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Kaleidoscope: Why The Alfred Hitchcock Movie Was Never Made
Too revolutionary for its time, Kaleidoscope is the most groundbreaking Alfred Hitchcock movie that never was. Out of all the films that have been lost throughout the decades, those which didn't even reach the production stage might be the most mystifying. In the case of Hitchcock's most ambitious project, the thought of how it could have influenced cinema becomes even more interesting once its unconventional elements started emerging in mainstream cinema decades later.
It would be an understatement to say that Alfred Hitchcock made a prolific career making spine-chilling thrillers. The Master of Suspense rightfully earned his title with films such as the all-time classics Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. But it was precisely this level of success that raised the expectations too high for the director and producer. After being universally lauded for his long streak of critically-acclaimed hits, Hitchcock started stumbling. The spy thriller Torn Curtain alerted him that it was time to switch things up a little bit. Not being one to take the simple route, Hitchcock came up with the idea for Kaleidoscope, a raw tale of a necrophiliac serial killer who murdered women near bodies of water.
In the late 1960s, when movies like Hostel or The House That Jack Built wouldn't even have been considered a possibility, Kaleidoscope proved to be too much to be put on film. Inspired by the naturalistic rawness of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealism, Hitchcock intended to push the boundaries he himself had established with films such as Psycho. Not only would he show the most gruesome deaths of innocent women and the most explicit nudity to date - he wanted to place the viewer behind the eyes of the killer, encouraging his horrific impulses with a naturalistic technique that would have exposed audiences to the cold hard fact that such people exist in real life, unconstrained by the imaginary barrier of a movie screen.
Despite the famed director's impressive amount of development work and his evident eagerness to make a type of film that had never been seen before (and wouldn't become accepted until much later), all executives refused to let his project move forward. In fact, his renowned persona played against him, as the consistent style of his previous movies and his TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents had built a very reliable brand that no one around him could afford to taint with a distasteful project. So, at the peak of his career, Hitchcock found himself trapped between stagnation and a leap of faith. Unfortunately, this was one of the only times the thriller maestro couldn't fool the higher-ups to carry out his vision, so he moved on to make the inferior Topaz and Frenzy. The latter becoming a toned-down collection of many of the elements that would have made Kaleidoscope his next timeless classic.
Kaleidoscope's coarseness doesn't guarantee that it would have been Alfred Hitchcock's best movie, but it shows how every director is bound to the limits of their time. Today, the brutal A Serbian Film doesn't make a dent in the collective's perception towards explicit films, and filmmakers like Gaspar Noé can capitalize on a niche that would revolt the most hardened cinephiles from five or six decades ago. In addition to all his masterful catalog, what Hitchcock could have created in this era will remain the most thrilling mystery.
