The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is a 1927 British silent thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen and Ivor Novello.

A handsome but secretive young man bearing a strong resemblance to the description of the murderer arrives at the Bunting house and asks about their room for rent.

They find a leather bag containing a gun, a map plotting the location of the murders, newspaper clippings about the attacks and a photograph of a beautiful blonde woman, whom Joe recognizes as the Avenger's first victim.

He explains that the woman in the photograph was his sister, a beautiful debutante murdered by the Avenger at a dance, and that he had vowed to his dying mother that he would bring the killer to justice.

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo occurs when he is sitting at a desk in the newsroom with his back to the camera and operating a telephone (4:44 minutes into the film).

[5][6] According to some sources, including the French filmmaker François Truffaut, Hitchcock makes another cameo at the very end of the film in the angry mob, but this has been disputed.

[1][6][7] The Lodger is based on a novel of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes about the Jack the Ripper murders, as well as the play Who Is He?, a comic stage adaptation of the novel by Horace Annesley Vachell that Hitchcock saw in 1915.

According to Tripp: "Fresh from Berlin, Hitch was so imbued with the value of unusual camera angles and lighting effects with which to create and sustain dramatic suspense that often a scene which would not run for more than three minutes on the screen would take a morning to shoot.

She wrote in her autobiography that as a result of Hitchcock making her perform repeated takes of one scene, she felt a "sickening pain somewhere in the region of my appendix scar", and had to return to hospital.

[13] In framing the shots, Hitchcock was heavily influenced by post-war horror, social unrest and the emotional fear of abnormality and madness.

[14] According to the Criterion Collection review by Philip Kemp, this scene was composed of "sixty-five shots in just over six minutes, with no title cards to interrupt.

"[17] Spoto also stated: "Montagu's claim that Hitchcock's edit contained up to 500 intertitles seems likely an exaggeration, but he worked with the director during the summer months to tighten up the film.

One of the other improvements was to hire American poster artist Edward McKnight Kauffer to design the animated triangular title cards."

Hitchcock had reportedly studied contemporary films by Murnau and Lang,[2][20] whose influence may be seen in the ominous camera angles and claustrophobic lighting.

[22] After arriving in the United States in 1940, Hitchcock was involved with a radio adaptation of the film with Herbert Marshall, Edmund Gwenn and Lurene Tuttle.

Music, sound effects, the various equivalents of squeaking shoes, deep breathing, disembodied voices are mingled in the telling of the tale with a mounting accumulation of small descriptive touches that pyramid the tension.

In early 1942, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hitchcock was considering a colour remake of The Lodger following the completion of Saboteur (1942), but he was unable to obtain the film rights.

[25] The score premiered at a concert screening of the film on 8 October 2014 at Moody Performance Hall with Richard McKay conducting.

[31] However, various licensed, restored releases have appeared on DVD, Blu-ray and video-on-demand services worldwide from Network Distributing in the UK, MGM and Criterion in the U.S., and others.