Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms define an antagonist as “the character pitted against the protagonist-the main character-of a work” (20). For them an evil or cruel antagonist is a villain. As a rule we expect such a person to be unattractive, bad mannered, short tempered etc. But Hitchcock’s villains never frighten viewers because we never notice their presence. He totally deconstructed the image of the villain. Just as the criminal Charles Spencer Oakley (Joseph Cotton) in The Shadow of a Doubt (1943) attempting to elude the police settle down in a small town in Santa Rosa, California, the place where no one ever dreams of meeting a killer with a charming facade. Siegfried Kracauer
