Alfred Hitchcock, the famed “Master of Suspense” for his films The Birds and Dial M For Murder, had a love-hate relationship with food. At his dinner parties, sometimes all the food would be blue. Other times, each dish would be death-themed. Atlas Obscura writes that Hitchcock had an uneasy childhood as the son of an English grocer, and one time, he woke up in the middle of the night and his parents found him eating cold meat and crying. As an adult, Hitchcock hated cold meat, eggs and cheese. You can see that food took on a meaningful quality in many of his films as well. Psycho features sinister sandwiches while To Catch a Thief had Grace Kelly coyly offer a “leg or a breast” of chicken. Hitchcock enjoyed pranks and often used dinner parties to pull them off. He put a whoopie cushion on the chair of Gertie Lawrence, a Broadway star, at one party. One time, instead of using tables, Hitchcock rented 45 TV-dinner tables and 45 chairs and set them in a large circle. He then put name cards on each table, and none of the names corresponded to any of the guests. In 1956, Hitchcock threw a haunted house party and the meal consisted of horror tropes: “Morgue mussels, suicide suzettes, consommé de cobra, vicious-soise, home-made fried homicide, [and] ragout of reptile.” Atlas Obscura writes that the cake even looked like a decrepit church and graveyard.
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