Alfred Hitchcock is one of the few Hollywood directors to be considered an auteur. Over the course of decades he consistently produced his dark vision of reality from within the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. A singular example of this dark vision is his 1941 film Shadow of a Doubt. This paper will examine how, in this work, Hitchcock employs many of the stylistic elements of the genre that would later become known as film noir to reveal the darkness that is at the heart of the “American dream.”