Nonetheless, Van Sant is apparently on to something. When talking with Eva, my 17-year-old niece, about the latest Halloween movie in which Leigh appeared with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, I said, "Of course, you remember Janet Leigh from Psycho."

She didn't. Because she had never seen Psycho. Because she didn't watch "old, black-and-white movies."

Shocking - but, then, shocking is what Alfred Hitchcock, the directorial mastermind behind Psycho, was partly about: shocks, suspense, thrills, comedy, and, above all else, "pure cinema." And, as far as cinema goes, "Hitch" and his influence on modern moviemaking have been profound.

"How many appreciate that almost every innovation in the cinema - including the many trendy artifices of fashionable young directors in recent years, such as jump-cutting, overlapping sound, freeze frames, slowed-down action - was anticipated years earlier by Hitchcock?" asks George Perry in his book Hitchcock.

The director, who died nearly two decades ago, would have been 100 this year. Yet the rotund director with the macabre sense of humor seems to have never left. Like a character in one of his suspense thrillers, Hitch has seemingly defied death.

Consider the evidence. In July 1998, there was a special laser disc box set of Psycho , full of extras; August followed with a Hitchcock postal stamp; October saw the first CD release of the newly recorded score to Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955); in November, ABC aired a TV remake of Rear Window (1954), starring Christopher Reeve; and in December, Gus Van Sant offered his retelling of Psycho; starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche.

And the wave shows no sign of abating. For Hitchcock's centenary year, Britain's BBC will mount a television tribute while New York University will present "Hitchcock: A Centennial Celebration" on October 13-17, 1999. That will coincide with the theatrical release of a restored Rear Window and a new Hitchcock biography by Patrick McGilligan. Finally, remakes are planned for 1999 and beyond of Spellbound (1945), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and To Catch a Thief (1955).

For one so prominent now, the so-called "Master of Suspense" had a humble and unlikely beginning: he was born August 13 in Leytonstone, England, the son of a working-class green grocer. As a Catholic sent to a Jesuit school, the boy quickly learned two lessons which helped him in his later career: fear authority and be fascinated by the forbidden fruits of sin and sex.

The young man studied to be an engineer but eventually ended up designing title cards for the more glamorous world of silent movies. Entranced by filmmaking, Hitchcock worked on every job he could, learning about lighting, editing, set design, and script construction.

His first movie was shot in Germany in 1925, yet it was his third picture, The Lodger (1926) which made his reputation and helped define his later movies. Besides employing his favorite theme of the innocent man suspected of a heinous crime, the silent film showcased the 27-year-old director's dazzling technique.When the killer strikes, for instance, all the viewer sees are five images cut together in rapid succession: a girl screaming; a street woman looking up from her stoop; a cat jumping off a garbage can; a policeman running; and a masked figure walking into the fog. It is stunning in its simplicity - and as jarring as anything in Friday the 13th or Halloween.

Technique became a hallmark of Hitchcock, from a constantly roving camera in the legendary "one-take" movie Rope (1948), to his 78 edits in 45 seconds for the Psycho shower scene. "Hitchcock began his career as a director at the height of what he always called the Golden Age of film," explains William Rothman in Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. "The great directors of the German cinema...were achieving unprecedented expressive effects with camera movement, set design, and lighting...[French directors] were experimenting with subjective devices and other formal innovations...Hitchcock started with a clear sense of film's traditions and a conviction that film was an art."

"Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story," Hitchcock himself said in Hitchcock/Truffaut. "...The next factor is the technique of filmmaking, and in this connection, I am against virtuosity for its own sake. Technique should enrich the action. One doesn't set the camera at a certain angle just because the cameraman happens to be enthusiastic about that spot. The only thing that matters is whether the installation of the camera at a given angle is going to give the scene its maximum impact."

To that end, the director experimented with sound in Blackmail (1929), the first British talking picture. Here, he cleverly played with how characters hear things. A woman who has stabbed a man repeatedly notices the word "knife" in a breakfast conversation, and to show her growing sense of guilt, that is the only intelligible word Hitchcock ultimately lets the viewer hear, as the dialogue gradually turns into gibberish.

Beyond technical trickery, the director also added comedy to the suspense film, an unusual step in the '30s. The first of his great chase movies, The Thirty-Nine Steps, combined laughs and adventure in a style that was later appropriated by the James Bond pictures. It was a canny move: the comic touches - dark or otherwise - help make the more serious (and sometimes grisly) elements palatable while widening the scope of the director's appeal.

In fact, Hitchcock quickly realized that thrills and comedy alone were not enough to make a successful movie. It needed romance. So, while most of his films are nominally about suspense, they are also about lovers who discover the depth of their feelings through a hair-raising adventure. In Rear Window, the hero fears marriage to a beautiful woman with whom he is involved. Perversely, the dangers the couple face investigating a brutal killing is what finally brings them closer together.

"Within the world of a Hitchcock film," explains Rothman, "the nature and relationships of love, murder, sexuality, marriage...are at issue." Or as film director Francois Truffaut put it: "...in Hitchcock's cinema...to make love and to die are one and the same."

Hitchcock developed these themes in his formative, British-based years during the '30s. By the 1940s and 1950s, he was working in America. It was there that his movies became even richer and more complex, dealing with issues of love and trust (Notorious, 1946), homosexual longing (Strangers on a Train, 1951), transference of guilt (The Wrong Man, 1957), and obsessive, destructive passion (Vertigo, 1958).

Many argue that it was the Catholic in Hitchcock who introduced morality into the subtext of many of his greatest movies. Shadow of a Doubt (1943), to name just one, explores the ideas of evil disguised as innocence and innocence perverted by evil. Teresa Wright plays Charley, namesake of her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), who is a murderer wanted by the police. Charley's dilemma: does she turn in the man she has worshipped for years or let him go? It is a horrible choice since Uncle Charlie is charming, loving, and gracious - the perfect gentleman and the perfect embodiment of villainy.

By cloaking such themes in the thriller genre, Hitchcock ensured his popularity and also helped changed the way critics looked at suspense movies. A film like Silence of the Lambs could never have won an Oscar or have been treated seriously if Hitchcock hadn't led the way. Indeed: with Hitch, entertainment and art became one, as the director drew the viewers into a dreamily plausible world which quickly became a nightmare.

"I try to put in my films...what Poe put in his stories," Hitchcock said once, "a perfectly unbelievable story recounted to readers with such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow."

As his image solidified during his career, Hitchcock never stepped too far out of character, disguising his important filmmaking aspirations behind the mask of a popular entertainer. Always the showman, Hitch was transformed into the most recognizable director in the world when he began offering droll introductions to the long-running Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series in 1957.

Nonetheless, the "Master of Suspense" moniker became a trap. The director soon became increasingly more worried about topping himself (he once quipped that the things which scared him the most were little children, policemen, high places, and the idea that "my next picture won't be as good as the last one"). Psycho may have been a financial smash, but after the relative failure of Marnie (1964), he didn't know where to go. Restricted by his image, fears, and studio from the kind of experimentation he had attempted in his prime, the director stagnated.

Yet the green grocer's son eventually had the last laugh. Once derided as a "simple" director of "thrillers," Alfred Hitchcock finally became much, much more. By the time of his death in 1980, he had been knighted, feted, and revered by younger filmmakers, critical institutions, and the public at large as a cinematic genius.

Since then, the word "Hitchcockian" has become an adjective to describe movies as varied as Seven, 12 Monkeys,,Reservoir Dogs, Carrie , Jaws, and Silence of the Lambs. Hitch's term "The MacGuffin" - to describe a meaningless plot device that starts the action rolling - has entered the popular lexicon. And, for many, his movies have become exemplars of what moviemaking is all about: passion, audience involvement, visual beauty, and technical virtuosity. Or, in a phrase, pure cinema.

"Hitchcock's most profound subject and achievement," critic David Thomson once wrote, "is the juxtaposition of sanity and insanity, of bourgeois ordinariness and criminal outrage...Hitchcock became a way of defining film."