In a 1967 interview, actor and screenwriter Bryan Forbes asked the great movie-maker Alfred Hitchcock if he would like to make a comedy.

“But every film I make is a comedy,” Hitchcock replied.

Had Forbes challenged him to explain the comedy in Psycho, in which Anthony Perkins plays homicidal maniac Norman Bates, what might the droll Hitchcock have said?

Tom Vincent, film programme manager at the National Media Museum, thinks the comedy in Psycho is in the way the film plays with audience expectations: the heroine, played by Janet Leigh, is murdered after about 40 minutes and Martin Balsam, who plays a detective, is attacked and killed about 20 minutes later.

He said: “I think he thought of it as a black comedy. He kills the heroine early and does it with such aplomb you barely notice. It is a spoof really that reveals something about audience expectations.”

The making of Psycho in 1959 is one of the themes in the biopic Hitchcock, due for a two-week run at the museum from Friday, February 8. It stars Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren and Scarlett Johansson.

Just before Christmas, BBC2 screened The Girl, a film about Hitchcock’s obsession with Tippi Hedren, the actress who comes under ferocious avian attack in The Birds.

Why the sudden interest in Hitchcock, who was born in lowly Leytonstone, East London, in 1899, and died in beautiful Bel Air, California, in 1980?

Tom Vincent said: “It’s been a big part of the Cultural Olympiad. The British Film Institute put a lot of work into restoring nine silent Hitchcock films they thought had been lost, and Vertigo was voted top in Sight and Sound magazine’s ten-yearly poll of the greatest films ever made. This has pushed Hitchcock to the fore.

“We’re hoping for good things with the film Hitchcock. I think people are curious to see the relationship between him and his wife and film-making collaborator Alma Reville.

“She was a powerful woman in British cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, but was probably overlooked. There were a lot of female screenwriters, but it was the directors who got the credit.

“The film seems to be a love story of her supporting him while he’s overcoming various crises.”

Among the season of films at the museum – including Polanski’s Repulsion and Chinatown, Babette’s Feast and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained – is, What Richard Did, a drama set in Ireland about a rugby-playing schoolboy who makes a terrible mistake, and Roman Holiday.

The latter is part of the museum’s Valentine’s Day Special on Thursday, February 14. This includes a three course meal for two at the museum’s new eighth floor Room At The Top events venue and a screening of the film starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, for £50.

For tickets and more information call 0844 8563797.