Psycho. Vertigo. The Birds.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock are classic standards of suspense and mystery. As a director, Hitchcock seemed to delight in the guilty pleasure of inflicting psychological terror on his audiences, and over the course of his 60-year career, he built an international reputation with more than 60 films, a television series and a mystery magazine.

Hitchcock’s work will be paired with musical scoring by the Asheville Symphony Orchestra at “An Evening with Hitchcock and Herrmann” held at 8 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 27, in Western’s Fine and Performing Arts Center.

While many modern-day horror films rely on gore and blood to capture the audience’s attention, Hitchcock was a master of suspense, according to Jubal Tiner, a film studies professor at Western Carolina University. Tiner, who has studied Hitchcock’s films extensively, presented a lecture of the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock at the Highlands Film Festival this summer.

Exploring the plot devices, camera angles and cinematography in Hitchcock’s movies, Tiner explained that television and movie directors today often use Hitchcock’s techniques.

For example, in one X-Files episode, there’s a scene where agents Mulder and Scully race through a cornfield as military helicopters circle overhead, presumably to capture them. This mimics a scene in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” where Cary Grant runs into a cornfield while being chased down by a crop-duster.

Hitchcock liked to film on studio sets because he had more control over the scenes, according to Tiner. While many of Hitchcock’s movies prey on people’s fear (fear of heights, fear of the unknown, fear of darkness, etc.), these movies also have romantic kisses, chase scenes and sex appeal that audiences pay to see.

“Hitchcock knew what his audiences wanted,” Tiner said.

Hitch, as he would become known to his friends, also had a clever sense of humor, offering up deadpan lines on his television series, giving prank gifts to actors, and appearing in cameos in his own movies.

Starting with the movie, “The Lodger,” in 1927, Hitchcock appeared briefly in every film he made. Audiences would learn to spot him in opening scenes, which Hitchcock set up early in the movie, so viewers could then concentrate on the rest of the story. Director M. Night Shyamalan (“Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” “The Village”) has cameo scenes for his films as well.

Hitchcock was born on Aug. 13, 1899 in London, England, as the son of an East End greengrocer. With a strict Catholic upbringing, he attended a Jesuit school and might have lived an anonymous life had it not been for one particular traumatic event in his childhood.

One day, his father presented Alfred with a note and told him to take it to the local police station. When the police officer read the note, he promptly arrested young Alfred and placed him in jail for 10 minutes. Alfred was released with the warning: “This is what happens to people who do bad things.”

Alfred Hitchcock would continue to have an aversion for police and authority figures for the rest of his life and even refused to get a driver’s license so he would never have to be stopped by the police. (There’s an uncomfortable scene in “Psycho” where a police officer plays out this very fear.)

Hitchcock became interested in movies as a teenager and picked up a studio job in London as a sign designer. Working his way up the ladder, he eventually took over as director of a film when the original director got sick. In 1925, Hitchcock directed his first serious production, “The Pleasure Garden.”

Hitchcock married his wife Alma in 1926 and they had a daughter, Patricia, two years later. Patricia would act in several of her father’s movies.

Film in its early stages in England was seen as a degenerate version of stage theatre, so Hitchcock took the family across the ocean for the bright lights of Hollywood. Initially denied by all the major studios, he agreed to a seven-year deal with producer David O. Selznick. This creative but tempestuous relationship wouldn’t last long, but it gave the budding director some solid experience to find some of his trademark techniques.

Hitchcock often used blonde-haired actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren. Hitchcock plots often involve situations of a mistaken identity, and suspense thrillers would focus on a MacGuffin, an object or device that everyone seemed interested in getting but was otherwise forgotten in the plot. (James Bond movies and other adventure movies often use this idea of a secret weapon or special device that everyone is after.)

With films like “Rebecca” (1940), “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), “Notorious” (1946), “Strangers on a Train” (1951), “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), “Vertigo” (1958), “North by Northwest” (1959), “Psycho” (1960), and “The Birds” (1963), Hitchcock became internationally famous as did the actors in these films — Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Anthony Perkins.

Perhaps one of the most famous scenes from a Hitchcock film is the shower scene from the thriller “Psycho.” Especially terrifying are those shrieking violins as a knife-wielding murderer jerks open the shower curtain.

The musical score for “Psycho” came from composer Bernard Herrmann, who collaborated with Hitchcock on several movies including “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest.” Herrmann, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City, composed the music for other famous films such as “Citizen Kane,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “Taxi Driver.”

Alfred Hitchcock continued to make movies in the 1970s. Though film scholars list him as one of the greatest directors of all time, he never won an Academy Award for Best Director for any of his films. He did earn a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1967. Snubbed by the Academy for years, Hitchcock’s acceptance speech that year was a simple, “Thank you.”

Hitch died on April 29, 1980. Ever the clever wit, he had his tombstone read, “I’m in on a plot.”