Murder has changed in style over the centuries, but it remains a primary human activity. No one understood this better than Hitchcock, whose popularity, writes Peter Conrad, testifies to a collective neurosis

Analysing my obsession with Alfred Hitchcock over the past few years, I found myself turning over in the privacy of my head a looped anthology of the murders that the old devil dreamt up and directed with such lethal finesse. Pride of place necessarily goes to Janet Leigh's sacrificial shower in Psycho, but I am also fond of the way Grace Kelly elegantly skewers an assailant with a pair of scissors in Dial M for Murder, the orchestrated assassination during the concert in The Man Who Knew Too Much and the avian campaign against the entire human race in The Birds. But, having treated myself to private screenings of these deaths, I cannot avoid asking why they attract me so much.

It is easy to attribute Hitchcock's "cinema of cruelty", as the French critic Andre Bazin called it, to his personal manias and his guilty erotic morbidity; and it doesn't take all that much courage to admit that you share some of his foibles. In making this confession, I am hardly alone: Hitchcock's popularity testifies to a collective, contagious neurosis. But now, having finished writing my book, I propose another explanation for the illicit appeal of his work. What made him great, I suspect, was his startling recognition that murder is a proudly primary human activity - a demonstration, perhaps, of the curiosity and creativity of our species. Animals kill to eat. Only human beings kill because they feel like it, or because they want to know what it feels like. We alone kill what we love, like Mark Chapman gunning down his idol, John Lennon. "I didn't want his signature, I wanted his life," Chapman said, and went on to boast: "I ended up getting both."

Chapman's sense of achievement is that of the artist who has completed his masterpiece, like an avenged character in a Jacobean tragedy delighting in the accomplishment of his "nightwork". "Murder can be an art, too," remarks John Dall in Hitchcock's Rope, having playfully strangled a friend whose body he stuffs in a trunk, before he serves a buffet supper to his victim's friends and relatives from the top of his impromptu grave. Ed Gein, the Wisconsin serial killer who was the model for Norman Bates in Psycho, practised murder as a kind of body art. After decapitating his victims, he tenderly stripped the skin from their skulls and used their faces as masks. He sewed female nipples into belts, bottled the sex organs that he had surgically removed, and stored other organs in a freezer for safekeeping. Bazin believed that the cinema - and, by implication, all the visual arts - comes from our funereal craving to create an artistic image that will eternalise decaying flesh. What better example of this "Mummy complex" could there be than the crime of Norman Bates, who kills his adored mother and then stuffs her?

Human history began with a murder, when restless, ambitious Cain slew his brother Abel. Murder, ever since that initial act, has been a way of testing prohibitions, defying the taboos that religion or pious emotions impose on our freedom. Men could liberate themselves politically only if they killed the kings who oppressed them. Revolutions require blood, and "La Marseillaise" happily describes the "sang impur" swilled away in the gutters. And killing kings was merely a rehearsal for the conceptual murder that - in this instance, bloodlessly, as the victim did not exist - triumphantly establishes our escape from moral abasement: this was Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead.

These are the mental rebellions that Hitchcock recycles with such wicked joy. Churches are a favourite location for crimes in his films, precisely because they are places that cavernously echo with the injunction "Thou shalt not . . . ". The towers of Westminster Cathedral in Foreign Corres-pondent and of the mission church at San Juan Bautista in Vertigo are used as launching pads for bodies. With the same flagrant glee, Hitchcock staged other deaths in the sacred places of a more modern liberal faith. The diplomats at the United Nations blather about world peace; meanwhile, in North by Northwest, one of them is pinioned by a knife which thuds into the small of his back. And not far away, what does the Statue of Liberty care - at the end of Saboteur - if a small, grappling man tumbles off her frozen torch, screaming as he plummets to thud on the pavement? She is supposed to care about the huddled human masses, but her sculpted expression doesn't alter.

Joseph Conrad apologised for the terrorist bomb plot that accidentally kills an idiot boy in his novel The Secret Agent, saying that he had "not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind"; Hitchcock, in Sabotage, his film of the novel, compounded the outrage by killing not only the boy who unknowingly carries the bomb, but a busload of innocent bystanders, including - and this to me, I'm afraid, is the unforgivable sin - a Jack Russell puppy. And he made us deliciously anticipate the explosion by following the lad through the streets, detaining or distracting him to ensure that he did not deliver the package before the time when it was due to erupt.

Oscar Wilde, who also understood that loving entails killing, proposed in 1891 that there "is no essential incongruity between crime and culture". He made the comment in an essay on the poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who saw murder as a mode of aesthetic improvement. Wainewright fed strychnine to his sister-in-law, and justified himself by remarking that she had thick ankles: do such people have the right to live? Wilde could afford to be aphoristically flippant in approving Wainewright's act, but the 20th century - in politics and also in art - went on to show how terrifying that equation between crime and culture truly is. If men have killed God, who is to stop them from killing one another while claiming that they are cleansing the world of those they deem to be inferior, degenerate or racially different? Hitchcock's most terrifying killers are those with a mission to improve the world by ridding it of human eyesores. Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt targets rich, fat parasitical widows; the Nazi played by Walter Slezak in Lifeboat talks a cripple into drowning himself.

It is the aestheticism of these men that makes them so monstrous. The artists who called themselves modern were equally candid about their experimentally destructive motives. DalI - chosen by Hitchcock to design Gregory Peck's Freudian dream in Spellbound - defined surrealism as the mutilation of physical nature, just as Picasso brutally rearranged human faces. The German expressionist Otto Dix even painted himself as a sex-killer, rampantly dismembering the bodies of the women he has butchered.

In 1951, tallying the millions of deaths totted up by four decades of war and revolution, Albert Camus concluded: "All contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect." What appalled Camus about the modern mechanising of slaughter was its evasiveness, its clinical euphemism. At Auschwitz (as at the Bates motel), killing happened in the shower; in Stalin's Russia, agricultural reform was a prescription for mass murder. The massacres were conducted by scientists in white lab coats, or bureaucrats ensconced behind their desks. "Blood is no longer visible," Camus protested, which meant that the end of a human life - or of multiple lives - lost its existential terror.

Perhaps we should be grateful to Hitchcock for showing us the blood, as he does when Anthony Perkins mops up the sullied bathroom in Psycho. He compels us - in a spasm of remorse - to care about the people whose deaths we have watched with such unholy excitement. Hence the obituary close-up of Janet Leigh slumped on the floor, a tear (or maybe a droplet left over from the shower) trickling from her dead eye. At his most excruciatingly truthful, Hitchcock shows how difficult it is to kill another human being, and how bumpy the rite of passage can be for the person who graduates from being to non-existence. In Torn Curtain, the resilient secret policeman doesn't succumb when he is stabbed. His legs have to be broken with a spade before he will fall down, and even then he goes on wrestling. Paul Newman and a helper finally drag him towards an oven, manoeuvre his head through the door and turn the gas on. From above, we watch his hands clawing the air, then his fingers fluttering. At last, all movement stops; the killers collapse in post-coital relief. What Hitchcock has shown us is at once obscene and, in its meticulous choreography, beautiful.

In the middle of the 20th century, five years before Camus's moral autopsy on modernity in L'Homme Revolte, George Orwell noticed how fashions in murder were changing. He looked back fondly on the old style of English murder: a bourgeois crime, usually committed in the privacy of the murderer's home in order to maintain the appearance of respectability. (Such killers are, in fact, still with us; remember the faceless frontage of Fred West's house in its banal suburban street.) The preferred method of Orwell's English murders was usually poison, which primly and discreetly leaves no blood. Hitchcock wanted Cary Grant to commit such a murder in Suspicion, administering the fatal dose to Joan Fontaine in a glass of milk; the studio, however, bound by its own stern and sanctimonious Decalogue, insisted that a star could not kill.

Orwell in 1946 blamed "the brutalising effect of the war" for shocking killers out of their timid, middle-class stealth. English murders, he claimed, were becoming more American - louder, flashier, frivolously callous, gruesome yet pointless, as in a case he analysed whose culprits were an American army deserter and a striptease artist. Could Orwell have foreseen a culture in which murder offers an alluring short cut to celebrity, as in the rampage of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, or the transformation into a folk hero of the mad vigilante played by Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver? Wanting "a name that said it all", a Midwestern youth called Brian Warner, educated at a Christian school, decided to call himself Marilyn Manson, paying homage to both Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, the murderer of Sharon Tate. For Warner, there was no difference between the love goddess and the psychotic Messiah: "I took a celebrity martyr and celebrity killer and put them together." We are, here, in territory that even Hitchcock did not venture to explore. Like Wilde or Machiavelli, he may have considered the possibility of including murder among the fine arts: at least he never envisaged it as a means of kick-starting a media career.

But one of the celebrity malefactors whose rampancy so fascinates us has recognised his debt to Hitchcock. In 1998, the BBC paid O J Simpson for an interview. He indignantly insisted that he had not slaughtered his wife and her friend, then gave a sideways smirk to the camera. Parting from the interviewer Ruby Wax (who had clearly met her match in effrontery), he said he had a surprise for her and promised to deliver it later. When the bell rang, she opened the door of her hotel room. There loomed O J, his arm raised, emitting a series of staccato shrieks: he was tunelessly reproducing Bernard Herrmann's score for the shower scene in Psycho, with its fraught strings, as he lowered his arm to stab the flummoxed Ruby. His weapon, rather than Mrs Bates's kitchen knife, was a banana purloined from one of the hotel's hospitality baskets.

O J's impudence is easy for us to condemn, but he was performing, after all, at our behest. Athletes, like actors, delight us because they are capable of feats that the rest of us only fantasise about. The same can be said of murderers, who dare, with a crazed heroism, to commit acts forbidden to most human beings through squeamishness or cowardice or dread of the consequences. Hitchcock challenges us to face what we really feel about Cain, Macbeth and O J: he is the man who knows too much about us for our own comfort.

Peter Conrad's The Hitchcock Murders is published this month by Faber & Faber (£16.99)

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