the characters from a place of dread-inducing security, and from its voyeuristic vantage point, the audience feels the helplessness of the characters, but also how significantly they’ve been pushed away from reality without realizing the precarity of their new emotional state.“One final thing I have to do... and then I'll be free of the past.” So says Scottie, Vertigo’s detective protagonist to his doppelganger companion, staring dead ahead without acknowledging her sat beside him, driving towards the film’s morbid, Gothic climax. A thousand films that literalize their trauma themes into fatalistic horror stunts can be traced to the eerie certainty, bargaining, and detachment of Stewart’s delivery. When the panicked socialite Melanie discovers a flock of lethal birds nesting in the loft, thanks to a gaping hole in the house’s roof, every film about a haunted house that finds new ways to violate its inhabitants and inheritors springs to mind.Hitchcock’s gift was finding psychological nuance and power within sellable stories; he was not interested in “elevating” horror, but rather mining commercial thrillers for a depth of intimate and disorientating distress through craft. Now that his greatest work is available to stream, it’s time to discover that the formula for our modern, immediate psychological horror has been tapping into our desire to lose ourselves to paranoia and disorientation for 70 years.Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds are part of seven Hitchcock movies now streaming on Netflix.