How Hitchcock’s Vertigo gave us the dolly zoom – one of cinema’s trippiest visual effects

By Susan Kerrigan, Professor Film and Television, Swinburne University of Technology

In one scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo, lead character John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is shown following Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) up a bell tower.

Scottie is afraid of heights. So when he briefly stops and glances down, he experiences a wave of vertigo. The stairwell distorts, seemingly stretching into the distance below him – a potent reflection of his dizzy and panicked state.

This scene is the first ever example of the “dolly zoom”, a dynamic visual technique achieved through camera movement and a zoom lens.

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