Dial M for Murder: the detective thriller, the postwar uncanny, and 3D cinema

In Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954), 3D facilitates the film's organization of the scopic and epistemological pleasures of the detective thriller around the perceptual experience of the uncanny. By filtering its decor through stereo-aesthetics, Dial M articulates a postwar dread of dispossession, challenges the spectator's efforts to feel 'at home' in the depicted space and in the space of reception, and dramatizes how the (violent) violation of boundaries and the anticipation of homelessness shaped the experience of postwar modernity.