Frenzy actual London serial murder cases: the Christie murders in the early 1950s, and the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888. Barry Foster has said that, in order to prepare for his role, he was asked by Hitchcock to study two books about Neville Heath, an English serial killer who would often pass himself off as an officer in the RAF. "Frenzy" was the third and final film that Hitchcock made in Britain after he moved to Hollywood in 1939. The other two were "Under Capricorn" in 1949 and "Stage Fright" in 1950 (although there were some interior and exterior scenes
Frenzy with its cross motif. Cast notes After a pair of unsuccessful films depicting political intrigue and espionage, Hitchcock returned to the murder genre with this film. The narrative makes use of the familiar Hitchcock theme of an innocent man overwhelmed by circumstantial evidence and wrongly assumed to be guilty. Some critics consider "Frenzy" the last great Hitchcock film and a return to form after his two previous works, "Topaz" and "Torn Curtain". Hitchcock announced the project in March 1968. Hitchcock approached Vladimir Nabokov to write the script, but the author turned him down because he was busy on a book.