Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.

Hitchcock frames fear as a stable, almost universal psychological inheritance: the adult mind still responds to threats through patterns learned in childhood stories and early vulnerability. By invoking Little Red Riding Hood, he suggests that modern anxieties—crime, war, social instability, personal danger—are narrative substitutions for the same archetypal menace (“the wolf”). The remark also aligns with his filmmaking method: suspense works when it taps primal, widely shared fears rather than highly specific ones. The “fright complex” implies fear is not merely situational but structurally embedded in individuals, making it a reliable engine for storytelling and for understanding human behavior.