Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Produced by Michael Balcon, Carlyle Blackwell, C.M. Woolf

Screenplay by Eliot Standard

Starring Ivor Novello, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen

Running time: 90 minutes

Budget: £12, 000

Alfred Hitchcock’s first suspense thriller and the first of many classics from the ‘master of suspense’. Drawing upon Jack the Ripper intrigue and influenced by German expressionism movement, this silent treat displays Hitch’s maverick ability to craft an entertaining and exciting thriller from the very word go.  The plot is staple Hitchcock – a family’s vacancy is filled by a mysterious and strange lodger (Ivor Novello) at the same time that London is being terrorised by the infamous ‘Avenger’ who leaves a trial of dead women in his wake.  Briskly-paced and coated in the trademark Hitchcock style of unnerving tension and droll black humour, The Lodger remains a true antique of silent cinema and a signpost for the great works that were to come.