Each year the BFI hosts a major film season focusing on different themes. The BFI Compendium is a book which accompanies each season.

39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock From his humble beginnings as a greengrocer's son in East London, Alfred Hitchcock rose to become the most famous and celebrated film director the world has ever known, his name is a byword for cinematic suspense, excitement and innovation. Comprising 39 lavishly illustrated new essays – many written by some of the world's foremost authorities on Hitchcock's films – '39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock' offers a complete portrait of the man the world came to know as the 'Master of Suspense', and a fuller understanding of just what we mean when we describe something as 'Hitchcockian'.

Exploring the shadowy world of Gothic cinema and television – a haunted place stalked by vampires and werewolves, ghosts and tormented monsters, mad scientists and the living dead, brooding Princes of Darkness and imperilled heroines… Through a range of lavishly illustrated new essays, written by some of the foremost authorities in the field.

An introduction to the long and illustrious history of Chinese cinema. Along the way it tells the parallel stories of Hong Kong and Taiwan’s cinema, and, of course, China’s great genre cinema, from ‘wuxia’ swordplay epics and kung fu spectacles to crime thrillers and eerie ghost tales. Through a range of lavishly illustrated new essays, written by many of the foremost authorities in the field, the fascinating, dramatic history of Chinese cinema is revealed.

Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder charts a course through the other worlds, future visions and altered states of sci-fi film and television, taking us from the magical invention of early cinema, past the flying saucers, forbidden planets and Martian invaders of 1950s Cold War sci-fi and the adventures in space and time of Doctor Who.

The book shows how sci-fi is as much about ideas as spectacle, and how it expresses our sense of fear and wonder like no other genre. 

Through a range of lavishly illustrated essays the book explores the cinema's enduring love affair with love, from the majesty of romantic epics to the flirtatious charm of a screwball comedy, and from the song and dance of a Bollywood musical to the darkest tales of obsession and desire.

This BFI compendium uncovers the history of the great black stars of film and cinema to the global megastars of today, and from the ongoing fight against racism and prejudice to the flashbulbs of the red carpet – the story of the black star.

160 pages with gold foil on the cover. 

‘Who Can You Trust?’ ventures into the pulse-pounding world of the onscreen thriller, a place of danger, desire and deception where you might find yourself caught in a web of political conspiracy, on the run from sinister foreign agents, living in fear of your loved ones, or even doubting your own sanity. Tracing the story of the thriller from its emergence in the silent cinema years, through the stylish twilight of film noir and the shadows of cold war espionage, to the paranoia of the 1970s and the anxieties of the new millennium, ‘Who Can You Trust?’ explores how the thriller has always expressed our deepest fears,
while keeping us gripped in nail-biting suspense.