PSYCHO New films, including HBO's 'The Girl' and the coming 'Hitchcock,' with Anthony Hopkins, demystify the famous director. Fox Searchlight Pictures

At last, the popular image of Alfred Hitchcock as a genial, whimsical entertainer, a brilliant filmmaker and a dry, droll tease, has fallen away.

A modest HBO film, "The Girl," which debuted in October, and a haunting performance by Toby Jones as Hitch has apparently collapsed the legend.

And later this month a theatrical movie arrives, "Hitchcock," with Anthony Hopkins as the master and Helen Mirren as his wife, Alma, who had to watch his infatuation with so many actresses.

Hitch is now revealed as a troubled man.

How troubled? Well, in the league of Norman Bates (we all know Norman), of Bruno Anthony in "Strangers on a Train," of Mrs. Danvers in "Rebecca" and of Scottie ( James Stewart ), the victim detective and desperate lover in "Vertigo," where he has such a dread of heights that he lives in San Francisco. Did no one notice this helpless, contradictory attachment before?

In the 1960s and '70s, the great age of film appreciation in America, the idea began to gain traction that Hitch was not just a poker-faced magician who loved to scare us, but maybe a genius. He had company then, but it's notable that so many other director heroes of that age have slipped from widespread recognition: Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, even Billy Wilder. Most of your kids don't know those names. But Hitchcock is as familiar as ever, one of those names that stand for the entirety of cinema, like Chaplin, Garbo, "Gone With the Wind," Disney and Monroe.

So "The Girl" is a rather belated slap in the public face in that it tells an uncomfortable story of how Hitch, the great voyeur, was drawn to touch what he beheld. No one could or should be able to watch Hitchcock movies without feeling their erotic tension, and the way desire and guilt were focused on actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint and Janet Leigh.

There is scholarly argument over the question still, but those supposed to know believe Hitch gazed and yearned but never touched his actresses. Or not until he put Tippi Hedren in "The Birds" and "Marnie." She is "the girl" in question.

For years now, Ms. Hedren has told anyone ready to listen that Hitch wanted her in ways beyond the terms of a personal-service contract she had signed with him. He began to control and design her appearance, and then he forced himself on her in humiliating ways. When she refused him he became a cruel tyrant, subjecting her to ordeals in filming, and then blocking her career. Moreover, he did all of this under the pained eyes of his wife, Alma ( Imelda Staunton in "The Girl"), for decades his support and collaborator and maybe the only woman he had ever slept with.

That's what "The Girl" is about. It turned out to be a far more compelling film than I'd anticipated. Let me add that, in its essentials, I believe Ms. Hedren's story—it is a story she told me herself in an onstage interview. Is that because I want to believe the worst? No, it's exactly because, since 1958, I have been so moved and frightened by "Vertigo," an obsessive study of watching and going mad, about a man who tries to turn a woman into the image of his dead beloved. It's a movie about moviemaking, and if you recall all that its villain does, it is an astonishing portrait of cruelty that goes unrebuked. That killer goes free.

The evidence and the art have always been on the screen. And if "Vertigo" is truly the best film of all time (it was voted such in a recent poll of critics conducted by the British film magazine Sight & Sound), then it says something about our deal with the screen and what it offers us. Hitch was very good. He saw meanings and powers in film not given to everyone. But he was also in some ways tortured—or he thought he was wicked, and he was in horror of himself. Just like Norman Bates.

There is more to come. In the coming "Hitchcock," why cast Anthony Hopkins (with Helen Mirren as Alma and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh) unless the film feels the dark impulses in the entertainer?

—Mr. Thomson wrote: "The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder"