The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Had The Weirdest Phobia Ever(Photo Credit –Wikimedia)
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Alfred Hitchcock hated eggs. That’s a weird way to start a story about one of the greatest directors in film history, but it’s true. The man behind Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, and about ten other movies your parents pretend to love more than they do was utterly terrified of eggs. Yes! Not the birds (the ones after which Hitchcock even made a movie) but eggs. The ones with yolks, the yellow kind.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Director Who Turned Fear Into Fame
It requires no special mention that Alfred Hitchcock built a legendary career out of playing puppet master to the nerves of audiences everywhere, by turning everyday moments into scenes of sweat-inducing suspense. You’d think someone like that wouldn’t flinch at anything smaller than a butcher knife. But apparently, breakfast could send him running.
His filmography reads like a thriller buffet. From spies running across continents to wives suspecting their husbands might be killers and from nosy neighbors uncovering dark secrets to shower scenes that made people switch to baths, the list can go on and on.
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He made fear into an art form and turned himself into a brand out of it. He even hosted a TV show where he popped in with that wonderfully dry face and voice, delivering little tales of murder with the same energy most people use to explain how printers work. Hitchcock knew how to sell himself, and marketing wasn’t something he stumbled into. He would show up in trailers, posters, and even sneak himself into his films.
And then there were the eggs. No joke, the guy was genuinely repulsed by them. Something about the way the yolk jiggled apparently triggered his internal scream factory. According to The Telegraph, Alfred Hitchcock made his stance very clear once when he spoke to Oriana Fallaci. He stated, “I’m frightened of eggs. Worse than frightened – they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes… Brr!”
He added, “Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid?” To Hitchcock, eggs were more disgusting than blood. At least blood had the decency to be red.
Alfred Hitchcock suffered from ovophobia, the fear of eggs.
“I’m frightened of eggs. Worse than frightened – they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes… Brr!” pic.twitter.com/UbfEj0uj0H
This makes the filming of The Birds even funnier. He directed an entire movie about winged terrors pecking the sanity out of people, and in real life, he was spooked by their unborn cousins. Thousands of feathered actors flying around the set, and not a single egg cracked under his watch. I guess this is called a miracle of filmmaking and personal egg-avoidance.
In the end, everyone has a thing. Some people fear clowns, others spiders. Alfred Hitchcock feared eggs, but that doesn’t make him less of a genius. It adds one more twist to the strange brilliance of a man who spent a lifetime terrifying others.
